Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes to Cook at Home: A James Beard Award Winning Cookbook

If you love to cook and eat Italian food this is the book for you! To put this review into perspective for you, it is written by a serious student of cooking that has been actively studying food on their own for 25 years. I have been focusing on Italian food for the last 10 years. My favorite cookbook is "The Professional Chef" by the Culinary Institute of America. Each trip my husband and I take to Italy we find new dishes to love that we want to recreate at home. With Mario's book you can bring your vacation home to your own kitchen. His directions are extremely easy to follow, dare I say they appear to be foolproof. My husband loves to look at the glossy pictures in the book and pick out dinner. If you like to see pictures of the finished dishes this book has plenty of pictures to satisfy that desire. I use this cookbook on a weekly basis and have been pleased with every recipe that I have tried. Mario's recipe for Osso Buco (page 363) is worth the price of the book alone. My husband loves the Chocolate Hazelnut fritters (page 477). I believe that there is something for everyone in this book. If you are looking to expand your Italian cookbook library, take a look at the "Harry's Bar Cookbook". It is written by the owner of the famous bar in Venice, and is a fabulous addition to any cookbook library for those that love authentic Italian food. You cannot go wrong with this book if you love serious Italian food. This is one of the most used books in my cookbook collection. Even with 500 cookbooks to choose from I frequently find myself reaching for this book. Unlike other cookbooks, this one obviously had all its recipes tested many times. I have made more than 50% of the recipes in this book and everyone has turned out well. Kudos to Mario for a fantastic effort and an exceptional end result.

I got this book for Father's day last year and we've been cooking out of it every week since. Batali's recipes are simple - typically no more than two to four main ingredients each - and require standard kinds of prep, like dicing onions and parsley or simmering a sauce. There's not a lot of work to do, if you know how to let go and allow things to brown. The recipes are close to no-fail, and everything has been delicious. The deserts are excellent too. I've learned as much as I can about cooking Italian food since my oldest daughter was born, studying everything from details anthropological studies of Italian cuisine to massive hotel cookbooks. The cuisine is simple and tasty, with easy-to-find ingredients, and there's so much regional variation I can cover virtually every dietary preference or season. This is a perfect addition to my library. First, its easy to use. Second, and more important, it makes the variations in regional cuisine clear without being heavy on the pedantry. Northern Italian cooking is heavy on the meat and the butter, for example, except for the Friuli area, but the further south you go the lighter the food, the more emphasis on tomato, fish and olive oil. You can find recipes in this book that match those variations, and its easy enough to translate that into menus that match seasonal or personal preferences. Its a good book to get kids involved with too: the recipes are simple enough that my three-year-old can be involved from start to finish. Two quibbles, which I find in almost every modern cookbook I look at, including the good ones. First, there's no wine recommendations. Some of the regional dishes taste so much better with the matching wine (and Batali certainly knows which, given wine importing is one of his sidelines) that I'm often left wondering what would work, aside from the obvious. Second, there's no menus - there's the primi/secondi-contorni/dolce distinction, for sure, but no suggested sequences. What are his service suggestions? Maybe I have to go to one of his restaurants to get that level of detail, but the book would become a thorough classic - on the level of Olney's books - if he included some wine suggestions and possible menus. But all in all, you can mine this book for dinner parties and Tuesday nights alike for years.

