♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -You're making food for people, and there's nothing more intimate than cooking and giving it to somebody to put in their body.

That's communion, you know?

And I think that Marcella Hazan was the priest there.

She was the person who helped you transmit love to somebody through the kitchen.

-She's the best.

-No, I'm not the best, but, uh, I try anyway.

-I think you're the best.

[ Laughter ] -She unlocked one of the greatest joys in the world, which are the culinary pleasures of Italy.

-She was the American Italian cook.

She was the American's Italian cook.

-Julia Child has called her "My mentor in all things Italian."

-Her trilogy of cookbooks are considered Bibles.

-The First Lady of pasta.

-The celebrated Italian chef.

-The queen of Italian cooking.

-She is to Italian cooking what Muhammad Ali is to boxing -- the champ.

-Marcella Hazan.

-Marcella Hazan.

-Marcella Hazan.

[ Applause ] -These were elemental truths that she was telling us.

It wasn't just how to make dinner.

-Italian cooking is very simple.

But it's not easy.

-It was essentially a plea to honor the history of food and how it arrived to our plates in America.

-There's food for sustenance, and then there's food that enhances experience.

And it's a way of making life better.

-Does this get the Marcella seal of approval?

-I like that.

-She has no qualms about saying if you're doing something wrong.

-She was a tough cookie.

So she had convictions about cooking, certainly.

And when she had conviction, she had conviction.

-And if she didn't like something or she didn't feel something was right, she voiced it.

-That is always who she was.

She would laugh.

You know, people would say, "I don't understand people who are saying, you know, they're trying to find themselves, they don't know who they are.

I know who I am.

I'm Marcella Hazan."

♪ ♪ -Romagna.

The sunlit sweet land is part of the northern Italian region known as Emilia-Romagna.

If you travel southeast of Bologna, you come to a land of orchards, of cherries and peaches and pears, of old farm towns, of hills, whose slopes are strung with vines bearing the purple clusters of the Sangiovese grape.

Turn away from the hills and go due east and you will gaze upon the Adriatic, a broad, blue line stretching out to meet the sky.

I'm a daughter of that land.

Its heat warms my blood.

All that I am started there.

-She grew up in a little fishing town, Cesenatico.

And at that time, the fishermen would come in with their catch, and they would cook part of it right then and there, right on the dock.

I know that she used to have fish there with her friends sometimes.

She enjoyed her young years in Cesenatico.

This house is where my mother grew up, as a little girl and a young woman.

We're in Emilia-Romagna here, the Romagna part of it.

So, of course, homemade pasta, a wonderful ragu.

Filled pasta with Swiss chard and ricotta, with that simple tomato sauce.

You know, for my mother, it was -- I don't know if I would say taken for granted, but, you know, it was normal.

This is what you ate.

♪ -Her life was, you know, one incredibly fortunate accident after another, starting with her accident as a child.

-When she was 6 years old, she was living in Egypt, and she was playing on the beach and fell.

She broke her right arm.

It should've been fixed without any problem, and the last operation was unsuccessful.

-And, eventually, the doctor says that they'll have to amputate her arm if she's to survive.

And Marcella's mother, Maria, refuses this.

She takes Marcella over to the city of Bologna, where there's this doctor who can allegedly perform miracles.

And that doctor says that he can salvage Marcella's arm, but she will only be able to extend it at a 90-degree angle for the rest of her life.

-Not a day passed that I was not conscious of my arm.

From my youth and forever after in my life, I strove to spare others any embarrassment over my handicap.

I can go for long periods now without a thought of my lame arm, but to see my twisted hand publicly exposed still makes me cringe, as it did when I was a small school child.

-When she starts liking boys, she dresses so that she can sheath any trace of that disability of hers so that they won't chide her for that.

-Marcella, at that point, developed the will to ignore and overcome.

Marcella had a will that wouldn't be swayed by anything.

♪ The Second World War came along and Marcella, as a teenager, lived under the most harrowing circumstances in an area that was supposed to be safe.

-During the war, she and her family went to live with her uncle on Lake Garda.

-Garda was, and is, a famously beautiful lake, but its appeal to our family at that portentous moment lay in what was optimistically presumed to be its remoteness from military targets.

That optimism would prove to have been gravely misplaced.

Not only was the war not passing us by, it had made us one of its prime targets.

-Maybe my mother got some of her resoluteness and determination from my grandmother.

And during air raids, everybody could go hide in the basement, but my grandmother would keep frying, you know, because she was in the middle of frying, and it would go bad if she stopped.

♪ -After the war ends, Marcella returns to Cesenatico, and she ends up spending the next nine years pursuing dual doctorate degrees in biology and the natural sciences.

-It wasn't easy, especially for a woman at that time.

She had one professor who belittled her incredibly, ended up being forced to pass her because he had no other choice.

-And what was she going to do with these degrees?

She had to find an occupation, and the occupation was teaching.

Marcella knew how to synthesize a subject.

She grasped it whole and broke it down into its essential parts.

My father and mother come from a very old line of Spanish Jews.

I was born in Italy.

This is the period in which Mussolini had come to power in Italy, and not too many years after that, Mussolini became allied with Hitler.

And so my father said, "This is not going to get any better, and it's going to get a lot worse."

This was 1939.

And he got a visitor's visa for the United States and brought the whole family to New York.

-My father was born in Cesena, which is maybe 9 miles away.

After college, he decided to come back to Italy because he missed Italy.

And in the summers, this is where you came.

Cesenatico was the place to spend the summer.

-I was desperate to return to Italy.

I missed the language.

And most of all, I missed the food.

And I had a cousin who lived there, and he said, "Well, I happen to know a very beautiful girl.

Would you be interested in meeting her?"

I said, "Yes, let's do that."

But I remember it as though it happened last night.

We knocked on the door, and this vision came out.

Very black hair.

Eyes such as I've never seen since.

She had a multicolored shawl draped over one shoulder, and it fell off the shoulder and wrapped itself around one arm.

And I didn't know why.

You know that when he was courting me, he was always talking about food?

[ Laughter ] He was telling me about what he ate for lunch and after what he's expecting to eat for dinner.

And I thought it was not very romantic.

[ Laughter ] -Well, I fell in love immediately because she was so beautiful, and also, she had a wonderful spirit.

She had soul.

She was warm.

-She was very smart and probably at a time where being a smart woman was not necessarily seen as a great attribute.

And Victor just loved her brain and loved who she was.

