(l-r) Chef Susan Lifrieri, Victor Hazan, Dorothy Cann Hamilton, and Marcella Hazan at the good-bye party

Last Spring, after 5 years of hooking hundreds of students on Italian cooking at The FCI, Marcella Hazan hung up her teaching apron. We asked Chef Susan Lifrieri, The FCI’s Director of Culinary Administration (and Marcella’s right-arm in The FCI’s kitchens), to share some of her thoughts about Marcella and what made her such a beloved staple of The FCI:

“Marcella has been a great mentor and a close friend. I’ll miss those few weeks a year we taught together. She opened my eyes to so much about being Italian. Having grown up in an Italian-American home, some of the culture got lost over the years. Now I have a much better understanding of Italian cuisine—and life in general. During the breaks, while [her husband] Victor gave his wine lectures, we talked about life, family, careers and, of course, food.

Marcella was real—she never put on a show. She wanted people to jump in and cook…to go home and make pasta or braised veal shanks and not be intimidated by a long recipe. To enjoy food. It was as much about eating like an Italian as it was about cooking Italian food. She always said there’s a certain way things taste when they taste authentic Italian.

Marcella really brought home cooking to The FCI. But never gave out the recipes before class. She didn't want anyone to be distracted by having to follow along. She’d say, "I'm teaching cooking—not recipes. Learn the techniques and how to use the ingredients.” And she made it do-able—not daunting. She’d teach the class to use bullion cubes instead of stock, and to make pasta dough in the food processor.

We learned a lot from Victor, too. Certain things we looked forward to when he came, like these little croutons with parmesan cheese and olive oil on top, which was a snack his grandmother or mother used to make him when he’d come home from school. It’s something we always did for the class to eat as a little snack when he was doing the wine lecture. It was a big treat for us all.

The students did a good part of the cooking in Marcella’s class. She taught more than just cooking, so students left with an understanding of the regional differences in Italian cooking. She’d talk about how Italy is set up topographically, using a map to show where the plains and mountains were. She used to say “how you don’t have any pasta in certain areas because there’s no wheat because there’s no plains, but you have rice and risotto and polenta. Or how you don’t have veal here because there are no pastures for the cows to graze on, but you have mountains so you have a lot of sheep, so you eat a lot of lamb in this area.”

I’ll miss Marcella’s way of communicating. How she called clams and mussels out of the shell ‘the little animals’. Or, one day, she was describing a certain type of olive and said it was ‘shrinkled’, which we assumed meant shriveled and wrinkled. Her body language and facial expressions would tell you everything you needed to know. The way she’d shrug and say ‘Eh’ if it was okay or fine, or she could just look at you and you knew you asked a silly question or puzzled her somehow.