Faith Willinger has spent three decades exploring Italy, traveling from the Alps to Sicily to visit its artistic and architectural wonders and track down the best restaurants, regional cooks, winemakers, and food markets. Along the way, she?s made many friends, eaten lots of tasty meals, and collected a wealth of authentic Italian recipes. Now, in Adventures of an Italian Food Lover, she pays tribute to her friends and to the food and wine she?s enjoyed in their company. If you plan to visit Italy, you can use this book as a guide to finding some of Willinger?s favorite places, from tiny shops stocked with foods available nowhere else in the world, to outdoor markets overflowing with an incredible variety of fish, cheese, fruit, and vegetables, to great restaurants in big cities and small villages. If you can?t travel to Italy as soon as you?d like to, Willinger?s recipes from real Italian kitchens, her warm, engaging profiles of the cooks who perfected them, and her sister?s charming watercolors of Italian friends and scenery beautifully evoke the essence of this enchanting country.

The recipes all start with great ingredients?extra virgin olive oil, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, heirloom wheat pasta, salt-packed capers, and other Italian pantry favorites?and use the freshest meat, fish, and seasonal produce. Willinger?s friend and neighbor in Florence shares her recipe for the delicious home-style Turnips and Their Greens with Garlic and Chili Pepper; the chef-owner of a bustling Neapolitan trattoria combines the freshest ingredients from the sea and the field in his Pasta with Mussels and Zucchini Flowers; and a Milanese marketing consultant who inherited his family?s vineyard in Le Marche and started an enological revolution in the region provides the recipe for the rustic Polenta with Tomato Sauce and Sausage Ragù he often serves to guests in the elegant formal dining room of his art deco villa.

Part cookbook, part travelogue, Adventures of an Italian Food Lover is an insider?s guide that will bring the best of Italy into your home and into your heart.

Author: Faith Heller Willinger
Hardcover:  256 pages
Company: Clarkson Potter  (2007-07-10) (2007-07-10)
ISBN: 0307346390
List Price: $32.50
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Here is an inspiring, wide-ranging A-Z guide to one of the world's best-loved cuisines. Designed for cooks and consumers alike, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food covers all aspects of the history and culture of Italian gastronomy, from dishes, ingredients, and delicacies to cooking methods and implements, regional specialties, the universal appeal of Italian cuisine, influences from outside Italy, and much more.
Following in the footsteps of princes and popes, vagabond artists and cunning peasants, austere scholars and generations of unknown, unremembered women who shaped pasta, moulded cheeses and lovingly tended their cooking pots, Gillian Riley celebrates a heritage of amazing richness and delight. She brings equal measures of enthusiasm and expertise to her writing, and her entries read like mini-essays, laced with wit and gastronomical erudition, marked throughout by descriptive brilliance, and entirely free of the pompous tone that afflicts so much writing about food.

The Companion is attentive to both tradition and innovation in Italian cooking, and covers an extraordinary range of information, from Anonimo Toscano, a medieval cookbook, to Bartolomeo Bimbi, a Florentine painter commissioned by Cosimo de Medici to paint portraits of vegetables, to Paglierina di Rifreddo, a young cheese made of unskimmed cows' milk, to zuppa inglese, a dessert invented by 19th century Neapolitan pastry chefs. Major topics receive extended treatment. The entry for Parmesan, for example, runs to more than 2,000 words and includes information on its remarkable nutritional value, the region where it is produced, the breed of cow used to produce it (the razza reggiana, or vacche rosse), the role of the cheese maker, the origin of its name, Moliere's deathbed demand for it, its frequent and lustrous depiction in 16th and 17th century paintings, and the proper method of serving, where Riley admonishes: "One disdains the phallic peppermill, but must always appreciate the attentive grating, at the table, of parmesan over pasta or soup, as magical in its way as shavings of truffles." Such is the scope and flavor of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food.
For anyone with a hunger to learn more about the history, culture and variety of Italian cuisine, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food offers endless satisfactions.


