They are also designed to fit into an Italian menu of two balanced 'principal courses' followed by a salad and dessert. To that end, her recipes call for ingredients typical of the Italian home (with some concessions for ones not readily available outside Italy). Hazan's cookbooks concentrate on strictly traditional Italian cookery, without American or British influence. She wrote in Italian, and her books were translated by her husband. Her 1997 book Marcella Cucina won the James Beard Foundation book award for Best Mediterranean Cookbook and the Julia Child Award for Best International Cookbook the following year. A sequel, More Classic Italian Cooking, followed in 1978 the two were collected in one volume, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, in 1992. In 1980, having been published in a version adapted for a British readership by Anna Del Conte, it won an André Simon Award. She published her first book, The Classic Italian Cook Book, in 1973. In the early 1970s, Craig Claiborne, who was then the food editor of the New York Times, asked her to contribute recipes to the paper. Hazan began giving cooking lessons in her apartment and opened her own cooking school, the School of Classic Italian Cooking, in 1969. 'Eventually I learned that some of the methods I adopted were idiosyncratically my own,' she recalled, 'but for most of them I found corroboration in the practices of traditional Italian cooks.' She began by using cookbooks from Italy, but then realized that her clear memory of the flavors she had tasted at home allowed her to reproduce them herself. In the kitchen of my New York apartment there was no one.' My mother cooked, my father cooked, both my grandmothers cooked, even the farm girls who came in to clean could cook. In Italy, I would not have wasted time thinking about it. there I was, having to feed a young, hard-working husband who could deal cheerfully with most of life's ups and downs, but not with an indifferent meal. As she recounted in the introduction to her 1997 book Marcella Cucina: Hazan had never cooked before her marriage.

In 1955 she married Victor Hazan, an Italian-born, New York-raised Sephardic Jew who subsequently gained fame as a wine writer, and the couple moved to New York City a few months later. She began her career as a science teacher. She earned double undergraduate degrees in natural sciences and biology from the University of Ferrara and the University of Padua. Hazan was born in 1924 in the town of Cesenatico in Emilia-Romagna.

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