"Gastronomy of Italy" continues to grace the shelves of home cooks, professional chefs and armchair travellers. A constant seller, the original version of this classic text won the prestigous Duchessa Maria Luigia di Parma prize. This new edition has been totally updated, reorganised and expanded taking into account the culinary changes of the last decade, the move towards healthier eating and today's demand for a fully comprehensive reference for the kitchen. It includes a detailed introduction to the origins and history of Italian cuisine, a cook's tour of the 16 regions of Italy and their specialities, a 200-recipe section, a full A-Z reference guide to Italian Food, an explanation of terms and techniques as well as a survey of Italian wines. Superbly illustrated with historical paintings, frescoes, prints and special food photography, Anna Del Conte's "Gastronomy of Italy" is an essential companion, which will remain a source of reference for life.
Winner of the Guild of Food Writers Award in 1996 and the Accademia Italiana della Cucina's Orio Vergani prize, The Classic Food of Northern Italy has become a well-thumbed bible on the shelf of every discerning cook. In this revised and updated edition, Anna Del Conte celebrates the cooking of northern Italy - both rustic and sophisticated, ancient and modern. As Delia writes in her Foreword "Anna is a purist. She will not countenance anything that isn't in the strictest sense authentic." In this collection of over 150 recipes Anna has chosen the very best ideas sourced from acclaimed restaurants, elegant home kitchens, rural inns and country farmsteads. Many of the traditional dishes may not be familiar, such as flatbread made with chickpea flour, Ligurian Ciuppin or macaroni pie in a sweet pastry case, but she also presents definitive versions of popular dishes such as Pesto, Ragu and Ossobuco. Her recipes are thoroughly researched and tested; she provides the home cook with a trusted and essential companion. Her numerous practical tips are the result of a lifetime's experience.
Spaghetti with meatballs, fettuccine alfredo, margherita pizzas, ricotta and parmesan cheeses—we have Italy to thank for some of our favorite comfort foods. Home to a dazzling array of wines, cheese, breads, vegetables, and salamis, Italy has become a mecca for foodies who flock to its pizzerias, gelateries, and family-style and Michelin-starred restaurants. Taking readers across the country’s regions and beyond in the first book in Reaktion’s new Foods and Nations series, Al Dente explores our obsession with Italian food and how the country’s cuisine became what it is today. Fabio Parasecoli discovers that for centuries, southern Mediterranean countries such as Italy fought against food scarcity, wars, invasions, and an unfavorable agricultural environment. Lacking in meat and dairy, Italy developed foodways that depended on grains, legumes, and vegetables until a stronger economy in the late 1950s allowed the majority of Italians to afford a more diverse diet. Parasecoli elucidates how the last half century has seen new packaging, conservation techniques, industrial mass production, and more sophisticated systems of transportation and distribution, bringing about profound changes in how the country’s population thought about food. He also reveals that much of Italy’s culinary reputation hinged on the world’s discovery of it as a healthy eating model, which has led to the prevalence of high-end Italian restaurants in major cities around the globe. Including historical recipes for delicious Italian dishes to enjoy alongside a glass of crisp Chianti, Al Dente is a fascinating survey of this country’s cuisine that sheds new light on why we should always leave the gun and take the cannoli.
Italy, the country with a hundred cities and a thousand bell towers, is also the country with a hundred cuisines and a thousand recipes. Its great variety of culinary practices reflects a history long dominated by regionalism and political division, and has led to the common conception of Italian food as a mosaic of regional customs rather than a single tradition. Nonetheless, this magnificent new book demonstrates the development of a distinctive, unified culinary tradition throughout the Italian peninsula. Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari uncover a network of culinary customs, food lore, and cooking practices, dating back as far as the Middle Ages, that are identifiably Italian: o Italians used forks 300 years before other Europeans, possibly because they were needed to handle pasta, which is slippery and dangerously hot. o Italians invented the practice of chilling drinks and may have invented ice cream. o Italian culinary practice influenced the rest of Europe to place more emphasis on vegetables and less on meat. o Salad was a distinctive aspect of the Italian meal as early as the sixteenth century. The authors focus on culinary developments in the late medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras, aided by a wealth of cookbooks produced throughout the early modern period. They show how Italy's culinary identities emerged over the course of the centuries through an exchange of information and techniques among geographical regions and social classes. Though temporally, spatially, and socially diverse, these cuisines refer to a common experience that can be described as Italian. Thematically organized around key issues in culinary history and beautifully illustrated, Italian Cuisine is a rich history of the ingredients, dishes, techniques, and social customs behind the Italian food we know and love today.
