Cuisines come and go in fashion these days and while the official Best Restaurant In The World (at the moment) is Osteria Francescana in Italy, Italian food often doesn’t get the critical love that other foods do.
So, while there are regional cookbooks, there has never really been a real Italian Food Cookbook from an English writer. In a country where people can’t even agree to disagree on how to make pizza or risotto, it’s probably impossible. Go down five kilometres and even a local dish will be made that bit differently each time
Valentina Harris, who with 30 cookbooks to her name, knows more than most about Italian food has created The Italian Regional Cookbook to meet a need. Why search a library of books when you can pull just the one off the shelf. And so Valentina travels around the twenty regions, literally as she had the chance to do so for a BBC series some years ago and this book comes directly from the research she did then.
It’s a book to travel through, to perhaps start at the beginning and work your way through, cooking all the way to the end. Or visit a region – Tuscany, Calabria, Sicily or Piedmont. In each you’ll find dishes you’ve certainly heard of and quite a few that you probably haven’t.
Over 325 recipes and 1500 photos, not just of finished dishes but of cooking stages as well, make this a mighty heavy tome, you may have to reinforce your bookshelf and pump some iron before using.
It is however a cookbook that cries out to be used regularly and which promises success combining clarity of instruction with deep knowledge of its subject.
{ISBN:0754832406}