Customer Reviews

The Classic Italian Cookbook (Classic Cookbooks)

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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I cooked Osso Buco alla Milanese, Fagiolini al Pomodoro and Patate al Forno from recipes in this book. Together with Italian bread, a nice little wine, a simple green salad and dessert, it was a superb meal.

Ask Dorling Kindersley to rush this wonderful cookbook back into print so your dinner guests will say you're a culinary genius.

I love this cookbook. It is filled with wonderful recipes and beautiful pictures. If you are not sure of a vegetable or how to cut it, there is a picture of it. I have many family recipes and find that the ones in this book compare to old world flavor. I recommend it highly.

This is my favorite Italian cookbook. The illustrations are wonderful and the directions are perfectly clear. The Pasta Vongole and Tiramisu are a couple of my favorite recipes.
This book is particularly good if you are a beginner.

"The Classic Italian Cookbook" features many delicious, easy-to-prepare recipes from Central and Southern Italy and contains many full-colour photographs. I've made a few of the recipes and, although none of them are unique to this book, they turned out well and were simple to complete.

I found two major drawbacks to the book, though. One is that most of the recipes come from southern and central Italy - in other words, where most Italians who emigrated to the New World came from. Few come from the populous, well-fed northern areas of Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige, and Piemonte/Savoia that have such a rich and varied food heritage. I found this extremely disappointing. (Vegetarians and vegans will also not appreciate that even the vegetable dishes get most of their flavour from meat, meat broth, cheese, butter, and/or milk.)

But the second drawback is almost inexcusable: many of the images are extremely unappealing to the point that they ruin the reader's appetite. As anyone who has read The Gallery of Regrettable Food knows, there's a right way to photograph food and a wrong way, and the wrong way can make even an appetizing dish seem thoroughly disgusting. I doubt many North Americans are attracted to pictures of dead, staring fish; even fewer want to see a skinned, eviscerated rabbit in full colour. But somehow even some images of vegetables look gruesome, especially given the consistently unappealing British "cut-out images with a drop shadow on a stark white background" art design that makes even the tastiest food look cold and clinical.

I would recommend this book for its recipes, but only for those who can look beyond the unappealing images and who are only interested in classic south-central Italian cooking.