So she said that eventually he kind of wore her down.

-Within a year after that, we decided we would get married, which was very bad news for my father and mother.

Here their only son goes back to that place that had cast them out and marries a Catholic.

In addition to that, it was a Catholic with a lame arm, and so my parents were very much against it.

But Marcella would bend circumstances to her requirements.

And so she lasted them out.

-They lived here for a while, and then my father decided that they needed to move back to New York, where he could have a job.

And it was my grandfather who said, "Come and work for me."

But my mother was pretty apprehensive.

But, you know, she was a courageous woman, and she loved my father, so she was gonna make it work.

♪ ♪ -Marcella moves to New York in 1955, and she has pretty lofty expectations when she goes there.

And Victor picks her up and then hails a taxicab from Manhattan to their new home in Forest Hills, Queens.

And then she sees that the skyscrapers pretty much kiss the sky, and she is absolutely charmed by what she sees.

And yet, as the taxi cab makes its way to Queens, all of a sudden, the smile on her face just disappears.

In that moment, Marcella feels the weight of everything that she had left behind in Italy.

You know, her family, her job as a teacher, her life.

-Everything was different.

The culture, the food, the language.

She spoke no English.

-And so she spends her days, at first, just watching television.

And she watches Brooklyn Dodgers games in particular.

And through that, she starts to learn English a little bit.

You know, some of her first words in English were "pitcher" and "ball" and "catcher."

-Through the middle, with a run that ties it up at 5-all.

-I can only imagine what desperate loneliness she had, alone in that apartment in a city in which you can't speak the language and none of the food tastes good to you.

And her husband wanted her to cook for him.

She got an Italian cookbook and basically taught herself to cook, and she just slowly worked her way out of that prison through cooking.

-This book is a book written by a woman called Ada Boni.

"Il Talismano della Felicita."

Happiness.

The only cookbook that we had in the house.

So she picked up this book and looked at it and began to cook from it.

But this triggered something in her mind.

She started looking at recipes and she made connections.

-And it helped me a lot.

You know why?

Because when I cook something I brought to the table, and we eat it and it came good, they were jumping from the table, come to kiss me.

They said how wonderful I am.

So I wanted to do more and more.

And so I started learning cooking with the ingredients that I found in America.

Italian food.

-Victor wanted a proper midday meal, and he encouraged her to learn how to provide it for him.

And she didn't.

She was madly in love with Victor, and obviously, like any bride, she wanted to please him.

-In another time, she could have been teaching at a university or working in a lab.

But she was a housewife who was cooking for her husband.

-Let me tell you, I never cooked in my life until I married.

I never boil water if it was not in the beaker in the laboratories.

Victor was not there all day.

And when he was coming home, he was expecting to have dinner.

So I got interested in food that I didn't know.

I was never interested before.

-In her early days in America, Marcella realizes that the only way for her to survive, along with Victor is to actually cook.

Marcella and Victor together follow this ritual where they would consume her cooking projects together and then sort of critique them, and through that dance, Marcella realized that there had always been a cook inside her.

-Cooking came to me as though it had been there all along, waiting to be expressed.

It came as words come to a child when it is time for her to speak.

-I used to tell Victor that he was the luckiest man in the world, because he got Marcella Hazan to cook for him every day.

-It's like coming home to Ella Fitzgerald every night instead of turning on CNN.

[ Chuckles ] ♪ -You know, the first time that I went to a supermarket was in America.

In France, I go to the butcher, to the fishmonger, to the vegetable guy, get the milk and so forth.

I thought it was an amazing idea instead of having to run all over the place, to have everything under the same roof.

Except everything was in package, package, package, package.

-And I saw the first supermarket.

Everything was dead there.

Everything was wrapped in a coffin.

Some part of my brain, the head memory, the smell of the food that I ate at home, the look of the food, and most important, the taste of the food.

-She described how she went around the city looking for good ingredients.

-You have no idea what the 1950s was like, in terms of food in this country.

Marcella would get into the subway, go to Manhattan, take a bus, go to Ninth Avenue, go to these stores.

And they used olive oil, but it was a cheap, but at least it was olive oil.

And she bought vegetables that she couldn't get at Grand Union, like eggplant, fennel.

And she brought those back on the bus, in the subway, back up to the apartment, and cooked.

-I'm going to make probably one of Marcella Hazan's most famous recipes.

And it's famous because it is so simple.

I'm going to just add some tomatoes, a little bit of onion, a little bit of butter, salt, and then that's it.

-Her recipes are very exacting but incredibly simple.

So you think about her famous tomato sauce, and it's as simple a sauce you can make, right?

I make it all the time.

So you take tomatoes, you cut an onion in half, you put it in the sauce, you melt butter into that warming tomato with some salt.

-And what, 45 minutes later, you've got a wonderful sauce.

So there was something about demystifying that was so wonderful about her.

-I'm gonna cut this in half.

I'm gonna use these canned tomatoes.

These are very natural.

So you just basically throw about 2 pounds of tomatoes.

So a little bit of salt, little bit of butter.

It's probably like 5 tablespoons to 2 pounds of tomato and one medium onion.

I like to use a whisk because it really kind of helps mash up the tomatoes.

I think we go through life just making things so complex and so stressful for ourselves.

And the simplest things in life are the ones that really kind of blow your mind.

I think she would just do what she needed to do to make something amazing.

♪ Mmm.

Nice.

I think meeting Marcella was probably one of the highlights of my life, you know?

Now I'm all emotional.

[ Laughs ] Oh, my God.

I'm gonna turn it down just a touch 'cause we got 45 minutes to go.

If we reduce too fast, then it doesn't give the onion time to do its thing.

You want to have it on that nice, lowish temperature that Marcella suggests in the book, and just kind of have it ticking away, have it sit there being happy.

Great things happen when things connect.

You know, it's the same with people and food.

It's the meeting of minds and the meeting of flavors, and it's...

When I cook, and I know for a fact that Marcella felt this, too, it's something deep inside your soul, you know?

It's, uh... [ Breathes deeply ] It's earth-moving.

You connect with it.

And I think that's why people love this sauce so much.

I'm just gonna take the onion out.

A lot of people are like, "Why would you discard the onion?

That's the best bit."

But the great thing about Marcella, really, is that she knows when to add stuff, what to add, when to take it out, when to not use it.

And then we're just going to add the pasta.

So we'll just add that there, like so.

