"I put in one recipe as a joke, really, and look what happened."įor her newest book, "Marcella Cucina" - "the last book of my life," the 74-year-old candidly calls it - she received a record-setting $650,000 advance from HarperCollins, at the time the largest ever awarded a cookbook author. "And pasta salad," she adds, in a tone that says she's not entirely happy about this accomplishment. Ingredients we now take for granted, like sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic vinegar and extra-virgin olive oil, got their high-profile launching in her books. "I was so stupid and afraid then."īy the late 1970s, she was a best-selling cookbook author, a popular cooking teacher and the woman who could rightfully take a major slice of the credit for expanding Americans' notion of Italian cooking beyond pizza and spaghetti and meatballs. That big, heavy door - I thought I'd be caught inside," she remembers. Even the big refrigerator in her New York apartment - an appliance unknown in her tiny town - was a terrifying discovery. When she came to this country in 1955 from her small fishing village in Italy, Marcella Hazan was a lonely, fearful newlywed suffering from immense culture shock.
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