HAZAN

changed. When I started teaching there was already more.

What did you feel about your mother’s teachings and what is it instead, have you innovated or tried to change?

I think it is impossible not to change, everyone has their own personality, I probably added certain modern techniques: how to prepare the ingredients, how to cut and then even a little bit of flavors maybe. I think the most important thing I learned is the flavor, what is the right flavor, trying to understand how to achieve it, how to produce this flavor. It was a difficult thing to explain, you have to have what my mom called, (in English then) “test memory” which many people, even good cooks who try to reproduce Italian dishes do not have. This test memory, in fact, you cannot know it if you did not grow up in that environment.

Which character trait of your mother influenced you the most?

My mom was a very genuine woman, she always said what she thought and was always very confident in her beliefs about herself, she didn’t change her mind easily. Several times they tried to make her sauces, her products to sell but for her it was not fair, well, she was not one of who accepted compromises and this was one of the things I always admired in her.

In the end then, (I don’t know what mom would think) I created a sauce based on her recipe; I only made a small modification of her tomato sauce, the one with tomato, onion, butter and salt, using the same ingredients; the only difference is that she cooked the whole onion in the sauce and eventually removed it. The onion is very tender, delicious sweet and we ate it but part. I, on the other hand, wanted to try to pass it with sauce together, because I have always liked the onion; it was also the only way to truly “civilize” this sauce because it would not have been logistically possible to take out the onion for production.

But there are an infinite number of tomato sauces in Italy, do you agree with me?

Yes, we can then say of a sauce that does not exist: the marinara sauce!

Your father (Victor Hazan) on the other hand was a wine expert. Now in America, we mainly talk about California wines, what do you think and what can we still teach the “Californians”?

Well .. you know, in Italy and also in France there is still the idea of the tradition that wine comes from the earth, that is, the grape that is indigenous to that area. Here it does not exist, But apart from that, the level is almost reached. You just need to understand that, a base wine of Nebbiolo in Piedmont, you do not go to plant it in Tuscany, it is not the same thing!