So this is Marcella's very, very famous tomato sauce.

Simple.

Soulful.

Perfect.

Marcella, I hope you're happy.

I hope I did a good job.

[ Laughs ] ♪ -If you've ever been to Venice, you remember the gondolas and the picturesque waterways.

And you remember the food, too.

Superb food prepared with that very special Italian touch.

The same special Italian touch that Chef Boyardee's sauce with meat can give to your meals over here.

-In America, when I came as a young girl, I was a bit mixed up.

The Italian American food?

What was that?

Spaghetti and meatballs, eggplant parmigiana, and all the things that we didn't have in Italy.

This is what America was eating.

And I found it quite intriguing that it is not the food that I remember from Italy as a child that we cooked at home.

-Most people in America had never really experienced Italian food like people eat in Italy.

What they knew was a cuisine that had developed, that became Italian-American cuisine.

It had its origins in Italy, but then it morphed into something different.

♪ -In the spring of 1958, I became pregnant.

Giuliano was born on December 1st.

When, earlier in my life, I thought that someday I might have a baby, I worried that because of my lame arm, I might hurt it when holding it or bathing it or even drop it.

Nothing like that ever happened.

But when he began to crawl, Giuliano once managed to open one of the lower cupboards of the kitchen, where I kept a gallon can of olive oil.

How he did it, I cannot understand, but he upended the can, pouring oil all over himself and the floor.

When I found him, he looked at me with the sly expression of someone having a wickedly good time.

Rare is the challenge a mother cannot rise to.

♪ -My father landed a job with an American advertising company in Italy, in Milan.

And my mother, of course, was thrilled to have the opportunity to go back and live in Italy.

-So they settle in Milan, and there, Victor is able to pursue work as a copywriter, and yet Marcella, meanwhile, could not find work easily in Italy.

And so what does she do instead with her day is she cooked.

She found all these ingredients that were not at her disposal back in New York.

And she would cook all these masterful dishes with those ingredients.

All those memories that had been coursing through her when she was in the kitchen back in New York were not false memories.

They were real.

-And my grandfather kind of tricked him into coming back to the United States.

He said that he wanted to sell the business.

He wanted my father to come back and work with him.

So that's when we moved back to New York.

-My father had developed a fondness for Chinese cooking.

At that time, there was a famous restaurant in New York run by a woman called Pearl.

So my father would take us out there.

Marcella tasted this food and said, "Boy, this is really delicious.

I wish I knew how to make this."

-Marcella decides to enroll in a Chinese cooking class taught by a renowned cooking teacher and cookbook author named Grace Zia Chu.

And so Marcella gets there on the first day, and right after the first session, Madam Chu announces that she wants to take a sabbatical and so she will no longer be teaching that class.

And so Marcella and her fellow students are like, "Wait.

So what do we do now?"

-Then the other women in the class loved Marcella so much, and they said, "Why don't you teach us Italian cooking?"

-So they asked me to teach, but I thought that they were crazy.

-But Victor encourages her, and he says, "Well, you know, you were a teacher back in Italy.

You do have these skills, and you're quite a good cook, so why not do it?"

And so, in the late 1960s, Marcella decides to begin teaching Italian cooking to American women.

-I'd been a rock 'n' roll writer and editor.

I decided I was sick of that.

A friend of mine in the city said, "Oh, there's this wonderful Italian cooking teacher, Marcella Hazan.

I'm taking her class, and she has another class, and somebody dropped out.

You could get in."

So I immediately signed up.

She and Victor lived on 76th Street, very small apartment with a tiny kitchen.

But there were six people in the class.

We gathered around her dining-room table.

What she taught us and me is what food should taste like.

I remember we were making veal Milanese, and I said to her, "Marcella, how hot should the oil be for it?"

And she grabbed my hand, held it like that far from the hot oil, and said, "That's how hot.

Feel it."

She was tough.

-These six women came once a week, all the fall and all of the spring.

So she said, "That's it.

That was an interesting experience.

Now I have to look for something else to do."

And I said, "Well, The New York Times runs a page once a year telling people where there are good cooking classes being given.

And she said, "Well, what about it?"

I said, "Well, I'll write to them."

[ Telephone rings ] -Marcella gets a call from this man whose name she doesn't really recognize, and he says, "Hello.

I'm from the New York Times.

I would love to pay you a visit and potentially write about you."

-So, one day, I got a call from someone I understood that was from New York Times, that they wanted to come to talk about the cooking lesson, a Wednesday, and said, "All right.

What time?"

"12:30."

"No, I'm sorry."

I said, "At 12:30, we have lunch."

"Really?

Your husband come home for lunch?"

"Of course.

Okay, I accept."

Victor come home, "What happened today?"

I said, "Someone..." and I told him.

He said, "You didn't catch the name?"

I said, "Well, yes, it was something like crack, crack, I don't know."

-It was Craig Claiborne, who was the food editor of the New York Times.

-And so Craig said, "Well, I don't normally accept invitations to lunch from my readers, but this seemed so unusual, if you don't mind, I'll come."

-She made upside-down artichokes.

She made cold oranges with sugar.

-She also made a pasta with peas and prosciutto, and she'd made veal roll-ups that she had learned from her mother.

And Marcella made them with a very light, fresh tomato sauce that also went over big.

-And this resulted in a 1970 article that ran for about half a page.

And it was a profile of Marcella, and the headline was something along the lines of "And There was a Time that She Couldn't Cook."

-He wrote a beautiful article.

He was enjoying the meal.

And the school was launched again.

I never had a problem to find students after.

-I was a New York Times junkie, so whenever that section would come out and Craig Claiborne would write his stories, and it happened that he did an article about Marcella Hazan.

I knew nothing about her, had never even heard of her, but I was very intrigued.

So I was allowed to sign up for the class.

And I remember it was a kind of a rainy night, and I was a little late.

So I rapped on the door of the apartment, and I heard this sort of a heavy-footed person coming to the door.

And then I heard someone say, "The class begin 6:00."

I said, "Uh-oh.

Am I in trouble."

And I was never late again.

She did not beat around the bush about anything or anyone.

It was right out there.

She may have minced garlic, but she never minced words.

-Marcella gets another call from this man named Peter Mullman, who was an editor at Harper & Row, a publishing house.

-He said, "Would you like to do a cookbook?"

"A cookbook?"

-I decided that was impossible because I don't write in English.

And Peter said, "Well, if you want, I will translate."

