It would be easy to paint Giuliano Hazan's success as an appendix to his mother's career. Marcella Hazan penned the seminal Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which Jeffrey Steingarten predicted would "become the essential Italian cookbook for an entire generation." He was right.

But it wasn't — quite — his mother's name that allowed Giuliano to carve out a career as a cooking instructor and cookbook author. Although this Sarasota resident has won multiple awards for both his teaching and writing, instructed thousands of people in the art of cooking at home, and has become an authority on Italian cuisine in his own right (Giuliano Hazan's Thirty Minute Pasta hits shelves next week), he never planned on a life in the kitchen.

"I GREW UP eating well," Hazan explains, "but I didn't really start cooking until I went away to college." While an undergrad, Hazan planned to follow in his mother's footsteps in an entirely different fashion — as a biology major. Marcella has doctorates in natural sciences and biology, and worked as a researcher before she embarked on a cooking career. That mother-son similarity — in science, at least — was short-lived.

"I was interested in theater," says Hazan, "but I ended up majoring in French literature almost by default." He pursued a theater career for a couple of years in Providence, R.I., but barely got his feet wet before he stepped back into the family business and started teaching cooking classes of his own. It was familiar territory after spending some of his teenage years assisting at his mother's cooking school in Italy's culinary capital, Bologna.

This article appears in Aug 26 – Sep 1, 2009.