Essentials of Italian: Recipes and Techniques for Delicious Italian Meals

I am iItalian and love to cook . I recommend this book highly. I've looked over the recipes and they are very close to what I would find in an authentic Italian cookbook. Great buy. Thanks William Sonoma.

My husband and I honeymooned in Italy, traveling to Rome, Florence and Venice. We had many many great meals there and I came home wanting a cookbook with the recipes for those meals. This book had ALL of them. I love the photos and how it is organized. The two recipes I have tried out of it (carbonara and osso bucco) were right on with what we had in Italy. This book is authentic and I disagree with the review that said it was not "essential". Essential to me means all the "standard" recipes you think of when you think of Italian cuisine. Now, this book isn't essential "American Italian" with garlic bread and extra cheese all over everything, but it had every essential "true italian" recipe I was looking for and I can't wait to make them all.

This is a wonderful cookbook and more! A must have for anyone who loves Italian cuisine I've made many recipes from this book and they're great! Great photography as well :) A pleasure to read!

`Essentials of Italian' is Michele Scicolone's second coffee table sized book on Italian cuisine for Williams-Sonoma, the first being the larger, splashier, `Savoring Italy' volume, where her name is much more prominently displayed as author. In this book, she gets third billing behind Chuck Williams, the general editor and Bill Bettencourt, the photographer. Scicolone only gets credit for providing the recipes, with all the supporting text being provided by Steve Siegelman. This is unfortunate. Of the two, this volume is a superior guide to Italian cuisine, less expensive, and a better photographic presentation of the recipe dishes. This puts me in a quandary, as I recall giving `Savoring Italy' five stars, based on the fact that it was a worthy and non-redundant complement to Scicolone's `1000 Italian Recipes'. But one option is easy. If you are choosing between the two, and it is the recipes which are important to you, pick `Essentials of Italian' and not `Savoring Italy'. The best part of the book is the fact that it does a decent job of realizing its title of `Essentials'. Before opening the book, I assumed that a book with that title should give good instructions on how to make fresh pasta, how to make gnocchi, how to make bulk sausage, how to make a pizza, how to make a ragu Bolognese, how to make an artisanal bread, how to make mozzarella, how to make a ricotta cheesecake, and how to make a timbale. I was just a bit disappointed when I found only four out of these eight; however I understand why sausage, sourdough breads, and mozzarella were left out. I don't understand why she missed the Neapolitan ricotta lemon cheesecake. So, the book comes through with at least all the common dishes typically made by the amateur home cook. And, with these and all the other recipes in the book, it is very true to its objective of providing `authentic' recipes. For every common named recipe, there are often dozens of variations, many of which are only remotely similar to their roots. But here, the Roman veal saltimbocca recipe is really the way they make it in Rome, with nothing except the veal, the prosciutto, the sage, and the butter. No intruding spinach or braciole presentation to muddy the basic charm of the simple recipe. The same thing is true of virtually every other recipe in the book. I have seen dozens of ragu Bolognese recipes and even those which have no pretensions to being a `quick' version often skimp on the most basic aspect of the classic recipe, which is combining several (usually three) different kinds of meat into the sauce. While the recipes for the same dishes in both `Savoring Italy' and `Essentials of Italian' are identical (word for word, really), bagna cauda, for example, `Savoring Italy' simply does not cover most of the most basic recipes. Rather, it delivers less familiar or at least different variations. `Savoring...' for example, gives us the more elaborate gratineed ricotta and spinach Gnocchi, while `Essentials...' give