Author: Gillian Riley
Hardcover:  672 pages
Company: Oxford University Press, USA  (2007-11-01)
ISBN: 0198606176
List Price: $35.00
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Buon appetito! Everyone loves Italian food. But how did the Italians come to eat so well?

The answer lies amid the vibrant beauty of Italy's historic cities. For a thousand years, they have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money, and power. Italian food is city food.

From the bustle of medieval Milan's marketplace to the banqueting halls of Renaissance Ferrara; from street stalls in the putrid alleyways of nineteenth-century Naples to the noisy trattorie of postwar Rome: in rich slices of urban life, historian and master storyteller John Dickie shows how taste, creativity, and civic pride blended with princely arrogance, political violence, and dark intrigue to create the world's favorite cuisine. Delizia! is much more than a history of Italian food. It is a history of Italy told through the flavors and character of its cities.

A dynamic chronicle that is full of surprises, Delizia! draws back the curtain on much that was unknown about Italian food and exposes the long-held canards. It interprets the ancient Arabic map that tells of pasta's true origins, and shows that Marco Polo did not introduce spaghetti to the Italians, as is often thought, but did have a big influence on making pasta a part of the American diet. It seeks out the medieval recipes that reveal Italy's long love affair with exotic spices, and introduces the great Renaissance cookery writer who plotted to murder the Pope even as he detailed the aphrodisiac qualities of his ingredients. It moves from the opulent theater of a Renaissance wedding banquet, with its gargantuan ten-course menu comprising hundreds of separate dishes, to the thin soups and bland polentas that would eventually force millions to emigrate to the New World. It shows how early pizzas were disgusting and why Mussolini championed risotto. Most important, it explains the origins and growth of the world's greatest urban food culture.

With its delectable mix of vivid storytelling, groundbreaking research, and shrewd analysis, Delizia! is as appetizing as the dishes it describes. This passionate account of Italy's civilization of the table will satisfy foodies, history buffs, Italophiles, travelers, students -- and anyone who loves a well-told tale.

Author: John Dickie
Hardcover:  384 pages
Company: Free Press  (2008-01-08)
ISBN: 0743277996
List Price: $26.00
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Antonio Carluccio is one of Italian foods greatest ambassadors, believing that Italy produces the finest produce and the richest cuisine in the world. This work distils a lifetime's knowledge and experience into one definitive book. Each chapter focuses on a different food type: fish and shellfish; poultry and game; pasta; fresh and cured meats; vegetables and pulses; rice and grains; fungi; cheese; fruits and nuts; and breads and pastries, and describes methods of cultivation, production and preparation, explaining numerous regional varieties, specialities and traditions. Over 200 classic recipes from every region of Italy are featured, along with an A-Z of Italian oils, herbs, spices, wines and liqueurs.

Author: Antonio Carluccio, Priscilla Carluccio
Paperback:  320 pages
Company: Quadrille Publishing Ltd  (2002-03-04)
ISBN: 1903845564
List Price: $19.01
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Mr. Food does it again as he takes our taste buds on a tasty tour through Italy. He tempts us with so many Italian favorites, from quick toss-togethers like Classic Bruschetta, Spicy Sausage and Bean Soup, Lemon Garlic Chicken, and Caesar Pasta Primavera to no-fuss slow-cooked dishes full of baked-in flavor. There's Spicy Garden Penne, Steak Pizzaiola, and meaty Stromboli, to name a few recipes that'll have us humming Italian love songs. And if we've still got room after all that, we can look forward to his no-nonsense tantalizing desserts. They're all here-including simple versions of Cannoli Pie, Tortoni, and everybody's favorite, Tiramisu. So let's not just tease our taste buds; let's start cooking!

With over 225 homestyle recipes to choose from, we're on our way to saying Ah e molto bene!! -which, of course, is Italian for OOH IT'S SO GOOD!!

