The Liberation of a Home Cook : “Marcella Cucina”<i> by Marcella Hazan (HarperCollins $35; 471 pp.)</i>

One morning about 20 years ago, we all awoke to read that Italian food was being discovered by those in the discovery business. Not, we have to remember, without a degree of general incredulity, noted by Marcella Hazan in her introduction to the 1979 “More Classic Italian Cooking”:

“In a recent magazine article I read that the status of Italian cooking is not yet so firmly established that Americans feel comfortable in serving it to important guests.”

But even then, canny culinary fashion brokers had begun shuffling French-dominated portfolios with an eye to the potential of Italy. Something had been in the air at least since 1976, when the illustrious firm of Knopf rescued Hazan’s first work, “The Classic Italian Cook Book,” from the collapse of another publisher.

Two decades further into this America Discovers Columbus phase, we have much to celebrate but also much to shake our heads over. Wonderful ingredients and excellent Italian cookbooks are everywhere.

Yet I can’t help thinking it’s a great pity that the enormous, still-growing Italian vogue coincided, alas, with an increasing tendency on the part of “serious” foodies to see themselves as upscale consumers rather than from-scratch home cooks.

Today, the status-minded probably would earn moral credit with really important guests by taking them to the priciest Italian restaurant in town. On lesser occasions, they might show that they do, too, know their onions by picking up something suitably Italian from food boutiques and gourmet takeout shops.

Hazan, though unavoidably bound up with the events that have brought us haughty Florentine dining spots and $100 thimblefuls of vinegar, has always stood a little apart from the post-”discovery” cult of visiting Italy via expensive purchases. Hers has been an odd cookbook career--odd, that is, when you compare what she’s saying with the vehicles through which it’s hitherto been said.

In various distinguished works, she has conscientiously led American readers through the basic materials and logical underpinnings of Italian cooking. Her recipes are meticulously designed to illuminate the sober virtues of well-chosen ingredients and properly directed culinary efforts.

But the true reward for those who apply themselves to the professorial and painstaking instruction of the Hazan books isn’t that the food is good (though it is). It’s that, after a certain amount of going through the motions, they stumble on an indefinable truth implicit in all honest Italian cooking and amounting almost to an emancipating anti-cookbook message: something like, “Just let the ingredients tell you what to do with them,” or, “Why, look how it all falls into place by itself.”

The latest and, we’re told, last Hazan cookbook is remarkably unlike its predecessors. “Marcella Cucina” flies straight to that same liberating lesson with an air not professorial but sprightly, and at a glance it feels like the work of some fresh-spirited individualist about a third the age of the seventysomething author.

The new book could profitably be used by someone who owns all or none of the other four. Its agenda is one of a kind. Though it has such expectable cookbook furnishings as 180-odd conscientiously tested recipes arranged in orthodox appetizer-to-dessert fashion, they turn out to have been chosen with no very rigid program in mind. This is all to the good.

What “Marcella Cucina” includes is simply what Hazan feels moved to include. The work is plainly meant as a free-form repository of pronouncements, musings and autobiographical jottings with “Tribute to Living Legend” written all over it. Given such leeway, some or many of the cookbook writers whom we’re pleased to call living legends would have fallen on their faces. Hazan simply manages to be purposeful in a more spontaneous way than before.

There is no attempt to include all the often-categorized “basic” or “classic” Italian dishes, from focaccia to pesto variations. But the areas of risotto, polenta and homemade egg pasta are covered with such thoroughgoing intelligence that a complete beginner could make a decent show as an Italian home cook on the strength of this material alone.

Similarly, Hazan doesn’t try to conduct us through a systematic A-to-Z survey of all the crucial ingredients, but the thoughts she delivers on a strategic trio of olive oil, Parmesan cheese and its relatives, and salt are just about worth the price of admission.

