The Good Food of Italy--Region by Region

Excellent service, prompt delivery, excellent condition as described, packaged well. Would use again.

My daughter just returned from a year of college study in FLorence Italy. While there she was enrolled in 2 cooking classes - and they used this book in both classes. The tiramsu receipe is the best! The recipes are consistently wonderful and the regional infomation is fasinating. I traveled with her for one month all over Italy and we used the regional information to guide us on ordering special meals at local restaurants. Have purchased several books as gifts for my food/cooking loving friends and family

Claudia Roden is one of the distaff aristocracy of Mediterranean culinary journalism with Elizabeth David and Paula Wolfert. This book, `The Food of Italy Region by Region' is an adaptation of a series of newspaper articles written for the Sunday Times of London. Each of the 19 larger regions has a chapter devoted to the traditional dishes and wines of the region. The cuisine of two very small regions, Valle D'Aosta and Molise are grouped together larger neighbors, Piedmont and Abruzzi respectively. Each chapter begins with an essay on the food of that region followed by several recipes. Emilia-Romagna, for example gets 21 example recipes.Each essay includes a section on the wines of the region. This was one of the most interesting aspects of the work to someone who knows very little of wines. Before reading this, I was under the impression that Italian vintage wine culture was hundreds of years old. Wine was certainly produced in Italy since before the Roman Empire, yet up to World War II, it was largely the production of everyday wine with few quality exports. Only in the last 50 years has Italy developed the same kind of quality labels to rival those of France. I must say they have done a very good job of it.I was also surprised by the relatively recent awareness of regional cuisine in Italy, as it never really codified its culinary traditions in the same way France did so well. I am delighted, however that there is a book, which ties together all the material in my five (5) foot shelf of books on regional Italian cuisine. It is especially interesting to see the split in Italian cuisine below Rome into the very Mediterranean cooking of Campania, Calabria, Apulia, and Sicily versus the more European cooking of, for example, Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Piedmont, and Friuli. In the north, for example, you have soft pastas and gnocchi with family resemblances to Germanic dumplings. In the south, for example, you have abundant olive oil and dried tomatoes linked closely to the cuisines of Greece and North Africa.The author presents close to 300 recipes by region, but also gives a list of recipes by these food types:AppetizersStuffed VegetablesFried FoodsCheese and EggsSeafood AntipastiPizzas, Breads, and PiesSoupsPastaDumplingsRisottosPolentasFish and ShellfishMeat, Poultry, and GameSide Dishes, Salads, and VegetablesDessertsThis is excellent Sunday Supplement journalism and very good culinary reporting. I found very few differences of opinion between the author and Mario Batali, my gold standard for Italian regional cuisine. In the case of any disagreements and any other evidence, I would give Mario the nod simply because he is a professional chef in addition to being an interpreter of Italian cuisine and the author is not a professional chef. That means that in spite of how expert Ms. Roden's reporting may be, she has not prepared this food in the restaurant environments on which she reports.One disagreement I detected is in pasta making technique.

this is a wonderful book - a well-written cookbook that you can read just for the pleasure of it and with recipes that work in a home kitchen. Claudia Roden is an excellent writer, researcher and chef.