Italian Two Easy: Simple Recipes from the London River Cafe (Hardcover)

by Rose Gray (Author), Ruth Rogers (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Cutting live crabs, slow roasting a pork shoulder and skinning a bone-in eel don't usually call to mind "easy" cooking, but Gray and Rogers, cofounders of the River Cafe in London (and authors of the River Cafe cookbook series), include the above culinary tasks in their follow-up to 2004's Italian Easy. The authors have compiled a collection of 150 regional Italian recipes, haphazardly divided into chapters such as Mozzarella, Tomato Pasta and "Fish with...." The odd organization obscures a strong collection of appealing and time-conscious regional recipes such as Fried Eggplant, Basil and Tomato; Orecchiette, Tomato, Ricotta; Sea Bass Baked in Sea Salt; and Chocolate and Coffee Sorbet. Full-page color photos and a list of Italian food suppliers make the book somewhat user friendly, yet basic information such as serving sizes (listed away from recipes) and curiously placed headnotes, which warn of unusual ingredients or difficult preparation (placed at the end of instruction), are counterintuitive. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Chefs Gray and Rogers have produced yet another volume of easy recipes from their popular London restaurant, River Cafe. Relying on fresh, often seasonal ingredients, the chefs combine them in ways traditional and novel. Broccoli rabe, garlic, and red wine produce the simplest of soups. Ripe tomatoes, onion, and basil make a spare yet tasty sauce for spaghetti when each of the ingredients is at the peak of the season. Lemon, garlic, and sage perfume a combination of wine and milk to sauce a slowly cooked pork shoulder. Poultry recipes stretch far beyond chicken and turkey to include guinea hen, pheasant, and quail. Vegetable recipes abound, pairing everyday green beans and potatoes or roasting together celeriac, fennel, and squash. Desserts call for many different baked fruits, but there are a few chocolate cakes to add richness. Most of these recipes make getting a meal on the table after a day's work less burdensome and require only a modicum of planning and shopping. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter (June 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307338355
• ISBN-13: 978-0307338358
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #294,468 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Great, Simple Recipes. Buy It!!!, June 14, 2006

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

`Italian Two Easy, Simple Recipes from the London River Café' by proprietor / chefs, Rose Gray and Ruth Rodgers is the sixth cookbook by these ladies, and I welcome it with almost as much anticipation as I did the next installment of `The Lord of the Rings' or at least the DVD release of same.

As the title suggests, this volume is the second of a pair of volumes of `Easy Italian' recipes, the first published about two years ago, copyrighted in 2004. This volume actually improves on the earlier volume in that I found the layout of the first volume very annoying, to the point where it detracted from the value of the book, in spite of the fact that the recipes were almost uniformly excellent.

Gray and Rogers reaffirm two major themes with this volume. First, they celebrate the genius of the Italian pantry with its rich collection of wines, olive oils, cheeses, salt cured fish, capers, breads, pasta, sausages, and cured meats. All of these products are centuries old, enhanced just a bit by the modern methods for canning beans and tomatoes. These commercial, yet artisinally prepared products are such great ingredients that one can assemble fabulous dishes with very little effort. And, that is what Mmes. Gray and Rodgers' recipes are all about.

The second main behind their books is that their recipes follow a very typically English approach to recipe writing. As I wrote to Ms. Diane Jacob, author of `Will Write for Food', there seems to me to be three types of recipe writing. First is the Julia Child model of `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' which covers every detail of cooking technique in exquisite detail. The second is the Joel Robuchon style found in the `Simply French' collaboration with Patricia Wells, where the point of a recipe is often to demonstrate some salient aspect of an important ingredient technique. The third is the Elizabeth David style which is light on asides or voluminous comments on technique or ingredients. This is the style that has become so successful for most recent and contemporary English writers such as Jane Grigson, Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson, Tamasin Day-Lewis, Gray and Rogers, and their protégé, Jamie Oliver. Now this is not the style of recipe writing you want to deal with when you are just starting out, unless it happens to be in Slater's and Day-Lewis recent large cookery manuals, `Appetite' and `Tamasin's Kitchen Bible' respectively. This is also not the style of cookbook you want if you wish to dig deep into the heart of Italian cuisine, as Gray and Rodgers do not (at least in this book) go into the techniques of either bread, pasta, or sausage making. For these techniques and important insights into the backbone of classical Italian cooking, I refer you to the grand dame of Italian cooking writing in English, Marcella Hazan and her `Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking' and her most recent `Marcella Says'.

As I have said of Jamie Oliver's books, Gray and Rogers' books are primarily celebrations of the simplicity of the Italian cuisine, although Oliver's exuberance comes through just a bit better than from our ladies. One thing you will not get from Gray and Rogers is a reflection of the typical Mario Batali statement that the Italian cuisine is the cuisine of poverty. While hams and cheeses and sausages may have been a necessity 200 years ago, in England and the United States, these Italian specialties are pretty dear. Prosciutto di Parma and Parmesano-Reggiano both run to $16 or more dollars a pound or more.

So, if you know your way around the kitchen and can afford `the good stuff', genuine imported Italian ingredients, then I heartily recommend this and all of the other five Gray / Rogers volumes, especially if you are fond of entertaining or like to cook every day, but don't want to spend three hours in the kitchen every day. These books demonstrate why it is so easy for Rachael Ray, for example, to put together fast meals based on the Italian pantry, but these recipes are, unlike Ms. Ray's fare, tested in restaurant experience.

Some of the recipes do require some Italian ingredients that are still not that easy to come by. One, for example, is bottarga, the sun-dried roe of the gray mullet. I have never searched for it, but I have also never seen it in my local megamart, although I suspect the big New York City food emporia such as Zabar's are sure to carry it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the appendix of suppliers in the back of the book were all American sources and not UK sources.

If I were to pick one especially strong point of the Gray / Rogers volumes, it would be their vegetable recipes. I have read and reviewed a number of excellent books on vegetable recipes, most especially Jack Bishop's several books, and I still find unique recipes among the River Café cuisine, especially in dishes which combine two or more vegetables and therefore don't easily fit into a book organized by vegetable. My only caveat is that since this book is all about the recipes and nothing but the recipes, it sometimes lets some bad advice slip by as when it suggests you discard the stems from a head of broccoli. I happen to love broccoli right down to its tougher stems, which one can always peel, so I suggest you be a bit more frugal here.

The second best aspect of the River Café books is their wealth of simple pasta recipes.

The bottom line is that these River Café cookbooks are easily one of the best sources of quick Italian influenced books I have seen anywhere, without the annoying and cloying Rayspeak chatter from Ms. Rachael. One could do worse than to fill your entire kitchen library with Gray and Rogers cookbooks, with Marcella Hazan's works in the library to fill in the background.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars London Food Icon on the River, February 22, 2007

By	J. Hanson "food from the heart" (minneapolis, mn usa) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Having been to the restaurant twice in my adult life I can not only recommend the London River Cafe as a destination place but now I can actually produce some sensational, yet quite easy, recipes in the here and now. Sometimes our palette can only be satisfied with the real thing but the new book, "Italian Two Easy", is as close as you can get. I highly recommend the book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book but a mistake on page 68!, June 30, 2008

By	Bettina Bungaard Martinez (plano, texas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I love this Italian cookbook, I'm trying most of the recipes and unfortunately I found a mistake on page 68. The "Orecchiette, tomato, ricotta" recipe forgot to include the basil after telling us to wash it. The meal was therefore not a success, it ended up rather bland as ricotta does not have much taste on its own.

I still use this cookbook every day and highly recommend it.