But I didn't know anything about writing a book, especially a cookbook.

Believe me.

-They agreed that they would deliver it within a year.

And somehow, with Victor working full-time and Marcella not really being able to write in English, figured out a way between the two of them to produce a cookbook.

-I had a portable typewriter set up in the living room.

She liked to work with a spiral notebook.

I would make little notes for myself.

Then I would disappear, and I would work away until maybe 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and then go to work, then come back in the evening, and go to work again.

And in less than a year, we had produced a book -- a book that made history.

-And "Classic Italian Cookbook" is one of the most brilliant Italian cookbooks ever done, and probably the most seminal Italian cookbook ever published in this country.

-"The Classic Italian Cookbook" was something that every interested cook, amateur or professional, simply had to have.

-So, I think the very first book of hers I bought was "The Classic Italian Cookbook."

I read the first few pages, and this whole front preface, which is pretty long, "The Art of Italian: Eat It," goes into detail on how we do certain things and why we don't do certain things.

And as you started to sort of build up in your brain, you know, as someone with a scientific background, it was like almost forming my own periodic table of Italian food.

-Marcella begins by declaring that Italian food does not really exist.

-The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of its regions, regions that, until 1861, were separate, independent, and usually hostile states.

What is important is to be aware that these differences exist, and that behind the screen of the two familiar term "Italian cooking" lies concealed, waiting to be discovered, a multitude of riches.

-You know, so much of that first cookbook was just gorgeous from a literary perspective.

That first cookbook really situated Italian cooking within the wider context of Italian culture.

-When Aristotle said that a work of art should imitate the motions of the mind and not an external arrangement of facts, he was anticipating a definition of the art of the Italian home cook.

In Italy, the source of the very best Italian food is the home kitchen.

-So, I'm going to make Marcella's Bolognese sauce, which I think is one of her most iconic dishes.

The recipe is from "The Classic Italian Cookbook."

This was her first recipe that I ever made.

This is like the shortest line-item list of deliciousness.

Actually has seven ingredients.

That's it.

But everything is just a series of building on successive layers very gently.

So, we start with the olive oil and butter.

And the first ingredient are the onions.

And we just really want to cook them till they're barely translucent.

You can almost smell the cooked onion flavor.

And if you cook with your nose, it makes you a better cook, which is how I approach it.

In goes the other aromatics, the celery and the carrot.

We just let this cook for a few minutes till it's a little bit, uh, fragrant.

Between November and January, automatically, every Sunday at noon, you should start a Bolognese, even if you don't plan on eating it for the next two days, in which case it will actually still be better.

So, at this point is when Marcella says you should add the meat.

This is ground beef.

And this is a very critical step because you want to break up the meat as quickly as you can.

And it's just seasoned with just a pinch of salt.

We will then add the white wine and then turn up the heat.

Cook this at a lively simmer, and we just let the wine reduce, giving it a stir every few minutes.

It is precise, but it's not time-consuming.

I think that's what makes it delicious and brilliant.

It's something that gives you so much in reward for flavor for just a little bit of work.

And the rest is time.

So, at this point, when the wine has bubbled away for a bit, you add the milk, a little bit of nutmeg.

When you smell this dish in all its five stages, those are learning moments, not just for this dish, but for being a better cook in general.

So, at this point we have the tomatoes, whole Italian plum tomatoes.

Just add the tomatoes.

Give it a quick stir.

You want to leave it at the gentlest of simmers.

In her words, 3 to 5 hours.

This is one of the, for me, the 10 greatest iconic dishes in the world.

Thank you, Marcella, for the inspiration, for the thoughtfulness, and for sharing.

Yes.

♪ -Critics are all about it, yet it doesn't sell terribly well.

When Marcella embarks upon her cookbook tour, she realizes that Harper didn't exactly put a lot of muscle behind the P.R.

push for the book.

And so she's pretty dismayed, along with Victor, at how the book is, or rather, is not doing.

Marcella and Victor decide to take matters into their own hands.

-Harper Magazine Press was mainly publishing books about social issues and politics, so the book didn't really fit their list.

-But in the meantime, Julia Child had written to her a very admiring letter, indicated that she would have been very pleased to meet her, if Marcella would have her, and, you know, would talk to Julia about this problem with the book.

-And asks her what they could possibly do to drum up more support.

And Julia responds by saying that she could put them in touch with her editor at the publishing house, Knopf, named Judith Jones.

-We went to see Judith in her office, and Judith said, "Well, this is really a remarkable book.

I've never seen reviews like this.

I think we could buy the rights to the book and reissue it."

-Judith Jones was the great food editor of the 20th century.

She is famous for taking Julia Child's manuscripts, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," one and two, and putting them into a workable form that you could sell to the American public.

Very formidable New England cook, fairly uptight, very -- also very precise, and had a very good ability to pull books out of talented people and to see the way that food trends were going.

-Knopf had a wonderful publicity machine, and they really got behind their books, and Marcella and Victor went all over on Knopf's dime, and that always helps.

You know, publicity is what sells these books.

-Marcella realizes that her work is far from finished, and so she decides to write a second cookbook called "More Classic Italian Cooking."

She gets a tape recorder and travels all around Italy to visit home cooks in many of the regions that are nestled within that country and record the way that Italians, real Italians, cook in real Italian kitchens.

-When my mother would go look for recipes and go into restaurants or people's homes, she would make these notes.

It's amazing in Italy how, from one region to another, everything is so different.

And she needed to be in a place for, you know, maybe a month to really get a feel for it.

I remember we went for a summer in a little town called Sori on the Italian Riviera.

My parents rented an apartment.

And we would go to restaurants.

She would talk to people and she would ask how things were made.

And then she would go home and cook this.

And then if it ended up coming out well and she liked it, then she would make it again and measure it and then write the recipe, and then she would make it again following her own recipe, and to make sure that it came out the way that it was supposed to.

My mother never, never measured when she cooked, and that was one of the hardest things that was for her when she was writing cookbooks, the fact that she had to measure.

And so my father, he would have her just, you know, put stuff in the way that she would normally put it in, and he would catch it in something and then measure it.

You know, risotto was the first thing that I learned from her.

And this is a risotto with fresh tomatoes and basil.

Now, my mother was from Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy.

And so she -- she liked to use butter.

If you don't let the onions saute enough and get color, then you're not gonna get flavor from it.

Peeling was one of the things that I learned from my mother.

