/ 4 October 2013

Bon voyage, Marcella Hazan

Bon Voyage, Marcella Hazan

The great cookery writer Marcella Hazan, who died this week at 89, taught me how to cook courgettes.

First, you have to soak them, and then give them a scrub under cold running water with a brush or rough cloth. This is important because it removes all the grit and small spiky hairs from the vegetable.

Describing vegetable shopping in her book Marcella Cucina (1997) at the stalls on the Grand Canal in Venice, she wrote it is “as difficult for me to pass a single stall by as it would be for a child to ignore any of the windows of a street lined with toy shops”.

Every batch of courgettes looks ­different: “Some slender, some plump, some a deep almost ­bottle green, some a green so pale it is nearly ­sallow.”

Venetians are exacting in their vegetable shopping. In her book, Hazan described how she might follow a “svelte, smartly dressed woman”, who had decided to make a salad for lunch. She was going from stall to stall, looking only at the radicchios, lettuces, rucola and onions.

The woman asked the vegetable seller how old the radicchio was, was the rucola wild, not cultivated? Was this really veramente – a sweet red Tropea onion, grown in the south?

“If it seems like a lot of trouble to take over a salad, it is food that she is going to put on the table, isn’t it, and what could be more important? There are no decisions she will make, either that morning or in her life, to which she is likely to give more deliberate thought.”

In Marcella Cucina, which she published when she was 73, she wrote that every time she brought pasta and courgettes to the table, her husband Victor reminded her of a cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker in which a woman complained to a painter (Monet), whose easel was set up in a front of a pond: “Claude, not another lily pond!”

She admitted she had a “courgette addiction, but if there is a sameness I never tire of it for within it I find, as Monet did with his lilies, endless variety”.

As a gift we are left two of Hazan’s simple but delicious courgette recipes: courgette sauce for pasta with tomato, parsley and chilli pepper; and courgette, tomato and basil sauce for pasta. The ingredients are almost identical, but in the latter the courgettes are slowly cooked in oil, garlic and parsley, a method that “sweetens and lengthens the flavour” leading to a sauce that is “distinctively full and mellow”.

Once the courgettes are deeply coloured, add tomatoes, salt, pepper and thyme and cook until the fat separates from the sauce. Toss the sauce with pasta, and serve immediately, with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano on the side.

Another recipe that I make again and again is her “Mara’s quick-pickled courgettes”. Her friend Mara Martin showed her the recipe, in which thin strips of courgette are fried with garlic, olive oil, red wine vinegar and salt over low heat for about half an hour. Turn the courgettes into a bowl and toss with mint leaves. It is deliciously savoury, and very good as a side dish with grilled fish and a salad.

Hazan always had a slightly uncompromising and authoritarian tone; as if she was suggesting that “this is how it is done, and this is how it was always done”.

For instance, she believed it is important to peel tomatoes before they are cooked, or as she said: “A tomato’s skin is a veil which obscures the wonders of its flesh.”

An unpeeled tomato will eventually lose its skin, and then you’ll have to pick it out. It will also have slightly tainted the dish with bitterness. So her advice was to peel your tomatoes with a sharp knife, or a peeler, even if they are to be used in a salad.

Hazan apparently ate at Tortellini d’Oro in Oaklands, Johannesburg, according to the restaurant’s matriarch Valeria Bollini.

Her daughter, Caterina Bollini, says Hazan is “the true inspiration of the food where we come from – Emilia-Romagna”.

“If I have a doubt [about a recipe] or my mother doesn’t remember, I’ll go back to her [Hazan’s] books, like the Bible.”

Bollini says Hazan’s text-heavy books may seem boring to those who are looking for photographs, “but if you actually know about cooking, you’ll use them. It is for the true purists of Italian regional cooking. They are the only Italian recipe books that I respect.”