Batali is one of our premier USA chefs, not only due to his FoodNetwork Fame with shows and Iron Chef fame now. Also due to his previous three excellent cookbooks. Primarily due to his passion for the food and sharing it with us! Here that is crescendoed with his offering us a collection of his favorites collected not only from Italy but also here in US and from TV and his home experimentation. To me, reading the Intro is the very best part of any good cookbook and Batali is one of the best to read. Here one learns of what the following recipe collection will be about and how to best experience what the chef would want for us. He begs us to spend more time on shopping, and this statement says it well: "Ninety percent of the success of your meal has already been determined when the food has been packed into your car at the grocery store or farmers' market." How true one learns, so shop for the best in your area! Further he makes the case well for home cooking becoming the pinnacle of our dining experiences as well, not dining out at restuarants. The coming together to share great food and wine is his goal and he achieves it. He begins with Italian wine primer by David Lynch, which is well done. Nearly 500 pages of recipes packed with info about ingredient, technique and serving suggests are here, along with interspersed gorgeous color photos. Try some of these: Cauliflower Pancakes;Savory Chestnut Custard; Pancetta-Wrapped Racicchio; Onion Soup Emilia-Romagna Style; St.John's Eve Pasta; Baked Pasta with Ricotta and Ham; Tortellini in Broth; Jumbo Shrimp Marsala Housewife-Style; Bream in a Package; Swordfish Paillards with Leeks and Grapefruit; Game Hens with Pomegranate; Veal Rolls with Lemon and Mushrooms; Eggplant Caponata (jazzed up version of classic); Grilled Marinated Chanterelles; Grandma's Pine Nut and Ricotta Tart; Chocolate Hazelnut Fritters; Roasted Pears with Chocolate. Besides this wealth and breadth of recipes from all the normal menu categories there is a nice glossary, source listing along with well done sidebar discussions e.g. pasta making, etc. If you're into luscious, simple Italian cuisine at its heights, this is it! Considering, start with this one and you'll stay with it.

`Molto Italiano' is Food Network icon Mario Batali's fourth and, to my lights, best cookbook to date. Like Mario, it has a very nice heft to it, advertising 327 recipes in an utterly simple organization in 450 easy to read pages with a built-in ribbon bookmark, something I think should be a required feature on all cookbooks. For all of those clamoring to buy Giada De Laurentiis' cookbook, I would recommend you pass that up for this book, which is far better. Mario states that his cooking, and these recipes, are all based on Italian home cooking and repeats his often stated belief that in Italy, no one thinks the best cooking is done in restaurantes. Everyone believes the best cooking is done at their aunt's house or Nonna's house or at the house of the matriarch living down the street above the market. No one goes to a restaurant to get superior meals; they simply go to celebrate so Mama and Nonna don't have to cook. I have been hearing this claim for years on `Molto Mario', and it finally dawned on me the implication this has for all the Italian restaurant cookbooks out there, including Mario's own `Babbo Cookbook'. In strong contrast to cooking in `the F country' where an important difference is made between `haute cuisine' (Paul Bocuse, Joel Robuchon, et al), `cuisine bourgeoisie' ' (Julia Child, Richard Olney) and `cuisine provincial' (Elizabeth David, Patricia Wells), Italy has its regional home cooking and approximations to it done in restaurante, trattoria, osteria, and enotecas. I am really happy to see this book devoted almost exclusively to RECIPES. There is a five page essay by David Lynch on Italian wines after the introduction and there is a one page list of recommended kitchen equipment at the end of the book (Please add food mill to list, as it is used in the potato gnocchi recipe. This is actually more useful than a potato ricer, as it can do more different things.). There is also two-page list of suppliers at the end of the book, but that's about it. The contents and relative size of the chapters accurately reflects Mario's mantra about the relative importance of various types of food in the Italian cuisine. Meat appears in almost every chapter as the base of a sauce or as a condiment, but it is less important as a main dish. The chapters are: Antipasto, by far the largest chapter at 106 pages, divided into sections on vegetable, seafood, and meat dishes. This section is so large that this book can easily replace most books specializing in antipasti. Soup, Rice, and Polenta takes 38 pages with 29 recipes, including all the most familiar dishes such as Roman egg drop soup, Tuscan cabbage and bean soup, saffron risotto, and polenta with clams. Dried Pasta gets 24 pages with 20 recipes. For me, the most important recipe here is Mario's version of spaghetti alla carbonara, wherein he does not break the egg yolks, but leaves that to the diner to enhance the sauce by breaking the yolks. I learned this dish on `Molto Mario', and hav