The important thing is just to go back and forth and use the whole length of the blade back and forth like this.

Yeah, she's still talking to me.

I remember what she would say.

"Watch the pot," you know?

Don't forget about it.

Don't abandon it.

It's like a baby that needs to be cared for and watched over.

Aha!

We're getting there.

Starting to turn color.

When I was a little boy, I would like to sit in the kitchen and watch my mother cook.

And sometimes she would let me do something, and one of the things that she would let me do was stir the risotto.

You know, she would explain how it needed to be done, you know, from start to finish.

In go the tomatoes.

I think it was part of her genius was, she could imagine what something would taste like.

And you know how they say that, uh, you know, chefs always need to taste while they're cooking.

She never tasted.

The smell would tell her what the flavor was like.

This is carnaroli, the prince of risotto rices.

So you start just with the rice, without any of the broth.

That way it kind of soaks up the tomatoes right away.

And you want to get the rice nice and hot.

And then we can start adding the broth.

You know, once you start adding the liquid, about 20 minutes.

I always used to say, if the phone rings while you're making risotto, you do answer it, but you don't talk.

[ Laughs ] And you can start to see the bottom of the pan pretty clearly.

Basically, you just keep on adding liquid until it's done.

Take the leaves off the stems and cut them.

♪ And read her recipe in the book.

You'll see it says to add the basil like at the very end.

You know, food brings back, you know, emotions and memories very strongly, and having learned how to cook means that I can continue that.

When I cook her dishes, it reminds me of her.

♪ -Throughout her years in America, Marcella always has this yearning, this hankering, to really show her students, you know, the beauty and glory of the Italian ingredients that she had grown up around.

And so she decides to open up her own cooking school in Bologna for American students.

-They rented space in a big commercial kitchen in Bologna, and it was a week of intensive cooking lessons.

-My mother's idea was that people should understand where the food came from.

-Look how beautiful it is.

A big bunch of rosemary.

Oh, my.

[ Sniffs ] Oh.

If you smell rosemary, you smell a meat roast.

We are going to do with this is a meat roast with rosemary.

-So it wasn't just cooking classes.

It also involved learning about how Parmigiano-Reggiano is made, learning about olive oil, learning about prosciutto.

And so the course included field trips during the day and then the cooking classes in the evening.

And it was quite a full program.

-Official taster, come here.

-I wrote to Marcella.

She was doing a one-week cooking course where you went to visit the vineyards and cheesemakers and all the rest of it.

And I remember it cost so much, we thought -- And I remember my husband said, "Well, you've worked so hard.

I'm going to somehow get the money to send you on that course."

And I arrived in Bologna.

The whole week was a wonderful mix of some cookery classes, some visits to farms, and I remember we were taught how to make little cannellini and tortellini and cannelloni and all kinds of lovely pasta shapes.

So it was a wonderful experiences during the week.

-We would take trips.

We went to the prosciutto factory because, "Well, here's where we hang the big slab of ham when it first comes in," move to the next room.

"This is when it's aged a little more."

♪ -It was a great build-up to the end of the week.

We were going to have our final dinner in Marcella's hometown, Cesenatico.

And we walked up along -- I remember up along by the water to this restaurant, and it seemed to me that it was right out on the sand.

I think it was called Gambero Rosso.

-And it's like where you eat for hours.

You have fritto misto, the fried fish and vegetables, and go from one course, pasta course, and maybe another pasta course, because she wants us to try everything.

[ Choir singing in Italian ] ♪ -Now you have to close the cavity.

Maybe you were a tailor in another life.

-You think?

-You close it very well.

-Marcella was a ham.

She loved to act.

She loved to mug.

She was a great mimic.

And she was very good on camera.

-Marcella Hazan, how are you?

Richard Simmons.

It's not Europe, Richard.

-I have makeup!

[ Laughter ] -And she wondered, "Why are all these other people getting on television?"

-We're roasting Miss Chicken today on "The French Chef."

-Julia Child was a showman.

But Marcella, you know, her English wasn't great.

She wasn't a natural on camera in the way that Julia Child was.

-A lot of manual labor, cutting that up, though.

-Oh, no.

You can cut those -- Oh, come on.

You can cut it any way you want it, when you want it.

-But Julia Child was playful, and Marcella was not those things.

-She never did get to have her own TV show.

I think she would have enjoyed her own TV show.

Sometimes you just never know why something doesn't happen.

-She was on "Good Morning America.

She was on "The Today Show."

Those were publicity appearances.

Her English was really a challenge.

-Tagliata mean "cut it."

You see that it's cutted?

-Oh, scattered.

"Tagliata" means scattered.

-No scatter.

Cut it.

-Oh, cut it!

-My English, I don't think... -That's all right.

Your English is better than my Italian.

-So, I don't think anybody was going to give her a television show.

-With the absence of that type of media, I think it's all the more impressive that she sold as many books as she did.

-Well, this must be one incredible book because it's won the two biggest awards in the country.

This is how Marcella writes her recipes.

They're all handwritten in Italian.

-Just because I don't write English.

-Just because you don't write English.

And your companion and wonderful husband, Victor, does all the translations for you.

-Marcella was Victor's project and a marketing triumph.

I mean, he was in marketing.

When he started managing Marcella, I would say his genius really became apparent.

-He developed over the years this ability to really capture her voice or something that was an amalgam of her and him together for this kind of universal voice of Marcella Hazan.

It does come from her head, her heart.

She was the one who had the vision and the talent, and he knew how to take it and package it.

-And he is one of the most elegant and evocative writers that I've ever worked with.

He didn't get credit for it.

It was not Victor and Marcella Hazan or Marcella Hazan with Victor Hazan.

It was Marcella Hazan.

And I think one of the challenges of his life was that he had to work in the background, and he subsumed his own ego to her in those books.

He and I talked about it many times, and it just became a fact of life.

-Marcella and Victor really inverted this gender dynamic between a creator and a muse.

So she was the one in power, kind of architecting all the creative decisions, and Victor seemed pretty happy with ceding the stage to his wife because he truly was able to see her as the talent.

-When she got her first book contract, Victor stopped working for the family business and they became sort of Marcella, Inc. from that point on.

-He finally became more involved in the cooking school and became known as a wine authority, particularly a red Italian wine authority.

So, eventually, he came into his own.

-And in Italy, a favorite dream is sightseeing along the Grand Canal in Venice.

Saint Mark's Square is alive with pigeons at feeding time.

