Ingredienti: Marcella’s Guide to the Market

Ingredienti: Marcella’s Guide to the Market by Marcella Hazan and Victor Hazan is an essential guide to choosing, understanding, and using the ingredients at the heart of Italian cooking. Drawn from Marcella Hazan’s handwritten notebooks and completed by her husband and longtime collaborator Victor following her death in 2013, the book distills more than 60 years of experience shopping for and cooking with exceptional ingredients.

Rather than functioning as a traditional recipe collection, Ingredienti teaches readers how to shop like a knowledgeable cook, with concise guidance covering fresh produce, pantry staples, pasta, cheeses, cured meats, oils, and other fundamentals of the Italian kitchen. From artichokes and zucchini to anchovies, olive oil, Parmigiano Reggiano, prosciutto, and pasta, Hazan explains what qualities to look for, how ingredients should be stored and prepared, and when commonly held assumptions—such as fresh pasta always being preferable to dried—may not apply.

Practical, opinionated, and rooted in a lifetime of daily cooking, Ingredienti is especially valuable for Italian food enthusiasts, farmers’ market shoppers, ingredient-driven cooks, Marcella Hazan collectors, and anyone interested in developing the judgment to select better ingredients before ever turning on the stove.