One of the highlights of my culinary life has been assisting Marcella Hazan at a cooking demonstration she did at Greystone — The Culinary Institute of America campus in St. Helena, California. It was 1997, and I was there for a food writing seminar. The auditorium was packed with chefs, writers from all the major magazines and newspapers, and the entire staff of the CIA, as she and one of the CIA’s instructors each prepared the same recipe from her newest cookbook at the time: Marcella Cucina.

When the two baked gnocchi dishes emerged from the ovens on stage, amazingly, Hazan’s was fluffy, piquant and picturesque, while the professor’s was flat, bland and boring….even though Hazan’s recipe had been followed to the letter, and it had been prepared step for step, side by side with the Italian food maven, by a professional chef at the CIA.

I’ve always liked to believe that it was my spoon procuring skills, wiping of surfaces, and fetching of ingredients that made the difference, but the reality is there’s a certain alchemy to cooking that some people can harness and most can’t.

At 84, as she’s nibbling on the petit fours of her life, Hazan and husband Victor have published a memoir: Amarcord: Marcella Remembers (Gotham Books, October 2008). Always known as a stern taskmaster, this article, the New York Times reports that she’s as feisty as ever.

In my brief duty as her assistant, I noticed she was treated as an eminence terrible by the writers and chefs in attendance. Truth be told, I think I got the gig because everyone else was in fear of how she would belittle them. She obviously didn’t suffer fools gladly, but was pleasant in a grandmotherly sort of way, and Victor was Italian grace and charm personified. Of course, if you changed how all America thinks about (and cooks) Italian food, you’d probably be a bit of a handful yourself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/dining/10hazan.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th