Author: Art Ginsburg
Hardcover:  300 pages
Company: Morrow Cookbooks  (1997-12)
ISBN: 0688143962
List Price: $14.95
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Author: Elizabeth David, Julia Child
Paperback:  416 pages
Company: Penguin Classics  (1999-02-01)
ISBN: 0141181559
List Price: $16.00
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"Bianchi's words are as delicious and simple as the food they celebrate, and clearly describe the exquisite detail so much a part of traditional food in all Italian towns. This book is a treasure for both the novice and the professional cook!" Mario Batali, Host of Molto Mario on TVFN

Author: Anne Bianchi
Hardcover:  336 pages
Company: MacMillan Publishing Company.  (1999-06)
ISBN: 0028623320
List Price: $27.50
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Perfectly pristine ingredients, combined sensibly and cooked properly, are the unmistakable hallmarks of the best Italian food. Chef Mario Batali, known to fans far and wide as "Molto Mario" from his appearances on television's Food Network and as chef of New York's much-loved Pó restaurant, has elevated these simple principles to fine art, creating innovative new fare that pays tribute to traditional Italian home cooking in a distinctly modern way. Now, for the first time, more than 200 of his irresistible recipes for fresh pastas, sprightly salads, grilled dishes, savory ragus, and many others are gathered in Simple Italian Food, a celebration of the flavors and spirit of Italy.
        
Mario draws inspiration for his distinctive dishes from the two "villages" that have left their stamps on his cuisine: Borgo Capanne, the tiny hillside village in Northern Italy where he lived and cooked for several years, and New York's Greenwich Village, where he has ready access to bountiful produce and outstanding artisan-made products; his full-flavored, smartly presented fare combines the best of both worlds. Chapters covering antipasti, pasta and risotto, fish, meat and poultry, contorni (side dishes), and cheese and sweets offer classic dishes such as Baked Lasagne with Asparagus and Pesto and pork loin cooked in caramelized onions and milk alongside Batali's own enticing improvisations--Penne with Spicy Goat Cheese and Hazelnut Pesto or Tuna Carpaccio with Cucumbers, Sweet Potatoes, and Saffron Vinaigrette. And because his recipes succeed on the strength of their ingredients rather than on virtuoso techniques, home cooks can easily duplicate the clear, clean flavors and lively presentations that are Mario's signature. Thirty-two pages of color photographs showcase Chef Batali's colorful and approachable recipes.
        
Traditionalists as well as those who thrill to the new will want to make dozens of these crowd-pleasing dishes a permanent part of their repertoire and embrace Mario Batali'sphilosophy of Simple Italian Food.

Author: Mario Batali
Hardcover:  288 pages Sold individually, See Product Description below for a complete description of this item.
Company: Clarkson Potter  (1998-09-29) (1998-09-29)
ISBN: 0609603000
List Price: $35.00
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Most food guides for Italy suffer from the ?too-much, too-little? syndrome. The territory is vast, yet for each city and village they rarely provide enough information. This guide focuses on a manageable territory?Liguria?and covers it in depth with an emphasis on understanding the local culture through its food. This is not an encyclopedic volume but a renowned food writer?s highly selective guide to Liguria?s authentic small eateries, culinary traditions, wine, wineries, food artisans, and gourmet shops. (The ?big? restaurants are covered in a short and amusing sidebar that lists the places that everyone knows and can read about in any guide or on the Internet: a tip of the hat to the great toques, but many other suggestions are given so the reader can dine elsewhere. In Italy, the restaurants Michelin rewards with multiple stars have little to do with regional or local food.) Recommendations center on ?where the locals eat.? The book is also lavishly photographed, perfect for the armchair traveler. There is a glossary of food items and unusual specialties, as well as a typical Ligurian menu, detailed indexes, many sidebars, and a map.

