A Comforting Portrait of an Italian Culinary Queen

If you can read, you can cook, and anyone who doubts that old maxim has Marcella Hazan as a compelling example to explain away. The woman regarded around the world (but most ardently in her adopted home of America) as the foremost authority on Italian cooking was no such thing when she moved to New York City as a newlywed science graduate at the age of 31 — indeed, prior to her marriage, Hazan had never cooked at all. Suddenly thrust into the unfamiliar role of housewife, and homesick for the flavors of her native Italy, she patiently taught herself with the aid of one dusty but comprehensive volume by venerable chef Ada Boni. The rest is history, as the amateur grew into the expert to whom others would eventually turn to educate themselves. “Marcella,” Peter Miller‘s formulaic but enjoyable documentary, ultimately presents classic Italian cuisine as a mistress to whom even doyennes like Hazan are beholden.

Still, if the richest traditions of Italian cooking are more commonly passed down than created or claimed, Hazan comes closer to most practitioners to ownership of her work. Take the deceptively simple tomato sauce to which her name is universally welded: tomatoes, butter, salt and a single onion, cooked to a transcendent point that tastes at once like the platonic ideal of a pasta sauce and like none you’ve had before. Hazan may not have invented it, but she perfected it and communicated it to the world at large: To millions of home cooks, her recipes are lovably and inextricably hers in the way that mom’s spaghetti is mom’s. If that description risks selling short Hazan’s vast technical knowhow and professorial research, “Marcella” does not: The film is heavily populated with talking heads from the gastronomy A-list who are duly in thrall to her knowledge and influence.

“Marcella” is most interesting, however, when it peels away the layers of achievement and adulation to show us the brisk, unpretentious woman…