Amarcord Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Alexandria and Cesenatico

  Cesenatico, La Comitiva

  The War

  Home Again

  Out of the University, into Love and Marriage

  On to the New World

  Back to the Old World

  Back to the New World

  A Book Born Twice and Twice Reborn

  A Funny Thing Happened

  Bologna

  Other Worlds

  How Not to Get Rich

  Venice

  My Three Graces Lucia, Maria, Nadia

  Parting with Knopf

  Leaving Venice

  In Appreciation

  Index

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  First printing, October 2008

  Copyright © 2008 by Marcella Hazan and Victor Hazan

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  Photo credits: pp. 3, 8, 12: © Foto Nanni; p.131 © The New York Times; p. 146 © Tara Heinemann; p.

  148 © Jim Lorelli; p. 231 © Gianni Berengo Gardin; p. 273 © Henry Grossman; p. 274 © Lou Manna

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  Cartoon on p. 295 by David Sipress

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hazan, Marcella.

  Amarcord—Marcella remembers: the remarkable life story of the woman who started out teaching science

  in a small town in Italy, but ended up teaching America how to cook Italian / by Marcella Hazan.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-592-40388-2

  1. Hazan, Marcella. 2. Hazan, Victor. 3. Cooks—Biography. 4. Cookery, Italian—History—20th century.

  5. Italian American women—Biography. 6. Women immigrants—United States—Biography. 7. Italian

  Americans—Biography. I. Hazan, Victor. II. Title. III. Title: Marcella remembers.

  TX649.H378A3 2008

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  Romagna solatia, dolce paese . . .

  Romagna, the “sunlit, sweet land” that the nineteenth-century poet Giovanni Pascoli described in his verses, is part of the northern Italian region known as Emilia-Romagna. If you travel southeast of Bologna, leaving Emilia and that hyphen behind, 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—go until there is sand in your shoes—and you will gaze upon the Adriatic, a broad blue line stretching out to meet the sky. I ran on that beach, and swam in that sea; I ate the fruits of those orchards, and drank that purple wine. I am a daughter of that land; its heat warms my blood; all that I am started there; there I learned to play, to eat, to love. My life’s story begins in Romagna, and to Romagna I dedicate it.

  Preface

  LITTLE IS LEFT of the world I was born into eighty-four years ago. It as a world where most of the food on our table—vegetables and fruit, wine and olive oil, chickens and rabbits—came from our farm or from that of a neighbor or a relative. The sausages we grilled and the salami we sliced were made from a pig we had raised; our house linen was woven from the hemp we had grown; we would go to the pescheria, the fish market, to buy fish that had been caught that night; and we did not buy pasta from a grocer because my grandmother—using a rolling pin nearly as long as she was tall—rolled it out every day using our own eggs and flour. It was a world in which the most common form of personal transportation was the bicycle. Automobiles were so rare—my father never owned one—that when Sandro, the richest man in town, roared down the road in his sports car, everyone ran out to look.

  That old world of mine was in Romagna, the southeastern, sea-rimmed corner of Emilia-Romagna, a region in northern Italy. It has its own distinctive dialect, as every place in Italy does. In Romagnolo, the dialect of Romagna, amarcord means “I remember,” compressing the three slow-footed Italian words “io mi ricordo” into a single swift, emphatic one. Federico Fellini, the late great film director, who was also a native of Romagna, used Amarcord as the title of one of his finest films, an evocation of life as it was when he was young in Rimini, a town that my own Cesenatico closely resembles. His example came immediately to mind when I sought a title for this collection of my memories.

  If you have lived as long as I have, when you open the door to the past, a vast hoard tumbles out in no particular order. The beam of memory does not necessarily sweep over life in strict chronological sequence. It may alight here on a person, there on a significant happening, without troubling to reconcile them or to plot them exactly on the graph of time. The characters and incidents that fill these pages were those caught in the random swings of memory’s searchlight. If, during my tale, I digress or skip ahead or reverse course, it is not out of capriciousness. It is the way that one looks back on life.

  In Nonno Riccardo’s arms, wearing my baptismal robe

  Alexandria and Cesenatico

  1931-1937

  YOU COULD DESCRIBE the road my life has taken as a series of unexpected and even improbable turns. When I was seven years old, I fell on the beach and broke my right arm. It was a commonplace event, yet it set my life on the variable course that it has since traveled. Amarcord—I remember
. Some of it, indeed, I remember too well.

