“I never saw a supermarket in Italy,” she told Linda Wertheimer in an interview with National Public Radio in 2010. “The chicken, they were arriving from the farmer and they were alive. And at the supermarket they were very dead. They were wrapped. It was like a coffin. Everything was not natural.”

Marcella Hazan (pronounced mar-CHELL-ah huh-ZAHN), born Marcella Polini on April 15, 1924, was also dealing with a physical handicap. When she was 7, she fell while running on a beach in Alexandria, Egypt, where her family was living. She broke her right arm and endured several operations. Her arm remained undersize and bent, but still able to hold a knife. Throughout her life, her arm would make her cringe when she saw herself on television.

In the couple’s tiny apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, Mrs. Hazan began to learn English by watching television and following the Brooklyn Dodgers. And she began to learn to cook, relying on her memory and Mr. Hazan’s copy of a cookbook by Ada Boni.

“Cooking came to me as though it had been there all along, waiting to be expressed; it came as words come to a child when it is time for her to speak,” she wrote in her 2008 memoir, “Amarcord: Marcella Remembers.” The couple eventually moved to Manhattan, and had a son, Giuliano Hazan, who would go on to become a noted cooking teacher himself.

They returned to Italy for a time, where Mr. Hazan pursued a career in advertising and Mrs. Hazan became enamored of the food in Milan and Rome, which was much different from the regional cooking she had grown up with in the village of Cesenatico in Emilia-Romagna, about 120 miles south of Venice.

By the 1970s, the family was back in New York. Mr. Hazan would come home to share lunch every day — a tradition the couple continued until her death.

On Saturday, the day before she died, they shared a meal he made of trofie, the twisted Ligurian pasta, sauced with some pesto made with basil from the terrace garden.