The smallness of the class, Giuliano’s insistence that we all get our hands dirty—wrestle with the monkfish’s slippery tail, slice the veal and pound it flat—allowed us to acquire a sense memory of how each dish should be prepared. Craning your neck over 20 other students in a look-but-don’t-touch school, or reading a recipe in a cookbook, doesn’t allow you to get a feel for making risotto with peppers and tomato, as we did in Giuliano’s class. He told us that risottos in most American restaurants are too dense and too rich.
“They prepare them ahead of time and reheat them. But when a risotto cools, its starch congeals. American restaurants often thin it out by adding cream.”
Giuliano stood at my side while I stirred the risotto until it achieved a thick-soup consistency. It was a little looser than risottos I’d made back home. “Taste the rice,” he said. “The individual grains should be firm but not chalky.”
While Giuliano tutored me in risotto, several students watched intently, waiting for their turn to stir. Others practiced peeling peppers with Giuliano’s special back-and-forth technique. In one corner of the kitchen, Lael played with Gabriella. In another corner, two students made fragrant cups of espresso from the amazing machine Giuliano bought especially for his classes. This, I thought, is how people used to learn to cook at home.
It was, of course, Giuliano’s famous mother, Marcella Hazan, who introduced America to Italian cuisine. Giuliano’s childhood was divided between the Upper East Side and Italy, and, every morning when he left for classes at the Rudolf Steiner School on 79th Street, Marcella sent him off with a little blue thermos of veal stew or something equally different from what his classmates ate. “But my lunch was never complicated,” he said, noting that “the most difficult thing to teach Americans isn’t how to make pasta. The most difficult thing to teach is simplicity. Americans are always worried they haven’t worked hard enough. They always ask me, ‘Shouldn’t we add a sauce to that?’ Home cooking has become such a special occasion that Americans can’t accept that simple is enough.”
The next courses at Villa Giona are on September 11 and October 2, and again in the spring and fall of 2006. The cost is $3,775-$4,175 per student ($2,775-$3,175 for nonparticipating companions), including six nights’ accommodation at the villa, breakfast, and five restaurant meals, but not airfare (941-923-1333; giulianohazan.com).
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