Again and again, through the years, I meet people who come up to me to say, 'I have made your chicken with two lemons and it is the most amazingly simple recipe, the juiciest, best-tasting chicken I have ever had.' And you know, it is perfectly true.Ģ. The bird, its two lemons, and the oven do all the rest. After you put the chicken in the oven you turn it just once. No fat to cook with, no basting to do, no stuffing to prepare, no condiments except for salt and pepper. If this were a still life its title could be 'Chicken with Two Lemons.' That is all that there is in it. She signed up for a Chinese cooking course - a cuisine that she found to be similar to Italian with its pasta dishes and layers of flavor. She was encouraged by her success re-creating favorite foods from home, and Marcella found herself becoming more interested in cooking. They settled in the suburbs of Forest Hills, where Marcella learned to cook out of necessity. They married and remained in Italy for a short six months before his parents called him back to New York to help with the family business. Nevertheless, Victor successfully wooed Marcella. Especially when you're not interested in food.' 'For me, a young woman, you think that someone who courts you would talk about other things, not food. 'He was always talking about food,' Marcella remembers. This was a man who loved food so much, he began planning his next meal before he'd finished the one he was eating. He had returned to Italy to write - and to eat. Victor Hazan was an American who had been born in Italy and lived there as a child. Her interest lay in the sciences - at university she studied biology, and she took a teaching position after graduation.īut meeting her future husband changed all that. But she did not know how to cook and wasn't interested in learning. She saw it mainly as fuel - getting her through the day and all the activities she enjoyed. Growing up, she didn't have much interest in food. And, in doing so, she tapped into a previously unknown talent - cooking. Everything was not natural.'ĭespite limited ingredients - and her limited English - she did her best to re-create Italian food as she remembered it. And at the supermarket they were very dead they were wrapped it was like a coffin. 'The chicken, they were arriving from the farmer and they were alive. 'I never saw a supermarket in Italy,' she tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer.

When Marcella Hazan came to the United States in 1955, one of her first priorities was figuring out how she would feed her husband, Victor. The American grocery stores, with all their canned goods and prepackaged foods, were a far cry from the markets of her Italian homeland, where fresh produce, meats and fish were easy to find. Marcella Polini and Victor Hazan in 1952, in her hometown of Cesenatico, Italy, shortly after they met.

Marcella hazan essentials