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Q and A

Victor Hazan on his final collaboration wife, an Italian cooking legend

Marcella and Victor Hazan, authors of “Ingredienti: Marcella’s Guide to the Market.” Barbara Banks

For 60 years, Marcella and Victor Hazan’s ongoing conversation about food resulted in many beloved cookbooks, including “The Classic Italian Cookbook.” Marcella developed the recipes and wrote in her native Italian. Victor, who was trained and worked as a writer, would observe, transcribe in the kitchen, and channel her voice to create the English texts. Three years after Marcella’s death, Victor has completed the couple’s final work together: “Ingredienti: Marcella’s Guide to the Market.”

Based on the handwritten manuscript Marcella left behind, the book is a guide to choosing and cooking with the best ingredients, a passion that drove her approach to food. “A lot of Marcella’s voice is in it. Since this is the very last thing she worked on in her life, there’s something haunting about it. She even sounds very youthful and energetic in it,” Victor says.

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Q. Why did Marcella choose this for her final book?

A. To Marcella this was really the most important thing she could write about. Even though her recipes were very exact, she never gave technique a great deal of importance. She always said technique comes down to common sense. What’s really important is understanding the character of your ingredients.

Q. Her recipes were always very ingredient focused.

A. To her, the food should taste of what is in it, not of a person who has made it. If you’ve ever gone through Marcella’s cookbook carefully, you will see how her recipes come down to the irreducible minimum that is necessary to put the dish on the table. One of the things she was famous for was her tomato sauce that has only three ingredients — tomato, butter, and onion. She doesn’t do anything to any of them but to throw them in the pot and cook them slowly for about an hour.

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Q. Is there any one ingredient that’s most emblematic of Marcella?

A. Practically all of them were important to her. Swiss chard or savoy cabbage, those are ingredients she loved to work with. Savoy cabbage she used so much in her last cookbook that her editor at one point looked at the manuscript and said, “For heaven’s sake, Marcella, has Publix been having a sale on savoy cabbage? This must be the fifth or sixth recipe of it.” She liked the flexibility. But in each case what mattered was bringing out the character of the ingredient, what it is that particular ingredient can do for you rather than covering it up with excessive technique or herbs.

Q. How did you work together to translate Marcella’s writing into English?

A. It’s actually more than translating. Marcella could speak English and of course she taught in English, but she never wrote in English. With the cookbooks, she would write the very brief introduction to the recipe. She would pass it on to me. I would organize the recipe and write a headnote so it would reflect the steps she herself followed in the kitchen. Then I would present it to her. She would read it and not every time did she approve it. Then we would have to go back and do it over again. It was an ongoing conversation, which is one way you could describe our life together. It was an ongoing conversation. The main subject of it was food.

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Q. How was writing this book different?

A. This last book there was less of that exchange because time ran out. She wrote most of it, but then she went. And I had a good deal of difficulty getting into it. It was too intimate. It was too much a recollection of her personality, the sound of her voice, and the way she looked.

Q. It must have been very difficult.

A. For the first year or so, even though the publisher would keep asking about it, I would say I can’t do it yet. It was very difficult. But on the other hand I had the benefit of nearly 60 years of life together. I would read the thing that she wrote aloud and I would read my interpretation of them aloud. Once I was into it, it restored Marcella to me for that period.

Q. How would you like your collaboration to be remembered?

A. Marcella had the ability to be as direct, simple as possible. Thinking about cooking, not just cooking, but thinking about it, was something that Marcella did. Writing, in the end, was my one personal achievement. It’s what I was trained to do. We put the two things together and we emerged with a single voice that has a very special timbre to it. It wasn’t my contribution alone. It wasn’t Marcella alone. It worked together in the way parents produce a child. So all of this put together — her teaching, her writing, my writing — none of it could be separate. It was all part of a single creation.

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Interview was condensed and edited. Michael Floreak can be reached at michaelfloreak@gmail.com