Marcella Hazan (née Polini; April 15, 1924 – September 29, 2013) was an Italian cooking writer whose books were published in English.

[4] 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.

As she recounted in the introduction to her 1997 book Marcella Cucina: "... 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.

"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."

[1] 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[citation needed].

Although Hazan prefers the painstaking approach of both preparing food by hand rather than machine and cooking it on burners atop the stove rather than in the oven, her recipes can yet be simple, one of the most popular of them (by her own report) consisting simply of a chicken roasted with two lemons in its cavity.

In a review of Marcella's Italian Kitchen for salon.com, Craig Seligman criticized Hazan's "impatient and judgmental tone", but added: "... her recipes are so beautiful and so reliable and, most of the time, so brilliantly simple that what can you do but venerate her and love her in spite of herself?"

There Hazan found that she could no longer get some of the Italian ingredients she had taken for granted in New York, and she decided to write a cookbook for people in the same situation.