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5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Text on Professional Italian Cuisine. Buy It!, July 4, 2005
This review is from: Italian Cuisine: An Essential Reference with More than 300 Recipes (Hardcover)
`Italian Cuisine (2nd Edition)' by Restaurateur, Tony May ranks as one of the best books on the general subject of Italian cuisine as a whole.
Good books on Italian cooking come in all different flavors. There are the great recipe collections such as Michele Scicolone's `1000 Italian Recipes' and Mario Batali's `Molto Italiano'. There are the studies of regional cuisines such as Lydia Bastianich's book on Istrian cuisine, `La Cucina di Lydia' and Lynne Rosetto Casper's excellent study of Emilia-Romagna, `The Splendid Table'. There are the surveys of all Italian regions, as in the classic Claudia Roden book, `The Food of Italy' and a book of the same name by Waverley Root, not to mention the classic by Elizabeth David. There are analytic books on Italian ingredients such as Erica De Mane's `The Flavors of Southern Italy'. There are treatises on styles of Italian cooking such as Susan Hermann Loomis' `Italian Farmhouse Cooking', Patricia Wells' `Trattoria', and Joyce Goldstein's `Enoteca'. There are books of Italian vegetable cooking such as the excellent volumes by Jack Bishop and Faith Willinger. There are dictionaries, such as Antonio Carluccio's `Complete Italian Food' and Anna Del Conte's `the Concise Gastronomy of Italy'. And, let us not forget the Italian-American books such as John Mariani's `The Italian-American Cookbook'. Not to be excluded are culinary memoirs, such as Vincent Schiavelli's `Many Beautiful Things' and other volumes on Sicilian cooking.
This litany of book subjects and titles is simply to distinguish Mr. May's book from all these others. His volume is neither complete nor regional nor personal nor vegetarian nor encyclopedic nor American nor analytical. Its primary focus is on classic recipes and cooking methods. It is very important to note very early in the book the statement that this book was written for culinary professionals. Thus, although it is packed with interesting tips and techniques, the presentation of the methods do assume you know your way around a kitchen. For example, unlike excellent illustrated instructions on pasta making in books by Lydia Bastianich and Marcella Hazan; the techniques presented here are all done without `visual aids'. This is entirely fair, as the book has declared itself a manual for professionals who already know the basics of mixing dough.
While the book does not make the mistake of saying it is `complete'; it does describe itself as an `essential reference to the riches of the Italian table'. I am convinced that no book on a subject so rich as Italian cuisine can cover everything. Therefore, the best books limit their focus to a particular part of the beast and one hopes they don't make any mistakes.
While I still feel this is an excellent book for serious foodies, I did find several statements that seemed mistaken to me. One was the translation of `antipasto' as `before the meal' rather than `before the pasta course', another was the classification of pine nuts and pistachio nuts as herbs, and another was some misspellings of some really rudimentary words. The most serious mistake may have been his misuse of the term soffrito at least one place (My authority is Marcella Hazan's recent book, `Marcella Says...'. While these mistakes are distracting, none of them lead me to believe that the author's statements about cooking techniques are untrustworthy.
My most satisfying discovery in this book, after reading dozens of books on Italian cooking, is new suggestions on how to make some really basic Italian dishes. My favorite discovery was the recommendation to use an especially wide pan in relation to the number of eggs in a frittata, with the warning that if the frittata is too thick, it will take to long to cook and the center will be too heavy. And, while this is not a book on Italian culinary history, Mr. May does make several interesting and, to my knowledge, correct comments on the history of some major Italian dishes such as when he traces dried pasta to a source much older than the Marco Polo fairy tale about bringing spaghetti back from China. Another interesting comment was to cite a similarity between the origins of paella and risotto, tied together primarily by the use of saffron.
I personally find the book exceptionally well organized for it's purpose, as each chapter is devoted to a basic ingredient, technique, or result. The chapters cover bread, condiments, herbs, spices, antipasto, sauces, cured meats, marinades, flatbreads, savory pies and molds, fried foods, eggs, vegetables and salads, legumes, mushrooms and truffles, soups and broths, pasta and polenta, rice, fish, meat, poultry and game, cheese and desserts. My most interesting discovery here is the general classification of `molds'. While almost everyone has probably seen a timbale either in the movie `First Night' or on an episode of `Mario Eats Italy', no previous discussion of this very elaborate dish lets on to the fact that there is a whole family of Italian dishes based on forming the food in molds.
The most useful quality of this book is that it is an excellent source for most of the most common Italian dishes. Some classics may be missing (I couldn't think of any which were not here), but most, such as saltimbocca alla romana, spaghetti alla puttanesca, pizza Margherita, fettuccine alla carbonara, and carciofi alla Romana are all here.
The bibliography is short, but it is composed almost entirely of original, Italian language sources. There are both English and Italian language indexes, which I welcome, but I find a joint index as you will find in books by Marcella Hazan to be better for the English speaker whose culinary Italian is not up to snuff.
This may not be the best book if you simply want a bunch of good Italian recipes, but if you want a sound grounding in Italian cooking techniques, this book must be in your library!
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