![]() ![]() ![]() This, and the fact that her recipes are consistently clear and straightforward, enabled me to overcome a lifetime of insecurity in the kitchen. But in her books her voice is always warm and encouraging. If you’ve ever seen Marcella on television, you know that she was a short, compact lady, a tough biscotti with a raspy voice who didn’t suffer fools gladly and had a surprising preference for Jack Daniels over a glass of wine. And I found mine in Marcella’s “The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.” All I had to do was follow her instructions to the letter, and success was pretty much guaranteed. ![]() Fresh ingredients were not in the picture having grown up in New York in the fifties, I had pretty much accepted my mother’s theory that any food item not wrapped in plastic was probably covered with germs. The little cooking I did usually involved frying in Wesson oil and saucing with Paul Newman salad dressing. There was one huge problem-I was a terrible cook. I returned from the trip determined that, for the rest of my life, I would eat only the way I had during those three weeks of culinary bliss. Twenty years ago, my wife and I went to Italy for our honeymoon and I discovered the wonders of Italian food. On Sunday, the great Italian chef and cookbook author Marcella Hazan died, at the age of eighty-nine. ![]()
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