Learn all about the savory Ligurian flatbread called farinata (and where to buy farinata baking pans), garlic (raw in local dishes, braids, the pink heirloom variety from the village of Vessalico, and the village?s annual garlic festival), pesto mania (and a profile of the hothouses of the western Genoese suburb of Prà that produce what most Italians and 99.9 percent of Ligurians claim to be the world?s best commercially grown basil) and which restaurants serve authentic mortar-and-pestle-made pesto, as well as dozens of other regional topics.

Author: David Downie
Paperback:  448 pages
Company: Little Bookroom  (2008-11-18) (2008-11-18)
ISBN: 1892145642
List Price: $24.95
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Just when you thought you knew the best of Northern Italy, along comes Lynne RossettoKasper to introduce you to Emilia-Romagna, a fertile wedge between Milan, Venice, and Florence, as gastronomically important as any land in the world. The lush homeland of balsamic vinegar, Prosciutto di Parma, tortellini, and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, this is a region venerated by Italy's food cognoscenti. "Ask an Italian where to take only one meal in Italy, and, after recommending his mother's house, he will more than likely send you to EmiliaRomagna,"writes Kasper.

A cuisine at once voluptuous and refined, the dishes of Emilia-Romagna's kitchen are literally irresistible. just listen to the names"Little" Spring Soup from the 17th Century, His Eminence's Baked Penne, Modena Crumbling Cake. Then imagine sitting down to a dish of Hot Caramelized Pears with Prosciutto, a Risotto of Red Wine with Fresh Rosemary or a Pie of Polenta and Country RagÚ

The first American book to present the food of this singular northern region, The Splendid Table is an Italian cookbook for the nineties. It will take you from Parma, Bologna, Modena, Ravenna, and Ferrara to tiny villages in the foothills of the Apennines, from Renaissance banquet halls to the simplest of farmhouses, offering history, folklore, and substantive cooking tips along the way.

Among the things you will find are:

A 56-recipe pasta chapter including many never before seen in America. From fast and easy dishes such as Linguine with Braised Garlic and Balsamic Vinegar to a lasagne of chicken, pine nuts, and currants.

A veal Parmigiano like no other-Pan-Fried Veal Chops with Tomato Marsala Sauce, the whole finished with curls of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.

An array of meatless or almost meatless recipes. Grilled vegetables with maccheroni; a

country dish of braised lentils with ribbons of pappardelle and crisp nubbins of pancetta; Tortellini of Artichokes and Mascarpone; or Fresh Tuna Adriatic Style.

Straight out of the Renaissance but perfect for today, a sumptuous tortellini pie, ideal for important dinners and holidays.

A salad of tart greens, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and Prosciutto di Parma with a warm garlic and balsamic dressing and many other antipasto dishes.

Over thirty dessert recipes including Chestnut Ricotta Cheesecake and Torta Barozzi, a mysterious chocolate cake made at only one pastry shop in the entire region.

"A Guide to Ingredients" that shares the secrets of how to select, use, and store the very best balsamic vinegars, olive oils, porcini mushrooms, Prosciutto di Parma, mortadella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, coppa, fresh herbs, and much more.

Encounters with Lucrezia Borgia, Gioachino Rossini, Napoleon's Empress Marie Louise, Giuseppe Verdi, Arturo Toscanini, Carlo Bergonzi, Renata Tebaldi, and Luciano Pavarotti, all characters in the epic of Emilia-Romagna.

The Splendid Table is the Italian cookbook America has been waiting for a book firing our passion for Italian food while responding to our health concerns. It not only reveals Italy's best-kept culinary secret, the great cuisine of Emilia-Romagna, it is at the same time one of the most important teaching books of our era. Know it will become a good friend, well thumbed and lovingly stained over years of good cooking and good reading.

24 pages of finished dishes in full color. 200 recipes with wine and menu suggestions.

Author: Lynne Rossetto Kasper
Hardcover:  530 pages
Company: William Morrow Cookbooks  (1992-09-21) (1992-09-21)
ISBN: 0688089631
List Price: $39.95
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