Food: Battling Spaghetti O Taste Buds

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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.)