Italians love to talk about food. The aroma of a simmering ragú, the bouquet of a local wine, the remembrance of a past meal: Italians discuss these details as naturally as we talk about politics or sports, and often with the same flared tempers. In Why Italians Love to Talk About Food, Elena Kostioukovitch explores the phenomenon that first struck her as a newcomer to Italy: the Italian "culinary code," or way of talking about food. Along the way, she captures the fierce local pride that gives Italian cuisine its remarkable diversity. To come to know Italian food is to discover the differences of taste, language, and attitude that separate a Sicilian from a Piedmontese or a Venetian from a Sardinian. Try tasting Piedmontese bagna cauda, then a Lombard cassoela, then lamb ala Romana: each is part of a unique culinary tradition. In this learned, charming, and entertaining narrative, Kostioukovitch takes us on a journey through one of the world's richest and most adored food cultures. Organized according to region and colorfully designed with illustrations, maps, menus, and glossaries, Why Italians Love to Talk About Food will allow any reader to become as versed in the ways of Italian cooking as the most seasoned of chefs. Food lovers, history buffs, and gourmands alike will savor this exceptional celebration of Italy's culinary gifts.
Recipes from the kitchens and restaurants of Italy's new culinary masters, who combine an innate sixth sense for quintessentially Italian flavor with a contemporary approach, defining an exciting new gastronomy. Everybody loves Italian food. It is among the most talked about, written about, and globally popular. But as travelers have sought out culinary experiences in off-the-beaten-path destinations elsewhere in the world, in Italy even consummate foodies eat the same postcard versions of traditional dishes, occasionally making forays into a handful of fine-dining favorites. Yet by far the country's most interesting cuisine is to be found outside of well-trodden establishments, and it's as varied and full of personality as it is delicious. This generation of chefs has come a long way from their nonna's kitchen: they approach tradition with a respectful yet emancipated perspective; they rethink the formats of the Italian restaurant; they are rediscovering foraging and farming; they introduce serious cocktail programs. This book covers thirty-two chefs and restaurateurs who are reinterpreting the "greatest hits" of Italian dining: from trattorias to fine dining, from aperitivo to pizzerias. Laura Lazzaroni takes her readers on a visual north-to-south tour of this new cucina italiana, stopping at restaurants, inns, farms, and pop-ups all across the country, showing in stories and recipes the multitude of approaches, influences, and ingredients that compose this movement, which is paving the way for the country's gastronomic rebirth.