Exceptional glimpses of the mind behind the other books emerge from this one. Many such insights come from the recipes themselves, which are weighted toward the subtly unusual, even unplanned. Some are out-of-the-way dishes that Hazan has run into at meals throughout Italy over the last half century (baked artichokes and shrimp topped with mozzarella, zucchini “pickled” by quick cooking in vinegar and oil, a pasta sauce of goat cheese and sweet peppers). But many are tuneful impromptus that just happened when she had to change menu plans at a moment’s notice or chanced on some very fresh this and some irresistible that at the market: “Finding myself at John Haessler’s splendid seafood shop . . . I decided to use the principles of vitello tonnato to glorify, not a piece of veal, but tuna itself.”

There’s a kindred impulsiveness in the way the author lets you in on opinions, attitudes or even the process of testing a dish: “Al dente beans are an abomination perpetrated by people who measure taste solely by the criterion of crunch”; “I don’t think of myself as a fancy cook”; “This recipe [a rice gelato] and I have had several contentious encounters, but I refused to give up on it.”

But what “Marcella Cucina” most delightfully (though very discreetly) lets you in on is the story of a marriage that the author clearly views as her real career and the clue to anything she may have accomplished as a cookbook writer.

For some 42 years, her inspiration in the kitchen has been the husband who, when she, as a lonely bride hesitantly teaching herself to cook in a foreign country, managed to produce something especially good for dinner, would rush out of his chair and throw his arms around her.

Things don’t sound all that different now. “ ‘Muoio di fame--I am starved,’ declared my dear Victor one morning, standing in the kitchen door. ‘What are we having for lunch?’ ” And when he pronounced himself in the mood for pasta, “I looked around to see what I had: There was pancetta in the refrigerator, sage in a window box and rosemary growing on the terrace.”

In a way, all the cookbooks have been outgrowths of the eager, affectionate conversations about the day’s meals that the two of them had in their first New York apartment over “an old bridge table whose top sagged precipitously in the middle.”

Today, Victor Hazan is still his wife’s sounding board on the rightness of a dish, but she also shows him collecting likely candidates for recipes or, on occasion, trying out an idea himself in the kitchen. He is also the translator-cum-editorial publisher of her Italian recipe-notebooks (see the sample page on the endpapers of “Marcella Cucina”) and probably is as responsible as she for a prose style quite unrelated to ordinary recipe jargon: “If during the cooking the pan juices should prove insufficient to keep the artichokes from sticking, add 2 tablespoons of water whenever necessary.”

Of course, the Hazans’ civilized writing doesn’t in itself mean that the recipes are good. These, however, are so good that once I’d started cooking from them, I didn’t want to stop. Anyone who loves fresh cranberry beans should try Assunta’s Beans, slowly stewed in olive oil and a little water, and delicately seasoned with sage. The boiled beef yields both a lively, clear-flavored broth and tender but character-filled meat that makes a good pairing with a vivid, offbeat apple-basil relish.

I had glorious results with a sausage and bean risotto, croquette-like little meatballs with mashed potato, a lovely dish of scallops and tomatoes gently accented with rosemary and garlic, and the mother of all vegetable soups (a Friuli dish made with both pureed and whole vegetables).

That the recipes “worked” is gratifying, but the real point is how they worked. As with earlier Hazan recipes, the key is that lucid, matter-of-fact Italian quality that I always want to call “effortless,” meaning not that the cook did no work but that the food seems to have arranged itself in the cooking without artificial interference.

Hazan herself mentions this issue at several points, writing of a sauce that “really consists just of assembling the ingredients and letting them go to work” or describing how, during her “bride-in-the-kitchen days, the flavors themselves pointed to the common-sense ways of preparing and cooking ingredients” that she was trying to reconstruct from memories of Italy.

The great pleasure of “Marcella Cucina” is that the book as a whole has just this feeling of having materialized as if it were a natural event. “As I look at the preceding pages, I am prompted to say that this book has written itself,” observes Hazan, uncannily echoing that “the-story-told-itself” quality evident in the individual recipes.

What she means isn’t hard to see. Astute culinary value judgments, crisp “service” information and loving memories mingle in one unforced, unanalyzable flow of charm.

At first I thought there must be some mistake about this being her final book. But on reflection, the easy spontaneity I took for a sign of evergreen vigor sounds more like the release of tensions proper to one saying a graceful goodbye.

Mendelson is the author of “Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of Women Who Gave America the Joy of Cooking (Henry Holt & Co., 1996).