In the 1980s, an assistant at Glamour took her romantic life to the next level with the aid of two lemons and a chicken. At the suggestion of one of the magazine’s editors, who was more or less following a recipe she’d found in an Italian cookbook, the assistant poked the lemons full of holes, stuffed them into the bird and loaded it into a hot oven. She ate the chicken with her boyfriend. Not long after, he proposed. Intrigued, other assistants tried the lemon-and-chicken trick on their own boyfriends. And lo, it came to pass that the halls of Condé Nast were soon glittering with the sparkle of new diamond rings.
The author of the cookbook was Marcella Hazan. If she had never done anything else in her life, Ms. Hazan would still have a guaranteed place in history as the progenitor of Engagement Chicken, a phenomenon so durable it has probably outlasted some of the marriages it was said to inspire.
Although Italian American cuisine was popular when “The Classic Italian Cookbook” was published in 1973, Ms. Hazan drew back the curtain on a richer tradition.Credit…Courtesy of Obscured Pictures
Of course, Ms. Hazan did much more than that. She changed, thoroughly and irreversibly, the way Italian food is cooked, eaten and talked about in the United States. Although it has been 12 years since Ms. Hazan died, at age 89, and more than 30 since she put out a cookbook, nobody has yet overtaken her as the source Americans consult when they want to know how Italians get dinner on the table.
The new documentary “Marcella,” which opens at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and begins streaming on May 9, ticks through a few of the things we can thank her for: Balsamic vinegar. Sun-dried tomatoes. The idea that there is no single “Italian cuisine” but many local ones, each with its own constellation of flavors.
I saw the movie in April at a screening at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. For the occasion, the curators unwrapped 19 cooking tools the museum acquired from Ms. Hazan’s kitchen last year. On display outside the theater were her square-cornered lasagna pan, her vintage garganelli comb adapted from a weaver’s loom, a linen apron printed with grapevines in dye made from vinegar and rust, and her wooden risotto spoon, which flares at the bottom like a rowing scull. (“You must never stop stirring,” she once wrote.)
