True Tuscan: Flavors and Memories from the Countryside of Tuscany

`true tuscan' by restauranteur / chef Cesare Casella is another attempt at capturing the cuisine of Tuscany with the same depth and interest shown in the many excellent treatments of Lazio (Rome), Liguria (Genoa and the Riviera), Emilia-Romagna (Bologna and Parma), and Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Trieste, San Daniele). Some of these regions such as Lazio have been the beneficiaries of several excellent treatments. For some reason, all the treatments of Tuscan cuisine in general have been too heavily oriented toward the travelogue or too self-serving to the business interests of the author. One notable exception is `The Tuscan Year' by Elizabeth Romer' which, however, is much more a personal memoir than a good survey of the region as a whole. To be sure, good regional cookbooks come in at least three different flavors. Romer's work and Vincent Schiavelli's `Many Beautiful Things' (on Sicily) is the culinary memoir, Mario Batali's `Simple Italian Food' and Suzanne Dunaway's `Rome, At Home' are examples of personal interpretations of home cooking from a region, and Lynne Rosetto Kaspar's `The Splendid Table' and Fred Plotkin's `La Terra Fortunata' aim at giving us a fairly representative survey of a regions most distinctive dishes. Cesare Casella's `true tuscan' falls somewhere between the personal treatment and the more scholarly study. But, the fact that it does not fit into an easy pigeonhole is definitely not a reason to consider it a poor book. It is, in fact, a very, very good book of Tuscan dishes. The means by which the author certifies this as a representation of Tuscan cuisine is by the simple fact that it is his cuisine, he is a professional chef, and he is Tuscan, at least originally. One thing this means is that there are more than a few dishes herein that originated in Liguria, Lazio, and points south. This is not really surprising since this book tends to confirm Fred Plotkin's statement in `La Terra Fortunata' that Tuscany is really in the middle of the pack among Italian regional cuisines, after Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Campania, Liguria, and even Puglia. And, my respect for this book is based heavily on the fact that it is one of the very few Italian cookbooks, which exemplifies the poverty of the historical Italian cuisine. In fact, Tuscany boasts two major influences to interesting cuisine in that during the Renaissance, it had one of the most powerful noble houses in Italy, that being the Medici's of Florence. And, a noble court is one of the four underpinnings of great cuisine stipulated by Paula Wolfert. This is one of the very few books which shows the importance of inexpensive ingredients such as beans, greens, stale bread, cheap fish, and organ meats in a lot of different dishes. One or more of these ingredients appear in virtually every recipe. At the same time, the book celebrates another hallmark of Italian cuisine, the celebratory dish, especially the now very famous timbale seen in Stanley Tucci's film, `Bi