In 'Ingredienti,' Victor Hazan channels late wife

For a long time after his wife died, Victor Hazan couldn't bear to read the notebooks that contained her final book. He would open a cover, look at her distinctive handwriting and find it too painful to go on.

Marcella Hazan, the famed cookbook writer, had broken her right arm as a child, and the bone was set so badly that she had to write with her left hand.

Her script resembled the writing of a small child. Facing it would mean facing her. The notebooks stayed closed.

"Handwriting is a mirror of a person's soul," Victor said. "It was a trauma for me."

And then, about a year after Marcella died in 2013, Victor had dinner with a friend who asked about the notebooks. Victor remembered the large espresso he would bring Marcella as she wrote. He remembered how she labored in her final working days to finish the book. It meant something to her. He turned the cover and began working on "Ingredienti," published July 12 by Scribner.

"I couldn't help bringing the book to life," said Victor, 88. "For her."

"Ingredienti" isn't so much a cookbook as it is a manual, with evocative descriptions, about choosing even commonplace ingredients with care. The section on sage describes "its soft, furry gray-green leaves." The pages on thyme note its fragrance, "suave, cool and penetrating."

It includes sweeping thoughts on how to use produce, but this isn't a collection of recipes with ingredients in one column and preparation instructions in the other. It is about buying the best possible meat, vegetables and herbs and using them without fuss.

The small white volume epitomizes Marcella's lifelong devotion to simplicity. Most of her recipes use only a handful of ingredients, a byproduct of growing up in Italy with limited means and cooking with as little as possible. She constantly stripped away the unnecessary to get to the essential, letting components speak for themselves.

In the book, she describes having a "relationship" with her ingredients.

"I thought about them, even when I wasn't shopping for them," she wrote.

"I thought about their fragrance, their color, their texture, their flavor. In the market, I loved to pick them up, which I would not have been permitted to do at any produce stall in Italy, inspect them, test them for firmness, admire their freshness, smell them."

While writing about food was Marcella's life, it was Victor's life too. Throughout her career, he deciphered her tight round letters and translated them into English, ensuring that her precise instructions could be followed by generations of cooks.

Victor says Marcella was the genius; he just helped. But they did everything together - talked about ingredients, discussed flavors and combinations. Much of their 60 years of marriage revolved around the kitchen.

Opening the notebooks was a struggle because a huge piece of his life disappeared when she died. But as he summoned the courage to work, their life together returned to him - a parting gift few in his place receive.

"Those notebooks were very much alive. The handwriting was alive, the descriptions were alive. For well over a year, Marcella was alive to me," he said.

"This was a great privilege."