Customer Reviews

Giuliano Bugialli's Foods of Tuscany

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Giuliano Bugialli's "Foods of Tuscany" has a perfect balance -- probably 90% recipes and 10% pictures and background. The pictures are wonderful, the recipes are delicious, and the background information displays a surprising level of erudition. My only criticism would be that many of the recipes are very labor-intensive; Julia Child's typical recipes seem easy in comparison. But the results are worth the effort

I bought this book because it was highly recommended by Edward Behr at The Art of Eating. You get around 150 Tuscan recipes. The author has travelled the region and found what he considers interesting recipes. Many of the are a bit complicated so you must like spending time in the kitchen. With only 150 recipes I don't think you get a full picture of the region, but you have to remember that the book is 20 years old. At that time, publishers were not really that keen on publishing books about regional cooking. Times have changed. I am not an expert, but I don't know about any books on Tuscany that are clearly better than this one.

You should also be aware that the author also has written "The fine art of Italian cooking" (product link not working), which despite its title also is a book mostly of Tuscan cooking. That is maybe better than the current book. It certainly contains more recipes and more information. However, the drawback is that it does not have any picture.

I think the hard cover book sold for 50 dollars in 1992 and that was a lot of money. Books are cheaper today, but it has to be said that the binding and printing of the book is beautiful. You hardly see that kind of quality in a book today - and certainly not in cookbooks. I would strongly recommend that you pick up the hardcover edition here on amazon for just 4 dollars!

I bought this book over 10 years ago. At the time I thought it was a beautiful book but did not cook from the book since my cooking skills were rudimentary and the book was way beyond my skills. Over the years my cooking skills have been steadily improving, but for some reason I never pulled down the book from the bookshelf. Recently I attended one of the author's cooking demonstrations and was really impressed with the way that he turned simple ingradients into fantastic meals. This prompted me to take the book out again and now I can really appreciate what a fantastic book it is!