  The beach I fell on was in Alexandria, Egypt, where my parents were then living. My mother’s side of the family, the Leonelli, were expatriate Italians long settled in the Middle East. Maria, my mother, one of six children, including two pairs of twins, was born in Beirut. Riccardo, her father, was the general manager of a cigarette manufacturer, a circumstance that may have encouraged me, when in my teens, to form an attachment to tobacco that lasts to this day.

  My father, Giuseppe Polini, was an accomplished tailor whose gifts had landed him excellent positions abroad, in Zurich, in Paris, and finally in New York. After five years in New York as the head cutter of B. Altman’s men’s custom department, he collected his savings and came back home to Cesenatico, a quiet fishing town on the northern Adriatic Sea, a 120-mile drive south of Venice along two old Roman roads, first on the Romea, then on the Adriatica.

  It is a short stretch of coast that Cesenatico lies on, but it has forever been known for the exquisite flavor of the seafood that populates its waters. Maine has its lobster, the Sacramento River its chinook salmon, Cesenatico its sole. It is a small fish, less than half the size of a Dover sole, but its firm, sweetly nutty flesh earns it first place among soles of any provenance. The same sea also produces a less glamorous fish, a type of sprat, larger than an anchovy and smaller than a sardine, but with similarly dark and unctuous flesh. It is known only locally, and even there, it is too humble to put in an appearance outside the home kitchen. There is nothing humble about its flavor, however. Its scent, rising from the grill, and its flesh, dissolving under one’s teeth, travel a direct line to one’s deepest gustatory emotions. The name it goes by in Cesenatico and its neighboring towns in Romagna is saraghina. Devotees of Fellini’s films may recall a wild, sensual woman by that same name, based on a character out of real life who used to roam the beach during Fellini’s youth.

  When Cesenatico’s fishermen sail back home in the afternoon, having fished all night, they dock their boats along a canal designed by Leonardo da Vinci, which bisects the town and winds its way through it toward the sea. I remember waiting for the men to return and unload their catch. They were grizzled and hungry from the night spent working the sea. They set up grills over wood charcoal on the pavement of the quay where their boat was tied up, and on the hot embers, they grilled a mess of saraghine. That is the moment I waited for, because the men always shared some of their saraghine with me. I had quickly learned to eat them as they do. Holding the small fish by the tail and the head, I brought it to my mouth, pulled back my lips, and used my teeth to lift the entire tiny fillet off the

  Back from a night of fishing, the crew snacks on grilled saraghine, eating them col bacio.

  bone and suck it into my mouth. Then I turned the fish around and sucked away the fillet from the other side. Oh, the succulence of it! “Si mangiano col bacio,” the fishermen say; you eat them with a kiss.

  After the Second World War, Cesenatico grew to become one of Italy’s most popular beach resorts, but in the 1920s and ’30s it was a sweet, simple village. There were two main parts to it. Well-to-do burghers from Bologna and other cities of the north summered in the pretty, art nouveau villas that, before they were eventually replaced by hotels, congregated in the shade of umbrella pines on the boulevards that run parallel to the beach. The fishermen and their families lived then, as many of them do now, in the center of town, in a huddle of modest one-story houses that face both sides of Leonardo’s canal.

  When my mother and her sister Margherita were young women, their mother, my grandmother-to-be Adele, took them to Italy for a summer holiday. On the advice of acquaintances, they stopped in Cesenatico, taking rooms in a pensione, a boarding house. The three women were tall, straight-backed, and exotically handsome, and like their friends back in Egypt, they wore broad-brimmed straw hats with blue veils that screened their faces from the strong summer light, and the inquisitive gaze of strangers. Into their curiously accented Italian, they dropped words from the other languages they spoke, Arabic and French. For most of my life I would continue to hear about the effect their appearance had produced. If three naked tribesmen from New Guinea had padded through town, they would certainly have been gawked at, but, once gone, forgotten. Whereas, when my widowed mother had turned ninety—she lived to a hundred and one—a man fifteen years her junior came forward to propose marriage, saying he had been dazzled by her sixty years earlier and had longed for her ever since.

  At the holiday’s end, my mother did not return to Egypt. The proprietress of the house where they were staying had introduced her to a personable man, a tailor, who was more worldly than the other townspeople; he had lived abroad and spoke several languages, including French. A brief courtship led to marriage, and Maria Leonelli and Giuseppe Polini set up house in Cesenatico, where, the following year, I was born. When I was two, my mother longed to rejoin her family in Egypt; my father was happy to please her, and so they moved to Alexandria, where Papi, as I called my father, opened a tailor and fabric shop.

