If you can read, you can cook, and anyone who doubts that old maxim has Marcella Hazan as a compelling example to explain away. The woman regarded around the world (but most ardently in her adopted home of America) as the foremost authority on Italian cooking was no such thing when she moved to New York City as a newlywed science graduate at the age of 31 — indeed, prior to her marriage, Hazan had never cooked at all. Suddenly thrust into the unfamiliar role of housewife, and homesick for the flavors of her native Italy, she patiently taught herself with the aid of one dusty but comprehensive volume by venerable chef Ada Boni. The rest is history, as the amateur grew into the expert to whom others would eventually turn to educate themselves. “Marcella,” Peter Miller‘s formulaic but enjoyable documentary, ultimately presents classic Italian cuisine as a mistress to whom even doyennes like Hazan are beholden.
Still, if the richest traditions of Italian cooking are more commonly passed down than created or claimed, Hazan comes closer to most practitioners to ownership of her work. Take the deceptively simple tomato sauce to which her name is universally welded: tomatoes, butter, salt and a single onion, cooked to a transcendent point that tastes at once like the platonic ideal of a pasta sauce and like none you’ve had before. Hazan may not have invented it, but she perfected it and communicated it to the world at large: To millions of home cooks, her recipes are lovably and inextricably hers in the way that mom’s spaghetti is mom’s. If that description risks selling short Hazan’s vast technical knowhow and professorial research, “Marcella” does not: The film is heavily populated with talking heads from the gastronomy A-list who are duly in thrall to her knowledge and influence.
“Marcella” is most interesting, however, when it peels away the layers of achievement and adulation to show us the brisk, unpretentious woman who surprised nobody more than herself by becoming a culinary icon, and articulates something of the oddly intimate but entirely parasocial relationships we form with our most trusted cookery writers. Unsurprisingly, interviews with those who actually knew her — including her husband and writing collaborator Victor, her son Giuliano (an accomplished Italian cookery writer in his own right) and her longtime publisher Bill Schinker — are more detailed and revealing than those with various adoring chefs and gastronomes who grew up on her work. Alongside extracts from Hazan’s memoirs narrated by Maria Tucci, they also paint an altogether different character portrait, excavating some brittle vulnerabilities in a personality otherwise routinely described as queenly and indomitable.
On the most poignant end of that spectrum is Hazan’s near-lifelong management of a disability: a right arm that, having never fully healed after being broken in childhood, remained fixed at a right angle to her body. On the most amusing is her occasionally rueful reckoning with her own impact: her regret, for example, at introducing balsamic vinegar to the mainstream, only to find it egregiously overused and misapplied ever since. Somewhere in between, perhaps, is the insecurity of an immigrant many times over, over a life spent shuffling between Italy and the United States, with her final years spent in Florida — where fresh Italian ingredients are hard to come by, and the artichokes are far too large.
“Marcella” offers some thoughtful insights as to how Hazan’s delicate, strictly traditionalist cooking acted as a counter to the distinctively hearty red-sauce-joint Italian-American cuisine that grew out of the East Coast immigrant diaspora. (Nostalgia can blunt and exaggerate signature ethnic flavors, argues one food writer among the talking heads.) It is notable that the interviewees are almost entirely American or American-based: It would be interesting to hear what Hazan’s legacy is in her motherland, but that perspective isn’t to be found in this upbeat, conventionally constructed celebration. Though she resisted cultural adaptation in her speech and manner, Hazan was ultimately adopted by the States as a culinary national treasure akin to her peer and friend Julia Child, even if, having never been granted her own TV show, she never attained the same degree of celebrity. Sunny and approachable, “Marcella” feels like one step to remedy that imbalance; perhaps a biopic will follow.