1,000 Italian Recipes

Despite the badly designed paper-over-board cover that resembles a made-for-the-bargain-table reject, this is a wonderful and amazing cookbook!!! Filled with simple, yet delicious recipes, this is a must have for anyone who wants to cook great Italian food at home. If I could have only two cookbooks (or had to recommend only two to the starting at-home chef), it would be this one and Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything. Though I haven't made all 1000 recipes in Scicolone's classic, so far everything I have made has been great - which means I've got a lot of good eating ahead of me. Buy it now. (PS. Wiley you might want to update this with a better cover.)

Many hard to find Italian recipes along with ones that are Americanized but still great eating.I love cookbooks and own over 200, I go back to this one often.

We just recently bought this book and have done so many recipes from it already. The herbs, the spice combinations, are just so fantastic. We haven't made one single recipe out of this book that wasn't four-star. Read the index to get an idea of the recipes - but if you love intricate, spicy, combinations of food...buy this.

`1000 Italian Recipes' by Michele Scicolone is a great idea which, in other hands applied to other cuisines has produced heavy books with little or no inspiration. Ms. Scicolone has done this right. She has done it so right that it ups the ante for all new general Italian cuisine cookbooks to justify why one would want an alternate book when this excellent volume is already in your library. The first thing which strikes the reader is the Table of Contents, which shows that Ms. Scicolone has a chapter on virtually every major category of Italian cooking, and, the Contents are divided into detailed subjects so that we don't only have a chapter on Antipasti, we have an Antipasti chapter plus sections on Cheese, Vegetable, Egg, Meat, Seafood, Dips, Bruschetta, and Fried Antipasti. While this book makes no claims to being a work on regional Italian cuisine, it pays great attention to regionality. For starters, the end papers display excellent little maps of Italy and its twenty primary provinces. It is probably entirely excessive on my part, but a few more cities marked on the map would have been nice, but it is so much better than what you get in most other books that cite Italian regions that I am very pleased with this feature. The map is validated by the fact that the headnotes to most of the recipes cite the region to which the dish is native. Among other things, it fixes for certain that potato gnocchi is a speciality of Rome, and that it is the premier gnocchi recipe for Rome's Thursday menus. This highlights the fact that in such a large book, you get not one gnocchi recipe. You don't even get just one potato gnocchi recipe. You get it neat, with lamb ragu, gratineed, with spinach, with seafood, and Sorrento style (with marinara sauce and mozzarella). You also get gnocchi made with squash and made with semolina. I do miss a recipe for gnocchi made with ricotta. And, these are not bare bones recipes. Potato gnocchi, like an omelet, is a relatively easy recipe with simple ingredients. But, both recipes require a lot of technique and gnocchi excellence comes only with practice. I think no amount of reading gnocchi recipes or even marathon sessions watching `Molto Mario' will make you a good gnocchi cook. You need to feel the dough and experiment with it to be sure it is just right. Here we get another symptom of how good this book is. I have read a lot of gnocchi recipes, and this is the first where I recall the writer's providing a really good test to tell when the potato gnocchi is good to go. Everyone tells you to be gentle and not add too much flour. This is the first I recall seeing a method for test cooking a gnocchi dumpling to see if you are good to go. We see the same story with just about every type of recipe. It is no surprise to see a Pasta Puttanesca recipe. It is a surprise to see the traditional cooked Puttanesca plus an uncooked version of Puttanesca. Another small feature that builds on all the other good things about this