  My broken arm was set in Alexandria’s Italian hospital, named after Benito Mussolini. They put it in a full cast that extended from my shoulder to my knuckles. The doctor told my mother to return for a checkup in a week. By the second day, how-ever,

  My mother and papi on my baptismal day

  I had so much pain that my mother took me back to the hospital. The doctor dismissed her, saying, “Of course her arm hurts, it’s broken. Go back home and be patient for a few more days.” Before the end of the week, my hand had become swollen and had turned blue. I cried constantly. Back at the hospital, the doctor took one look and called for the cast to be removed immediately. What they saw made my mother ill. There was a purulent sore at my elbow. Gangrene had set in. I was put to bed with my arm raised high, hitched to the rod of the mosquito net in the hope that the swelling would go down. But the sore grew larger and the doctor told my parents that to save my life they would have to cut off the arm, a recommendation that my mother refused to accept. She had heard that in Bologna there was a world-famous orthopedic surgeon, Professor Putti, who had performed miracles. She booked passage on the first boat for Italy, and soon we were in the professor’s study, which—aside from a small examining table in a corner and a sterile-looking white cabinet—looked as though it should have been in a mansion rather than in a hospital. The professor’s walnut desk was enormous; there were Turkish carpets on the floor and ample leather armchairs where patients and visitors sat. After he had examined me, Putti told my mother, “This needs a miracle. You pray and I’ll try to do the rest.”

  Putti operated several times. He saved my arm and succeeded even in straightening my hand. One last operation held the hope that

  At six years old, the year before I broke my arm

  I would be able to flex both the elbow and my wrist. Putti was not available just then, so the operation was performed by his assistant, who was later to become a renowned surgeon as well. It wasn’t on my arm, however, that he made his reputation. After that final operation, I could not open my arm out at more than a ninety-degree angle, and my hand curled inward, assuming the clawlike shape that has endured to this day.

  I was in and out of the Istituto Rizzoli—as the hospital was, and still is, known—for several years. When it became evident that my right hand would be useless for writing, I started learning how to write with my left. It was more difficult than you might imagine, and at first, I did better holding the pencil in my mouth. I had become the nurses’ mascot, with freedom to roam around and, as I grew older, to help with small tasks. What I had the most fun doing was pushing around some of the younger patients in wheelchairs, although, because I had just one working arm, I had been forbidden to do so. One day I had built up too much momentum and the wheelchair escaped the grasp of my good hand. The boy sitting on it had a leg in a cast stiffly stretched out. It collided with a wall, bringing the swiftly rolling chair to an abrupt stop. His screams brought the nurse
s running, and I began to wail so loudly and uncontrollably that it was not clear at first which of the two of us had been hurt.

  For a great many years after I had left the hospital for good, not a day passed that I was not conscious of my arm. When I was in grade school I cringed every day that I went to class, fearing that my classmates would make fun of me as children are cruelly wont to do. As a teenager, I did everything my friends did and more: I bicycled with them all day long, I swam out farther, took dives as high as any of theirs, ran as fast. From my youth and forever after in my life, I strove to spare others any embarrassment over my handicap by doing everything that was required of me as nonchalantly as possible. The embarrassment became mine, however, when I became old enough to be interested in boys. I adopted a style of dress that masked my arm. I had a collection of shawls that matched or contrasted prettily with my dresses, and I folded them over my arm. Had someone told me then that one day I would cook on television, exposing that arm to millions of people, I would have said “Ma sei matto!”—“You’re out of your mind!” I can go for long periods now without a thought for my lame arm, but I avoid looking at tapes of my television appearances. To see my twisted hand so publicly exposed still makes me cringe, as it did when I was a small schoolchild.

  Shortly after I had left Egypt with my mother, my father, who had been devastated by my pain and by the prospect of my losing an arm, closed his business in Alexandria and moved back to Cesenatico, where we could live close to the medical attention I needed. Right then is when my life took its first large, unscripted turn. I had left Egypt behind me, never to return. Instead of growing up in Africa, I grew up in Italy, where I would know war at first hand and where I would meet the man who became my husband, who led me into yet another unforeseen turn, leaving my country to come to America. Nor was that the last great turn my road would take. That one came at middle age, when, at forty-five, I suddenly found myself plunged into a career wholly unrelated to the one I had expected would be mine forever, propelled again into a world new to me, the world of food.