Battling Spaghetti O Taste Buds

By CATHY BOOTH VENICE

A simmering sauce of endives, smoked pancetta and double cream fills the wood-beamed Venetian kitchen with its aroma. Bits of baby lamb are soaking up the flavor of juniper berries and white wine. Strings of homemade tonnarelli are drying nearby. Standing over her restaurant-size range, Marcella Hazan looks with mock astonishment at six blushing students. "You don't cook? What do you do? Starve?" It is her standard line when Americans complain that they don't have time to prepare real meals. "I despair," she says, waving a sauce-laden wooden spoon in the air.

But Hazan has good reason not to despair. In the past two decades, Hazan, 65, a former biology researcher, has done more to help refine America's Spaghetti O taste buds than any other Italian cook. Her first effort, in 1973, The Classic Italian Cookbook, is the definitive textbook on Italian cooking in America. Craig Claiborne once proclaimed her a "national treasure," and Julia Child calls her "my mentor in all things Italian." James Beard traveled to Italy for Hazan's cooking class. She preached the virtues of extra-virgin olive oil long before the Mediterranean diet became a health fad, raved about pearly risottos before they became trendy, and opened up spaghetti-and-meatball mentalities to light, delicate radicchio sauces. Her three cookbooks have sold 1 million copies. Her cooking workshops in Venice have drawn students from 28 countries, including ordinary housewives, professionals and celebrities like Danny Kaye, Burt Lancaster and Joel Grey.

But teaching Americans how to eat Italian sometimes seems like a Sisyphean task. "I can't ever get over how difficult it is to develop knowledge about Italian food," she says. "You go to a Chinese restaurant, and people are eating with chopsticks. But give them a spoon with pasta, and they don't know how to roll it on the fork!" That's not all. "Why is pasta overcooked in America? Why is it oversauced? I get depressed." She regrets having put a cold-pasta recipe in her More Classic Italian Cookbook, which apparently sparked America's pasta-salad boom in the '80s. "I'm so embarrassed," she rails, explaining that cold pasta is not a part of traditional Italian cuisine. Not that she doesn't favor many American foods: hot dogs, pastrami, the world's best steaks, corn on the cob. Says she: "Americans are so much more curious and open-minded about food than Italians."

Hazan, a native of Cesenatico who has doctorates in geology-paleontology and biology, confesses that she learned to cook only after marrying Italian- American Victor Hazan in 1955. It was a struggle at first. After working as a biological researcher at New York City's Guggenheim Foundation by day, she would rush home each night to fix dinner. American supermarkets shocked her: "The food was dead, wrapped in plastic coffins." She became a professional cook by accident in 1969, when friends in a Chinese cooking class asked for Italian recipes. (Her fame was sealed by Claiborne, who came to lunch one day and went home raving.)

Hazan is hard at work on two new volumes. "They're not cookbooks," she says. "I promised I wouldn't write another one. These are food books." One, an Italian food encyclopedia to be published late next year, will take readers on a culinary voyage through Italy's regions. The second project, which she hopes to complete by 1993, will introduce readers to Italy's best cooks -- not restaurant chefs, but top-level home cooks from around the country. "The idea is to tell about the relationship between people and food," she says. "In Italy food is something that matters. It gives joy."

That is what she tries to convey through the exclusive weeklong classes, costing $1,500 a student, that she teaches several times a year in her 16th century Venetian apartment. "I never give them a recipe to follow," she explains, sitting on her rust-colored sofa and nibbling on a homemade Zalett cookie. "You don't travel so far for just a recipe. My idea is to teach cooking." She shocks some students with her constant smoking but wins over others with her down-to-earth approach. When pupils complain that they can't manage some maneuver, for example, Hazan waves her right hand, deformed by a childhood accident, and says, "If I can do it with one hand, you can do it."

Her classes always begin with a visit to Venice's market, where fresh produce is delivered by gondola each morning. She pinches and pokes, expounds on zucchini and strawberries, and describes the delights of sardines, fresh anchovies and eels. Then it's back to Marcella's kitchen, with its Sicilian- granite counters, ceramic vases, stainless-steel and copper pots. The lessons are partly historical (pasta traditionally contains more egg as you travel north to richer areas of Italy) and partly practical (how to use a peeler: don't whittle, lightly saw from side to side). The centerpiece is her advice on pastas and, most important, what sauces go with which pasta. Contrary to popular belief in America, for example, Italians do not serve meat, or Bolognese, sauce with spaghetti. Reason: the smooth, thin spaghetti strands cannot catch and hold the sauce.

Unlike many nouvelle cuisine-style cooks, Hazan stresses taste over appearance. Almost on cue, a student asks her opinion of tomato-tinted pasta. "I've lost the war on this," says Marcella, who argues that it makes no sense to make pasta with tomatoes when you put a tomato sauce on top. "There's not much appreciation for flavor in America," she complains. "Cooking is an art, but you eat it too." Considering the number of books she has sold in the U.S. and the flocks of American students that converge on her kitchen each year, that message is certainly getting through.