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"The world of cooking has lost a giant today," daughter-in-law Lael Hazan tweeted Sunday afternoon. It was Hazan's 1973 cookbook, "The Classic Italian Cookbook," that led gourmands to draw comparisons between Hazan and another larger-than-life cookbook author: Julia Child. The two women were longtime friends; Child told People Magazine in 1998 that Hazan was "forbidding because she's rough ... that's her manner, and she's got a good heart." In 2000, Hazan was awarded the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Marcella and Victor Hazan retired to a condo on Longboat Key, Fla., in the late 1990s. There, the couple renovated the kitchen, which overlooked the languid blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Punctuated by calls and visits from fans and reporters
-- and occasionally making appearances in her son's cookbooks and at cooking
classes in the northeast -- Hazan returned to the thing she loved doing most: cooking for her husband. On Sunday, Victor Hazan wrote on Facebook: "Marcella, my incomparable companion, died this morning a few steps away from her bed. She was the truest and best, and so was her food." In 2004, Marcella Hazan wrote, "Simple doesn't mean easy. I can describe simple cooking thus: Cooking that is stripped all the way down to those procedures and those ingredients indispensable in enunciating the sincere flavor intentions of a dish." Hazan said the Roman dish spaghettini aio e oio -- thin spaghetti with garlic, oil, parsley, chili pepper and nothing else
-- embodies the simple-yet-complex nature of Italian food. Dishes should nourish and please, she added, not "dazzle guests with my originality or creativity." "I am never bored by a good old dish and I wouldn't shrink from making something that I first made fifty years ago and my mother, perhaps, fifty years before then," she wrote. "I don't cook
'concepts.' I use my head, but I cook from the heart, I cook for flavor."
[Associated
Press;
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