Why Marcella Hazan always teaches us to cook Italian

In the 1980s, an assistant from Glamor spent her romantic life at the level of two lemons and a chicken. During the suggestion of one of the editors of the magazine, which more or less followed a recipe that she had found in an Italian kitchen book, the assistant pushed the lemons full of holes, stuffed them in the bird and loaded it in a hot oven. She ate her chicken with her boyfriend. Shortly after, he proposed. Intrigued, other assistants have tried the lemon and chicken tour on their own boyfriends. And now, he came to pass that the corridors of Condé Nast soon sparkled with the brightness of new diamond rings.

The author of the Kitchen Book was Marcella Hazan. If she had never done anything else in her life, Ms. Hazan would always have a guaranteed place in history as a trigger of the engagement chicken, a phenomenon so durable that he probably survived some of the marriages he said.

Of course, Ms. Hazan did much more than that. It has changed, completely and irreversibly, the way Italian cuisine is cooked, eaten and spoken in the United States. Although it has been 12 years since Ms. Hazan died, at 89, and over 30 years old since she released a kitchen book, no one has yet exceeded her as a source that Americans consult when they want to know how the Italians take dinner on the table.

The new documentary “Marcella”, which opens at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and begins to broadcast on May 9, turns some of the things for which we can thank her: balsamic vinegar. Dried tomatoes in the sun. The idea that there is no “Italian cuisine” but many local people, each with its own constellation flavors.

I saw the film in April during a screening at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. For the occasion, the Conservatives unpacked 19 cooking tools acquired by the Mme Hazan’s Kitchen Museum last year. Outside the theater were its lasagna pan at the square corner, its vintage garganelli comb suitable for a weaving, a linen apron printed with vineyards in a dye made from vinegar and rust, and its wooden risotto spoon, which escapes at the bottom like a branch calculation. (“You should never stop stirring,” she wrote once.)