Every tourist, of course, investigates the romance of a ride in a gondola.

-My father had always wanted to live in Venice.

It's a magical city.

It's a romantic city.

-And once we were in Bologna, I said, "We've come to a stage now where we can go and do whatever we do, any place.

Why don't we go and buy a place to live in Venice."

-So many artists are drawn to Venice because of the light.

At night here, we don't hear anything except the lapping of the canal.

When you live in Venice, you're going by foot.

So it's a very human city.

-We're in Campo San Giovanni e Paolo.

This is where my mother and father lived.

Their house was right behind that big building there.

This is a magical place.

This was a beautiful place to live in.

This period, when my parents were living here, it was one of my mother's happiest periods of her life.

-I think it was a 16th century building.

Victor had figured out a kitchen, which was done with ship-like brilliance under the eaves.

So it had everything she needed within arm's reach.

But it was a relatively small place.

There was a terrace all the way around which looked out over Venice, and it was the dream place.

-One of the joys of being in Venice was going out into the markets and going to the Rialto, where all of this wonderful food was, and seeing her picking up the chicory, or the broccoli rabe or the rucola, smelling it and sort of pushing it at you and saying, "See, look at this, how beautiful this is."

She knew everybody.

She knew all of the fishmongers and the butchers, and they were happy to see her.

One thing about the Rialto market that's amazing is when you walk through it, you don't smell any fish because it's so fresh and you see that some of the fish are still moving.

You come here for the product of the sea that surrounds you.

And what you find here is so fresh, so sweet.

You never get it anywhere else.

-We went to Venice.

We found a wonderful place.

We started restoring it.

And we did begin giving classes at home.

And they were very, very successful.

They were booked two three years in advance.

We had an enormous waitlist.

-I got a fax from Victor because there were no computers then saying, "We've had a cancellation.

Would you like to come?"

It was very short notice and I said yes.

We were told to bring an apron, a notebook, and a pen, and we were all standing there very nervously with our notebooks, taking down what she said.

She had the ingredients in a pot, and then she grabbed a handful of salt and threw it into the pot.

And I said, "Marcella, your recipes are so precise, I can't believe that you just threw all that salt in the pot."

And she said, "I never measure anything."

She said, "And now you cook it."

And I said, with my pencil poised, "For how long?"

And she looked at me with great disdain and said, "Till it's done."

-It was a small kitchen.

None of her kitchens were ever large, and she always had an assistant.

And they were always tough, tough women.

-And the one that I think most people remember was Maria.

And Maria would, you know, get everything together that my mother needed all the ingredients, all the prep.

But the most important thing that she did was make the homemade pasta for my mother.

I think the fact that she hurt her hand and it never went back to being what it was, it was very difficult for her to do things with her right hand, but it never stopped her from doing anything.

I remember that she would tell her students often, you know, "If I can do this with one and a half arms, then you should have no trouble doing it."

-I think we all tend to understate how powerful first time discovery is of things.

When I grew up, we didn't have extra virgin olive oil.

We didn't have arugula, we didn't have radicchio.

We didn't have every kind of pasta shape under the sun.

-Nobody had heard of sun dried tomatoes until Marcella Hazan.

I remember my mother using olive oil, and it was sort of something that you would put on your skin when you went in the sun.

-There was only one olive oil in America, and it was not extra virgin and was terrible.

-Nobody knew what an extra virgin olive oil was and how much better it tasted than what we were used to.

-Then we season with extra virgin olive oil.

-Always the extra virgin?

-Yes, it's only the olive oil that is extra virgin.

-Okay.

-Let's go -- Look who's she's talking to.

That's right.

-One ingredient after the other, she brought it to America.

-Marcella introduced balsamic vinegar to us.

I think it is something that she lived to regret.

She would use it as a drop of beautiful seasoning, of flavor.

It was valuable and precious.

And now, anywhere you go, you ask for a vinaigrette and you have balsamic vinegar.

I remember going to dinner with her, and she would cringe with the fact that people served it everywhere.

-I'm going to make Marcella's chicken with two lemons, which is almost like a bit of poetry, because this is it.

It's 3 to 4 pound chicken, salt, pepper, lemons.

I don't know of a recipe that's simpler than this that certainly delivers as much flavor impact.

It's so straightforward and elemental.

But the first thing is the chicken is only seasoned with salt and pepper.

It is seasoned generously.

Plus also the inside of the cavity.

I'll do the same with the pepper.

You take two lemons.

I'm going to take off my gloves for this.

And the lemons have to be perforated substantially.

You can do this with a fork.

Insert lemon into chicken.

You should be able to get the second one in.

Use a toothpick to also seal the front part of the chicken here.

Keeping the legs together also helps, too.

And that is all the prep.

The chicken is cooked initially with the breast side down for 30 minutes, 350 degrees.

[ Bell dings ] And once you're sure it's not stuck, then we flip it over.

It goes back into the oven at the same temperature for another 30 minutes.

[ Bell dings ] Complete the process with a 20 minute roast at 400 degrees.

-[ Bell dings ] -That looks like a perfectly golden brown chicken that's not too burned or too caramelized.

This is by far the dish I have shared most with people, not to show what I can do, but to show what they can do.

And that's what's important.

-Even I can do this one, right?

-And we all live through her spirit and her memory and sort of pass that knowledge on to other people.

Marcella Polini Hazan.

-And you can see that this page is just a mess.

This was the lemon chicken that I made, and suddenly, everybody I know made.

It was just the most amazing thing.

And I just could not believe this thing was going to work.

And you did.

And it was the most dramatic thing in the world.

The essence of this stuff, wait, there's just two or three ingredients.

How did this turn out this way?

-I remember that was probably the first thing I ever cooked of hers, and it gives you something that you have through the rest of your life.

Stuff the lemons in the chicken, you've got dinner.

-A women's magazine published the recipe, and a number of the readers wrote back saying, "We tried the chicken.

It's delicious.

I made it for my boyfriend, and after they had the chicken, he proposed."

And this happened again and again.

So the magazine decided to call it Engagement Chicken.

-My mother smoked from, I think, when she was 14 years old, probably one to two packs of cigarettes a day.

I remember she first started teaching as a guest at cooking schools where smoking was not allowed.

She would start out by saying, "Well, you have a choice.

You could have a good class and let me smoke.

Or you could have a so-so class and I won't smoke."

So she smoked at every class.

-For Marcella, her cigarette was super important, and I loved the way she held her cigarette.

