Introduction

An Italian speaker glancing at the title of this book would see the second word, Cucina, as a verb, third person singular, thus reading the title as Marcella Cooks. That is precisely what this new work of mine is about: What I cook and how I cook. And a little bit about why I cook.

Although at first as a wife, and then as a teacher and writer, I have devoted a large part of my life to cooking, I never deliberately made that choice. It was not I who chose cooking; it happened the other way around. I was trained as a biologist, and until after I married, I had never come close enough to a kitchen stove to turn on the gas. I came to America a few months after our wedding and there I was, having to feed a young, hardworking husband who could deal cheerfully with most of life’s ups and downs, but not with an indifferent meal. At home, in Italy, I would not have wasted time thinking about it. My mother cooked, my father cooked, both my grandmothers cooked, even the farm girls who came in to clean could cook. In the kitchen of my New York apartment there was no one. It could not have been a kitchen of unusual size, but stamped in my recollection is the impression of a cavernous space that I entered each day fearing, or perhaps even hoping, that it would swallow me up and I would not be heard from again.