Lisa McLean's Cooking with Marcella: A Forty-Year Love Letter to Italian Food
Lisa McLean
Cooking with Marcella A personal journey through all of Marcella Hazan's cookbooks, one recipe at a time, with storytelling, practical insights, and a deep love for authentic Italian cuisine. cookingwithmarcella.substack.com
Some cooking projects begin with ambition. Lisa McLean's began with memory. In the 1980s, in a small London kitchen, she opened one of Marcella Hazan's cookbooks for the first time and started to learn how to cook. More than forty years later, she's returned to those same books with a simple commitment: cook every recipe again, slowly, faithfully, exactly as Marcella wrote them.
That project became Cooking with Marcella, a weekly Substack where Lisa works through Hazan's complete body of work, from The Classic Italian Cookbook (1973) through to Ingredienti, Marcella's posthumous final book. Each post pairs a carefully prepared recipe with its regional roots, its place in Marcella's publishing history, and the personal kitchen stories that make the cooking feel alive.
Following the Books, Not the Trends
One of the most distinctive things about Cooking with Marcella is Lisa's commitment to tracing how Marcella's own thinking evolved across editions. She'll cook a recipe from The Classic Italian Cookbook and then compare it with the version that appeared in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking nearly twenty years later, noting what Marcella added, removed, or refined.
Her spinach soup post is a perfect example. She made Marcella's original five-minute Minestrina di Spinaci from the 1973 cookbook, then examined the later version, where the only change was two tablespoons of finely diced onion sautéed in butter before the spinach goes in. That kind of close reading reveals the quiet precision behind Marcella's work, and Lisa treats each small revision as a lesson worth understanding.
Across her posts, she's covered soups, antipasti, frittate, vegetables, sauces, and preserves, building a growing portrait of Marcella's complete repertoire. She references The Classic Italian Cookbook, More Classic Italian Cooking, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Marcella Cucina, Marcella's Italian Kitchen, and Ingredienti, giving readers a sense of just how wide and deep this body of work really is.
Two Recipes Worth Exploring
Minestrina di Spinaci: Marcella's Spinach Soup
Lisa McLean
Marcella's Spinach Soup A five-minute recipe that became an unexpected comfort, with reflections on how Marcella refined it across editions. cookingwithmarcella.substack.com
Lisa made this soup on a day when she wasn't feeling well, reaching for Marcella almost on instinct. A bunch of spinach, homemade broth, butter, Parmesan, and nutmeg. Five minutes later, she had exactly what she needed. The post captures something essential about the project: these aren't performance recipes. They're the kind of cooking that meets you where you are, and Marcella understood that better than almost anyone.
Baked Beetroots: Rape rosse al forno
Lisa McLean
Marcella Hazan's Baked Beetroots A single ingredient, cooked with patience, showing the quiet depth of Italian home cooking. cookingwithmarcella.substack.com
This post is pure Cooking with Marcella. Lisa bakes a beetroot from her local tropical market alongside a yam, simply because the oven was already hot. She then returns to Marcella's instructions, recalls her advice about choosing beets by their tops, and shares the memory of tiny Venetian beets Marcella loved at the Rialto market. The recipe itself is almost nothing: salt, olive oil, red wine vinegar. But the writing around it makes you understand why that's enough.
Why It Matters
In our last spotlight, we featured Frank Fariello's Memorie di Angelina, where Marcella Hazan serves as one voice in an ongoing conversation with Italy's great culinary writers. Lisa McLean's project is something different and equally valuable: a devoted, book-by-book study of Marcella's work alone, cooked faithfully and reflected on with the patience of someone who has lived with these recipes for decades.
Lisa calls the Substack "a love letter to the woman who made me believe a tomato sauce could change your day." For anyone who has ever felt that a single, well-made dish could shift the mood of an entire evening, Cooking with Marcella is proof that the simplest food, handled with respect, still has that power.
Explore Cooking with Marcella: cookingwithmarcella.substack.com
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