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Tartufi di mare: sea truffles, a kind of clam, usually eaten raw

Tinca: tench, a type of carp

Tonno: bluefin tuna

Triglia di scoglio (tria): red mullet, called rouget de roche in France; larger and more deeply colored than the triaglia di fango (rouget barbet), sometimes called barbon in Venetian

Uove di seppie (latticini): egg sacs of female cuttlefish

Vongole (bibarase): small clams, one and a half inches across, round, with a zigzag shell pattern reminiscent of Native American pottery; wonderfully tender and sweet; sometimes called vongole gialla

Vongole veraci (caparozzoli): clams, a bit larger and more oblong than vongole, with fine lines in both directions on the shell; the muscle has two little horns like the U.S. steamer clam; more highly prized than vongole, but this is a competition among minuscule culinary Olympians; known as palourde in France

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Our menu was fried sardines and anchovies, grilled cannocchie, spaghettini with vongole, monkfish with red wine and vegetables, green tomato salad, and lemon gelato. My first duty was to zest two firm lemons with a vegetable peeler. Before long I had zested my thumb and gouged out deep chunks of lemon peel with the bitter white pith attached, about my average performance at this task. Marcella showed me how the zest comes right off if you move the peeler back and forth in a sawing motion. (One of Marcella’s students told her this trick alone was worth the trip to Venice; I would agree if you throw in a fritto misto di pesce or two.)

Marcella’s teaching is not about kitchen tricks, but you pick up lots of them working alongside her. When sautéing onions or garlic, Marcella does not wait for the butter and oil to stop foaming before adding the vegetables, as we are usually taught to do, and she can think of no reason why anyone would; once the butter stops sizzling, it is so hot that the garlic instantly burns. After steaming mussels or clams, Marcella does not discard the ones that refuse to open. If this were an infallible test, how could anyone eat raw clams pried open with a knife? she asks. When she parboils zucchini, Marcella cuts off only the rounded end; if you remove the stem end too, the vegetable will take on too much water. When cooking a pasta sauce containing olive oil, Marcella adds a little uncooked oil at the end to freshen the taste of the dish; for sauces cooked with butter, she adds a little butter.

Marcella showed me how to butterfly fresh sardines with my thumb, as the fishmonger in the market did. (Here are the delectable details: You hold the sardine parallel to the table and snap off the head behind the gills with your other hand, pulling horizontally to extract the intestines. Then you slide your thumb between the backbone and one side of the flesh, scraping the end of your thumbnail against the bone all the way to the tail. You break off the bone at the tail and lift it carefully from the other side of the flesh. Finally, you open up the sardine and with a scissors snip off the fins and sharp edges all around and wash the fish under cold running water.) Then Marcella prepared the cannocchie for grilling by snipping away the meatless parts of the shell with kitchen shears and cutting the shell lengthwise along the top to aid in marinating and cooking. She turned the cannocchie in olive oil, bread crumbs, salt, and lots of pepper, and left them for an hour.

We gutted the anchovies together, and Marcella cooked the little clams for the spaghettini and the vegetables for the monkfish, a savory recipe from her third book. Our preparation took the better part of two hours.

Marcella began to fry the sardines, holding each one by the tail, dipping it in flour, and immediately frying four or five in a quarter inch of hot vegetable oil in a skillet. They curled instantly because of their freshness. Soon a rhythm was established: when one sardine was done and lifted out to be drained, salted, and eaten with our hands, another was floured and laid in, perfectly maintaining the temperature of the