Quotes from Marcella Hazan

The Italian comes to his table with the same open heart with which a child falls into his mother's arms, with the same easy feeling of being in the right place.

Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of the Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life.

And while other passions in your life may at some point begin to bank their fires, the shared happiness of good homemade food can last as long as we do.

Once the pasta is sauced, serve it promptly, inviting your guests and family to put off talking and start eating.

In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce.

Lidia, this is how America has to cook Italian." And with this wonderful book, she showed us all how.

Their patrols were always on the move, and so were the bombs that Allied planes dropped on them. When Marcella went off to school in the morning, there was no certainty that she would get back.

After the gravedigger's testimony had been heard, the judge spoke to Marcella. "Signorina," he said, "we are too busy here with serious matters to spend time on such foolishness. Take your skull, go home, and don't let us see you again.

such as a three-ingredient tomato sauce, a chicken with just two lemons, a soup with but a ladleful of cannellini, a pork butt braised solely in milk, a bluefish baked with garlic and potatoes, a pasta with a fistful of small scallops, Bolognese sauce, are drawn from the everyday meals Marcella cooked for her family.

Perhaps without my always being fully conscious of it, the dishes continued to evolve, moving always toward a simpler, clearer expression of their primary flavors, and toward a steadily diminishing dependence on cooking fat.

but often discovering that the recipe had to be wholly reshaped to make room for the perceptions and experiences gained in the intervening years of cooking and teaching.

The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of regions that long antedate the Italian nation, regions that until 1861 were part of sovereign and usually hostile states, sharing few cultural traditions and no common spoken language

Marcella recalls in her writings and interviews that she had very little interest in food growing up, but did have vivid memories of her tiny grandmother standing on a crate, rolling pasta into silky sheets that were almost as big as a bedspread.

A cook is at a disadvantage if they don't have an understanding and knowledge of these products, and Marcella made it her mission to write about parmigiano-reggiano, aceto balsamico, bottarga, dried porcini, colatura di alici, olive oil, capers, Arborio and Carnaroli rice, mortadella, and more, many of which were not yet widely known in America. She even dedicates six pages to the different shapes of pasta and suggested sauces.

and the differences between rolling pasta by hand versus with a machine.

Italians love to grow and eat vegetables, and in each of the twenty regions of the country, there is a favorite one.

Cooking is an art, but you eat it too.

What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world.