Marcella! A Review of Amarcord
This one is a memoir, rather than a cookbook. It’s full of detailed information: places, times, details about food and preparation and teaching and publishing — and marriage. There’s a particularly memorable contrast between her struggles to learn English (in her twenties), and the apparent effortlessness with which she learned to cook, at about the same time. Facts and clear description notwithstanding, though, I’ve come away with a strong sense of mystery about it all. In terms of age, Marcella (1924-1909) was in my mother’s generation, which may be the reason I read this book against the background of my own relationship to cooking, to the circumstances in which any given person might or might not learn to do it, learn to love it, or even come to be obsessed by it. Because there seems to have been nothing fateful, nothing foreordained or inevitable about what turned out to be very remarkable course of events.
In some ways, it’s a “rags-to-riches” story. First there’s the carefree girl running free on a beautiful Italian beach, deeply attentive and appreciative of the plentiful and absolutely fresh food that is just there, part of the scenery, but NOT cooking at all herself. Then there’s globe-trotting celebrity teacher and cookbook author, the world’s best-loved authority on Italian cooking (One of her students in her Bologna cooking classes was Burt Lancaster). She ascribes the focus on food to fairly straightforward problem-solving: as a young bride recently – arrived in New York without a word of English, she writes that her husband — also Italian, but with some experience of the USA — could roll with many of life’s punches, but NOT with indifferent meals. She simply had to learn. But there never seems to have been any question of quietly adapting to a different circumstances: the project was rather to reproduce, as closely as possible, the flavours, textures and joys they both remembered from Italy.
When an interviewer asked her how she explained her success — she became famous very fast, with hardly a breath of controversy — she said something along the lines of “right place, right time”. She’s certainly right. James Beard, the famous food writer who hammered home the gospel of “fresh, seasonal, and local” in all matters culinary, was a friend and supporter of Marcella’s — it was as if Beard had been preparing the way in print for years, and Marcella came along with some specifics — a name, time and place and history of exactly this attitude toward food. Also it helps to be living in New York. It’s not everywhere you could casually invite some food writer over for lunch, not knowing quite who it is, and discover that he’s Craig Claiborne.
Of course she did, then, serve him a lunch that ticked all the boxes — fresh, seasonal — and distinctly Italian, and of course he spread the news. And she kept on doing that. Arguably even more remarkably, she seemed to have a gift for teaching it. It’s easy to say “gift”, and she makes it sound easy in the memoir too. But teaching a cooking class involves a mountain of logistical details about food and equipment and space and safety regulations and promotion…all mastered so perfectly as to look easy. It couldn’t have been easy — at least not all the time. I can’t doubt for a moment, though, that it was what she wanted to do. I’d give a lot to understand even a little more about that intense conviction, drive, clarity, and tenacity that sustained the great Marcella Hazan.
