Chef Follows Famous Mom's Footsteps

By JEFF HOUCK The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 9, 2007

Sarasota cooking teacher and author Giuliano Hazan recently gave an Italian cooking demonstration at the Rolling Pin Emporium in Brandon. Before the class began, he took some time to recall the lessons his mother, Marcella Hazan, imparted to him in the kitchen:

"My first food memory … I think I was maybe 5 or 6 years old. At that time, we were living in Italy. I was born in New York. When I was 2, we moved to Italy. We moved back when I was 8. The summers were always spent in Cesenatico, which is my mother's birthplace. It's on the Adriatic coast, a beach town. My grandmother lived there and I spent all my summers there.

"This particular summer, my parents had gone away for a while, and my grandmother had prepared tortelloni, which are filled pasta with Swiss chard, ricotta, and she served it with a simple tomato sauce.

"As the story goes, I ate an adult-sized portion of it, and then proceeded to collapse onto the table. My grandmother was terrified. She called the doctor, who came over, examined me and said, 'He's fine. He's sleeping. He's happy.' It's still one of my favorite dishes."

"I remember going into the kitchen when I was 8 or 9 years old. I remember a long, narrow kitchen that we had in our apartment in Manhattan on East 76th Street. There was a little stool there where I would sit and watch.

"Sometimes I'd go up and help stir the risotto or mix things and so forth. My children are doing that, too, now. I have an 8-year-old and a 3 1/2-year-old who says, 'I want to help you cook.' It's neat."

"I was always drawn to the kitchen and liked to watch and see how she cooked. I was lucky to grow up in an environment where food was very important. I learned to respect the food. It's kind of natural for me to develop an interest in how it got that way.

"Eating together as a family made a big difference. We're trying to do the same thing now with our daughters. For the most part, it works."

"The first thing I cooked with her must have been risotto. That's what sticks in my mind. I didn't do a lot of cooking with my mother. It was mostly helping her.

"I didn't really start cooking for myself until I left home for Swarthmore College [in Pennsylvania]. I did that because I was hungry. I absorbed it by osmosis. I'd call my mother and ask her how she made this and made that.

"Also, by that time, she had published cookbooks, so it was very convenient to have a printed set of my mother's recipes with me."

"She started teaching in 1969 at home, and soon after that, Craig Claiborne wrote an article about her in The New York Times. That was her first big break and exposure.

"Her first book came out in 1971, and that year I was 13. She was teaching classes in our home. Her school in [Bologna] Italy opened in '76. She taught in our home during the day, so most times I wasn't home. But sometimes I was. I have memories of her classes there. The place was small enough, so it was better if I wasn't there. But in Bologna, it was different. I was always there during all the classes."

"After college, I did a professional theater program in Providence, R.I., at the Trinity Conservatory. I thought that I wanted to have a career in the theater as an actor and director. In some ways, I still have a career in theater. Shortly after graduating and realizing I couldn't live on $100 a week doing children's shows, I started teaching Italian cooking at the community school in Barrington, just outside Providence, in 1983.

"By that time, I had seen the school in Bologna for six years or so and gotten a little bit of an idea of how my mother was doing it. Then I started teaching fairly regularly. In 1985 or so, my mother would let me do a dish every once in a while in class in Bologna. Right around that time, she started teaching in their home in Venice, Italy. The last year in Bologna, 1987, that year I pretty much did all the teaching of the classes."

"What I enjoyed then about teaching is what I think I enjoy now … I really enjoy cooking and looking for ways to make things as clear and easy as possible for people to do that. My mother was a teacher before she started cooking. She was a high school math and science teacher in Italy. Her background was in teaching. She was known to be a very good teacher. One of the best teachers."

"I don't know if you know how she got started teaching and cooking … in New York, she started taking a Chinese cooking class taught by Grace Chu. She got to know the other people in the class. They asked what she did; she said she was a teacher. They asked what she cooked at home, and she told them. After the last class, she noticed on the back of her recipes a list of the six people in the class and with her name at the top it said, 'For Italian cooking classes.' She thought it was a joke until people started calling asking when they were going to schedule the class for them. It was accidental."

"She always used to say that the most important ingredient in the kitchen is common sense. It's not just like a lab experiment where you follow it exactly and it all comes out exactly the same. It's always different, and you need to adjust to what's happening in the pan."

RISOTTO WITH ZUCCHINI

1 pound small zucchini

1/2 small yellow onion

3 tablespoons butter

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

6 cups homemade meat broth, or 1/2 of a beef and 1/2 of a chicken bouillon cube dissolved in 5 cups water

3 to 4 sprigs flat leaf Italian parsley

1 3/4 cups rice for risotto (arborio, carnaroli or vialone nano)

1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Preparation time: 50 minutes

Scrub the zucchini under cold water and cut into 1/2-inch chunks.

Peel and finely chop the onion. Put it in a heavy-bottomed braising pan with 2 tablespoons of the butter. Place over medium high heat, and saute until it turns a dark golden color, about 5 minutes.

Add the zucchini, season with salt and pepper, and cook until the pieces are tender and lightly browned, 10 to 15 minutes.

While the zucchini is cooking, put the broth in a pot over high heat, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to maintain a very gentle simmer. Finely chop enough of the parsley to measure 1 tablespoon.

Raise the heat to medium high under the zucchini, add the rice, and stir until it is well-coated. Add about 1 cup of the hot broth and continue stirring. Add only enough broth to produce the consistency of a rather thick soup, and wait until all the liquid is absorbed before adding more. Season with salt and continue until the rice is al dente, 20 to 25 minutes.

Remove the risotto from the heat, add the remaining tablespoon butter, the parsley, and the Parmigiano-Reggiano. Stir well and serve at once.

Serves 4 as a main course or 6 as part of a multicourse Italian meal

Source: "How to Cook Italian," by Giuliano Hazan

Reporter Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324 and jhouck@tampatrib.com. Keyword: Stew, to read what Marcella Hazan has to say about teach