A few films stand out to food lovers at this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival, including one simply titled Marcella. It’s named after Marcella Hazan, the late Italian-born cookbook author. She’s a seven-time James Beard Award winner and is best known for her simple and traditional recipes.
Her recipes were translated into English by Victor, her husband of nearly six decades. The last showing of the film in the Milwaukee Film Festival is Thursday, May 1, but it's being released in cinemas nationwide and will be available to stream on major platforms like Amazon and Apple starting Friday, May 9.
Peter Miller directed and produced the film about Hazan, who was an entirely self-taught chef who shaped the way countless people thought about cooking and flavor.
“This is a film about food, but it's really the story of an amazing person's journey through life. Marcella was a scientist. She had two Ph.D.s in science. She never cooked until she got married and went with her Italian expat husband back to the United States. And he asked her to put a meal on the table every day.”
Miller recounts that Hazan told her husband, Victor, that she’d “never boiled water unless it was in the beaker, in the laboratory.” He says, “Overqualified as she was, she got an Italian cookbook and reverse-engineered the flavors that she remembered from her youth in Italy.”
“Soon, she was giving Italian cooking lessons, and she was such a brilliant mind that she was able to translate what she remembered from Italian cooking to Americans who wanted to learn how to cook this magnificent cuisine,” says Miller. The documentary also details the central role that Victor, Hazan's husband, played in her life and cuisine.
It was very difficult for Hazan to do things with her right hand. She injured it when she was a child, and it turned into a lifelong disability. Miller says this was something that really did shape her. She used to tell students in her cooking class that if she could make the dish nearly one-handed, then they certainly could make it.
“In some sense, you could say that maybe that disability was part of how she got her willfulness,” says Miller. “And you know, this is a person who was extremely strong-minded and strong-willed and would tell you what she was thinking and nothing would stop her.”
But Miller says Hazan, who was born in 1924 and died in 2013, grew up in a different era. “And oftentimes [if she appeared on TV], she's got her hand out of the frame, you know, because [the injury] was something that she did not feel good about. She didn't love watching herself on television with her injured right hand. Thank goodness times have changed, and we approach disability in a different way.”
Miller says, often, Hazan’s recipes have just three or four ingredients. “I mean, her famous sauce [is the one] with tomato and onion and a half a stick of butter and salt. That's all there is, but if you follow her instructions, it's the most magical sauce you could ever make.”
He notes that, for Hazan, “the most important ingredient in the kitchen is common sense.”
_