She sort of had a sort of pose that she would hold it like that.

-She chain smoked cigarettes and drank Jack Daniels and had this very husky voice.

And a lot of people criticized her and said that her taste was shot, and it never was.

-She said she was allergic to wine, but I think she just liked her bourbon.

-My mother couldn't drink wine because it gave her acidity, but she did like to drink Jack Daniels, but she drank it, you know, at the end of a meal.

People, you know had heard that she drank Jack Daniels.

You know, she would come to a restaurant, and they would bring out a Jack Daniels first thing.

She would look at it and was like, "What am I going to do with this?"

-She was totally, most consistently herself, able to be cranky if necessary, but she could be the best company, and she liked nothing better than to be with other people.

And we had so much fun together.

But we always knew if we went out to a restaurant that something would come, that she would just throw her hands up about, and she wasn't afraid to share her displeasure.

-And beneath that rough, tough exterior and that gravelly voice was a very loving, wonderful friend.

-Victor and Marcella were incredibly demanding.

They're demanding of themselves and consequently demanding of their editor and publisher.

-In the first book, Judith Jones didn't have to do anything in the kitchen with Marcella.

After the second book, they decided to do a third book, and that is when they really began to have serious personality issues.

-Judith Jones felt as though some of Marcella's instructions for recipes were sort of imprecise.

She also wondered why some of those recipes were even in the book, like this cauliflower gratin with a bechamel sauce.

And Marcella thought to herself, "Well, why are you, an American woman, the arbiter of what is or is not Italian?

-It was a fortunate day for my career when Julia Child brought Judith Jones and me together.

It's what I thought then and what I think now.

I can't say exactly when the warm feelings that we had once enjoyed began to cool.

Publishers always know best, of course, but authors often know better.

-At the end of the third book, the collaboration between Judith and Marcella had completely collapsed.

However, I kept an eye on the sales, and the sales of the first two books were declining, and I thought to myself, there's a lot of wonderful material in these two books.

Why don't we collect it in a single book, re-edit it, freshen some of the recipes, and call it "Essentials."

-From what Marcella told me, Judith never believed in it.

Judith basically said, "Why would people want this?"

But Marcella and Victor persisted and wrote the book, revised the recipes.

It was a hell of a lot of work.

The book was published with a modest first printing, and, to the great surprise of the Knopf people, it got a lot of attention from the food press.

Marcella was on a lot of television shows.

-Recently, she has revised and updated many of her classic recipes from two earlier cookbooks.

They are now reissued in a single volume.

It is called "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking."

And the book took off like a rocket.

-And the first printing sold out like in three days, and this was the beginning of December.

It went into two more printings before Christmas.

-In spite of the demand, they were very conservative about the way they reprinted the book, and the bookstores were out of stock, so they missed a tremendous amount of sales.

-In the meantime, James Beard Foundation was having its annual awards for best cookbook in its category.

-They are like the Oscars of the food world.

-And they called Marcella, and they said, "Marcella, you know, we've seen this new book you've done, but nobody has submitted it to the committee."

-And Judith said, "Well, I can't submit it because it's two old books.

It's not a new book."

-When Victor and Marcella found out about that, they just lost it.

-And Marcella decided, you know what, I'm just going to submit this book on my own.

And she did just that, and she ended up winning a James Beard Award for that.

-And in that time, we said "basta" with Judith Jones.

We asked our agent to sever our relationship with Knopf.

♪ -By that point in the '90s, Marcella had risen to such heights that she commanded just as much respect as Judith did in the culinary world.

And as a result, she was really able to fight for what she felt as though she deserved.

And what that was was a relationship with someone other than Judith Jones, and instead pursue a partnership with a new publisher.

-Bill Shenker.

He hired me at Harper.

He's a very, very smart publisher.

He loved Marcella.

He thought she was brilliant.

And I got this flimsy one page proposal.

I spoke to Bill about it, and he really was keen to publish her.

-Marcella and Victor selected the publishers that they wanted to be published by.

There was no proposal.

There was no outline.

It was just, "Do you want to publish the next book?"

-The next thing I knew, Bill had outbid the competition.

They had a limit as to how high they could go.

He went higher.

I became Marcella's editor.

-And this results in her commanding an advance of $650,000.

And back then, that was the highest reported advance for any cookbook in America up until that point, which really speaks to just the immense reverence so many people had for Marcella by that point.

-At the Food and Wine Aspen Conference, where there would be chefs and cookbook authors signing their books, you would get paired up with another author.

And for some reason, every single year, I was paired up with Marcella Hazan, and I've written "The Union Square Cafe Cookbook," and we might, on a given afternoon, have sold 12 copies of the books.

Marcella would have a line of people stretched all the way out the tent not only to buy her books, but to meet her.

And meanwhile, I'd never had more than three people waiting in line.

And so I would sit there telling stories.

I would do anything to make our line grow.

I was the slowest autographer you've ever met.

-She would be in book signings anywhere in this country, and people would come up to her and say, "I named my daughter for you."

So there are American Marcella's because they connected with her in that way.

-Unfortunately, as you get older, Venice becomes difficult.

What makes Venice magical makes it hard, too, because you don't just go out the door and hail a taxi.

You have to walk.

You say that it takes three bridges to get to this place.

-There is a joke in Venice.

If you get sick, where does one go?

And the joke is that you go to the airport.

At that time, Venice was not known for quality medical care.

Also, it's a difficult city to get from one place to another.

-And my mother's legs are starting to give her some trouble.

She has a harder time climbing and walking.

And there were 82 steps to get to the apartment.

I know this because my mother bemoaned each single one.

-After 20 years in Venice, you begin to hunger for a place where it's warm in the winter, and that is what we did.

We left Venice and moved to Florida.

-Life is a collection of stories.

Of the tales they once told, only the echoes continue to reach us, but growing fainter across ever lengthening stretches of memory.

I am unequal to the task of describing how it felt to abandon our home to others and leave Venice.

♪ -Their son Giuliano had settled in Sarasota, Florida, so they wanted to be close to him and his family and their grandchildren.

So they moved to Longboat Key, which is a wonderful place.

They had a beautiful apartment that they redid in their own style.

-If you walked into this building, like so many oceanside buildings in Florida, you could not believe that you weren't actually in Venice when you opened the door of the apartment.

-I personally think they would have been happier in New York City because they loved theater, they loved music.