Buon appetito! Everyone loves Italian food. But how did the Italians come to eat so well? The answer lies amid the vibrant beauty of Italy's historic cities. For a thousand years, they have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money, and power. Italian food is city food. From the bustle of medieval Milan's marketplace to the banqueting halls of Renaissance Ferrara; from street stalls in the putrid alleyways of nineteenth-century Naples to the noisy trattorie of postwar Rome: in rich slices of urban life, historian and master storyteller John Dickie shows how taste, creativity, and civic pride blended with princely arrogance, political violence, and dark intrigue to create the world's favorite cuisine. Delizia! is much more than a history of Italian food. It is a history of Italy told through the flavors and character of its cities. A dynamic chronicle that is full of surprises, Delizia! draws back the curtain on much that was unknown about Italian food and exposes the long-held canards. It interprets the ancient Arabic map that tells of pasta's true origins, and shows that Marco Polo did not introduce spaghetti to the Italians, as is often thought, but did have a big influence on making pasta a part of the American diet. It seeks out the medieval recipes that reveal Italy's long love affair with exotic spices, and introduces the great Renaissance cookery writer who plotted to murder the Pope even as he detailed the aphrodisiac qualities of his ingredients. It moves from the opulent theater of a Renaissance wedding banquet, with its gargantuan ten-course menu comprising hundreds of separate dishes, to the thin soups and bland polentas that would eventually force millions to emigrate to the New World. It shows how early pizzas were disgusting and why Mussolini championed risotto. Most important, it explains the origins and growth of the world's greatest urban food culture. With its delectable mix of vivid storytelling, groundbreaking research, and shrewd analysis, Delizia! is as appetizing as the dishes it describes. This passionate account of Italy's civilization of the table will satisfy foodies, history buffs, Italophiles, travelers, students -- and anyone who loves a well-told tale.
‘Roden’s great gift is to conjure up not just a cuisine but the culture from which it springs’ Nigella Lawson A fully illustrated updated edition of Claudia Roden's masterpiece cookbook including over 300 delicious recipes and gorgeous full colour photography of local Italian scenery. The Food of Italy was written after Claudia Roden spent a year in Italy researching the subject. Regional recipes, country cooking, the bravura of grand dishes; pasta, seafood, rice dishes and authentic Italian desserts; Claudia Roden's encyclopedic knowledge of her subject infuses a rich and stunning book. The Food of Italy was first published in 1989. But the recipes are fresh yet timeless. For this edition Claudia has updated over 30% of the recipes to fit modern tastes, with new inclusions like farro salad and burrata. The book is structured by region. So you get the glorious tomato and aubergine dishes of Sicily; the classically Roman dishes like salty meat and fried vegetables, and rich Tuscan stews and soups. Featuring an incredible repertoire, The Food of Italy is completely approachable for home cooks.
Here is an inspiring, wide-ranging A-Z guide to one of the world's best-loved cuisines. Designed for cooks and consumers alike, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food covers all aspects of the history and culture of Italian gastronomy, from dishes, ingredients, and delicacies to cooking methods and implements, regional specialties, the universal appeal of Italian cuisine, influences from outside Italy, and much more. Following in the footsteps of princes and popes, vagabond artists and cunning peasants, austere scholars and generations of unknown, unremembered women who shaped pasta, moulded cheeses and lovingly tended their cooking pots, Gillian Riley celebrates a heritage of amazing richness and delight. She brings equal measures of enthusiasm and expertise to her writing, and her entries read like mini-essays, laced with wit and gastronomical erudition, marked throughout by descriptive brilliance, and entirely free of the pompous tone that afflicts so much writing about food. The Companion is attentive to both tradition and innovation in Italian cooking, and covers an extraordinary range of information, from Anonimo Toscano, a medieval cookbook, to Bartolomeo Bimbi, a Florentine painter commissioned by Cosimo de Medici to paint portraits of vegetables, to Paglierina di Rifreddo, a young cheese made of unskimmed cows' milk, to zuppa inglese, a dessert invented by 19th century Neapolitan pastry chefs. Major topics receive extended treatment. The entry for Parmesan, for example, runs to more than 2,000 words and includes information on its remarkable nutritional value, the region where it is produced, the breed of cow used to produce it (the razza reggiana, or vacche rosse), the role of the cheese maker, the origin of its name, Molière's deathbed demand for it, its frequent and lustrous depiction in 16th and 17th century paintings, and the proper method of serving, where Riley admonishes: "One disdains the phallic peppermill, but must always appreciate the attentive grating, at the table, of parmesan over pasta or soup, as magical in its way as shavings of truffles." Such is the scope and flavor of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. For anyone with a hunger to learn more about the history, culture and variety of Italian cuisine, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food offers endless satisfactions.
