She and her husband, Victor, came to New York for the book party, and I finally had the chance to meet her. Several years later, she published her memoir, “Amarcord: Marcella Remembers,” and the cartoon appears on the last page of the book. A copy of the menu is framed on my studio wall. Not long afterward, I received a letter from Marcella herself, asking me for permission to use the cartoon on the menu of her eightieth-birthday celebration in Verona, Italy. I actually started having people over for dinner. My wife and I stopped going to restaurants or ordering takeout every night of the week. I started shopping at farmer’s markets and buying thirty-dollar bottles of balsamic vinegar. Soon I was whipping up asparagus risotto, pan-roasted quail with pancetta, spaghetti vongole, braised carrots with capers. It also helped that she has precise rules-only use the best olive oil, do not put salt in your aio e oio until you toss it at the end, never cook a tomato sauce in a covered pan, or it will end up being “bland, steamed, weakly formulaic.” I do well with rules. I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon.” All you do is put the tomatoes in the pan, add a medium-sized onion cut in half and the butter, and simmer for forty-five minutes. She begins the recipe by saying, “This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly tomato taste. For example, there is her classic tomato sauce with onion and butter, her gift to the beginner Italian cook and the first thing I made from the book.

This, and the fact that her recipes are consistently clear and straightforward, enabled me to overcome a lifetime of insecurity in the kitchen. But in her books her voice is always warm and encouraging. If you’ve ever seen Marcella on television, you know that she was a short, compact lady, a tough biscotti with a raspy voice who didn’t suffer fools gladly and had a surprising preference for Jack Daniels over a glass of wine. And I found mine in Marcella’s “The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.” All I had to do was follow her instructions to the letter, and success was pretty much guaranteed. Fresh ingredients were not in the picture having grown up in New York in the fifties, I had pretty much accepted my mother’s theory that any food item not wrapped in plastic was probably covered with germs.

The little cooking I did usually involved frying in Wesson oil and saucing with Paul Newman salad dressing.

There was one huge problem-I was a terrible cook. I returned from the trip determined that, for the rest of my life, I would eat only the way I had during those three weeks of culinary bliss. Twenty years ago, my wife and I went to Italy for our honeymoon and I discovered the wonders of Italian food. On Sunday, the great Italian chef and cookbook author Marcella Hazan died, at the age of eighty-nine.

Italian cooking marcella hazan