I mean, Victor told me, "Oh, Sarasota has a symphony and all this stuff going on, but it's not New York City."

-Longboat Key is not a place with markets, all the accessibility of Bologna, where she taught, and Venice is gone.

But she figured out.

So the artichokes are too big.

But, you know, she would figure it out.

And she knew that it was like a lot of her readers.

They didn't have the access to farmers markets, to fresh ingredients the way she did.

She was never a snob, but she cared about it for the right reasons.

-Growing up in California, we have bean culture, and I always liked beans, but I had no idea how much I liked them.

And then the deeper I dug, the more I realized, oh, beans are fascinating.

So I started growing heirloom beans.

I started selling them online.

And I'm going through the orders one day, and I just stop in my tracks, and it says Marcella Hazan.

And I'm thinking, "Well, no, I mean, this is a joke.

Someone's being funny with me."

But then she asked to be my friend on Facebook later.

And we very slowly started getting a relationship together, mostly through Facebook messenger.

So I remember thinking, okay, we've become buddies.

I asked her what her favorite bean was, and she said, "My favorite bean is Sorana, and if you can find those, you'll have a customer for life."

So I found the Sorana beans.

We trialed them, and we thought, well, let's go into production with these because these are really great.

So we actually ended up having a pretty good harvest, and the bean was delicious.

It was just as good as she described.

So we called them Marcella.

I mean, the whole story belongs to her.

And these are the American grown Marcella beans.

I do olive oil, and I do garlic.

You don't want to fight the ingredients.

You let them do the work.

If Marcella taught us anything, it's to go really simple and use the best ingredients.

I think just onion, garlic, and a bay leaf, and the best olive oil is really all you need to do.

♪ Then I like to bring it up to a full boil.

You let them boil for about 10 or 15 minutes, and then I turn it down to a low simmer.

And then, depending on how busy I am, the best way to go is low and slow as you can.

And if it can take all day, what have you got to do that's more important?

One thing I love about the Marcella books is you learn to cook.

It's not just following directions.

It sounds loopy, but Marcella's voice is in my head, as I'm cooking.

I'm thinking she's going to say, "Mm, you're doing this too fast," or, "I know you want to get done, but just wait."

And every time, she's right.

So I'm still hearing her.

And I think that's the beauty of the books, is she is still speaking to you.

♪ So this is the lardo, and it's resting, and you can see it starts, but all of a sudden becomes translucent and the beans are coming up.

Isn't that great?

This is absolutely Marcella in a nutshell.

Or on a plate.

-I got this great opportunity to do a TV show called "Mind of a Chef", and I got to choose who I'd want to do a TV show with.

And I was a huge fan of Marcella, and so were cooking, and I'm really nervous.

-You put a knife to divide the skin from the bone and became like a big lollipop.

-And she's so sweet.

And at this stage, you know, she's, I think 89.

You know, she was tired, you know?

When she was on camera, she was like, sharp as a button, you know, and there was a moment where she's like, "Okay, I need to take a break," you know, and you could see her slow down, and she just kind of gave it her all, you know?

And that was her dedication.

I suppose it was pretty ballsy trying to recreate one of Marcella's dishes in front of Marcella in Marcella's house.

I can't wait to eat this.

-No, no.

It's good.

-And I just remember her, you know, going over, giving it a little sniff.

-Open up.

-Open up.

-Need a little more salt.

-And I think she was happy.

I didn't want to mess it up.

You know, that's like the last thing I wanted to do.

We're going to put a lid on this and cook it for about two hours, maybe.

-When it's done.

-And actually, after we stopped filming, um, I had to take a second off camera, and I did get quite emotional, uh, because, you know, I did know how special it was.

Does this get the Marcella seal of approval?

-I like that.

-You do?

Whoo!

I kind of had a feeling that that would probably be the last time I'd see her.

Yeah.

So very special to have somebody teach you and pass that along.

♪ -Eventually, the smoking started having its effects.

I think she developed emphysema, I believe.

She would periodically, you know, have to go on oxygen.

Even though she, you know, had an oxygen tank for breathing, she still smoked.

She didn't smoke next to the tank, thank God.

Otherwise, we would have all been blown up.

-Marcella was never frail.

She was always a presence.

Always.

She was indomitable.

She was the way she was until she was no longer.

And that's an extraordinary thing, to live your life by your own rules, by your own intellect, and your own passions.

We should all get to do that.

-I made coffee every morning for Marcella, and so she's gotten out of bed.

I heard her call, "Victor, Victor," and I looked across the apartment, and she said, "I can't -- I don't feel my legs anymore.

I can't stand up."

And I said, "Well, I'll help you.

I'll get you to a chair."

And I grabbed her.

As I grabbed her, she just vanished.

-I was about to start a course at our cooking school in Verona.

I was setting up the kitchen.

It was Sunday.

So my phone rang, and it was, uh, Lael... ...letting me know that my mother had died.

It was hard to process.

I didn't really know what to do.

How was I going to do a cooking course?

I think it was my father who wrote to me and said that what my mother would have wanted would have been for me to continue doing the course, which is what she would have done.

It was the best way to honor her.

♪ -When we lost Marcella, there was a sense that one of the great transformative cooks of our country was gone.

She changed an entire culture.

She taught us how to cook Italian food.

-We are talking about Italian food and not the strange food.

-Okay.

-Okay?

-I think what she contributed is a sense of directness, of simplicity, of getting at the basic of things.

-Simple is not easy.

You have to be very careful when you do it, because you can ruin a dish.

-It isn't easy to follow her.

I mean, you'd have to be Marcella to be Marcella, but you can learn from her.

-Everybody needs to just remove the onion from the tomato sauce.

It's removed for a reason, and she takes it out because it's given what it needs to give.

And I think that's the magic of Marcella Hazan.

You know, she knows.

When you know you know.

-I'm in awe of you.

Always have been.

-Thank you.

-You're terrific.

-The quality of your life can be better if you cook the way she taught us.

And I would be so pleased if we could adapt this Italian way of cooking that Marcella taught us to everything we do.

-To you, Marcella, wherever you are.

And for all the good that you did to America's food.

Thank you.

♪ ♪ ♪ -Some dishes you do only two things, and if you do one wrong, it's half wrong, which is too much.

♪ -Mm.

[ Imitates explosion ] -You see, in Italy, if you go to a restaurant and the food is very good, the thing that you say, "Oh, it's just like home cooking," and that is Italian food.

♪