Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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311 of 328 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Italian Cookbook for Non-foodies. Buy It!!, May 4, 2005
`Molto Italiano' is Food Network icon Mario Batali's fourth and, to my lights, best cookbook to date. Like Mario, it has a very nice heft to it, advertising 327 recipes in an utterly simple organization in 450 easy to read pages with a built-in ribbon bookmark, something I think should be a required feature on all cookbooks. For all of those clamoring to buy Giada De Laurentiis' cookbook, I would recommend you pass that up for this book, which is far better.
Mario states that his cooking, and these recipes, are all based on Italian home cooking and repeats his often stated belief that in Italy, no one thinks the best cooking is done in restaurantes. Everyone believes the best cooking is done at their aunt's house or Nonna's house or at the house of the matriarch living down the street above the market. No one goes to a restaurant to get superior meals; they simply go to celebrate so Mama and Nonna don't have to cook. I have been hearing this claim for years on `Molto Mario', and it finally dawned on me the implication this has for all the Italian restaurant cookbooks out there, including Mario's own `Babbo Cookbook'. In strong contrast to cooking in `the F country' where an important difference is made between `haute cuisine' (Paul Bocuse, Joel Robuchon, et al), `cuisine bourgeoisie' ' (Julia Child, Richard Olney) and `cuisine provincial' (Elizabeth David, Patricia Wells), Italy has its regional home cooking and approximations to it done in restaurante, trattoria, osteria, and enotecas.
I am really happy to see this book devoted almost exclusively to RECIPES. There is a five page essay by David Lynch on Italian wines after the introduction and there is a one page list of recommended kitchen equipment at the end of the book (Please add food mill to list, as it is used in the potato gnocchi recipe. This is actually more useful than a potato ricer, as it can do more different things.). There is also two-page list of suppliers at the end of the book, but that's about it. The contents and relative size of the chapters accurately reflects Mario's mantra about the relative importance of various types of food in the Italian cuisine. Meat appears in almost every chapter as the base of a sauce or as a condiment, but it is less important as a main dish. The chapters are:
Antipasto, by far the largest chapter at 106 pages, divided into sections on vegetable, seafood, and meat dishes. This section is so large that this book can easily replace most books specializing in antipasti.
Soup, Rice, and Polenta takes 38 pages with 29 recipes, including all the most familiar dishes such as Roman egg drop soup, Tuscan cabbage and bean soup, saffron risotto, and polenta with clams.
Dried Pasta gets 24 pages with 20 recipes. For me, the most important recipe here is Mario's version of spaghetti alla carbonara, wherein he does not break the egg yolks, but leaves that to the diner to enhance the sauce by breaking the yolks. I learned this dish on `Molto Mario', and have been frustrated at everyone else's recipe which whips the yolks together with the white before mixing with the pasta.
Fresh Pasta chapter is over twice as long with 34 recipes, including a basic pasta dough and several gnocchi recipes. As Mario did his apprenticeship in Emilia-Romagna, where fresh pasta is much more common than the southern dry pasta, this is understandable.
Fish is understandably a major chapter at 48 pages and 31 recipes, including calamari, shrimp, crabs, snails, sardines, bass, sole, snapper, mullet, salt cod, monkfish, eel, tuna, swordfish, and mackerel.
Fowl is slightly smaller at 38 pages and 27 recipes with 10 chicken, 6 turkey, 5 duck, and 6 game bird recipes. This includes some classics such as hunter's style chicken and turkey meatballs.
Meat occupies a sizable chapter, at 54 pages and 40 recipes, including several of my favorites such as veal Marsala, sausage and broccoli rabe, stuffed meat loaf, and two recipes for calves liver. Yum.
Vegetables also get an appropriately sizable chapter with 34 pages and 34 recipes, including some with Mario's favorite ingredient, Guanciale (Note: Dean and Delucca in Greenwich Village carries Guanciale).
Sweets are in the last chapter of 42 pages and 32 recipes with items from the Austrian influenced Alps to Sicily. Mario goes so far as to recant his claim that Italians do not eat many sweets, revising his story to say that they don't eat many sweets at the end of big meals. Instead, they pack away the sugar with nibbles throughout the day.
Lots of familiar Italian dishes such as frittatas are here, but Mario doesn't waste precious room on bread that has been covered so well in other books.
While Mario gives the Italian name for each and every recipe, the recipe names in the various section tables of contents are all in English. Even those names which have become well known such as `cacciatore' are given as `hunter's style'. Italian is reserved for the recipes' subtitles. This makes the book especially good for first timers to Italian cuisine.
The recent book to which Mario's work is most closely comparable is Michele Scicolone's `1000 Italian Recipes'. I compared several recipes in the two books and, for various reasons almost always preferred Mario's version. In the veal Marsala, for example, Mario sautés in olive oil and uses butter as a final flavoring rather than sauteeing in hot butter. Both more practical and more authentic. In the potato gnocchi recipe, Mario gives much more delicate instructions for combining the riced potato, flour, and egg. Mario also starts off with less flour per potato, leaving the finishing amount of flour to the discretion of the cook.
This is my new first choice among Italian cookbooks for non-foodies. The recipes are all relatively simple, but with no compromises. For Mario fans, put this under your pillow at night. Very Highly Recommended.
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60 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another winner from the American Italian cooking master, April 8, 2006
If you love to cook and eat Italian food this is the book for you!
To put this review into perspective for you, it is written by a serious student of cooking that has been actively studying food on their own for 25 years. I have been focusing on Italian food for the last 10 years. My favorite cookbook is "The Professional Chef" by the Culinary Institute of America.
Each trip my husband and I take to Italy we find new dishes to love that we want to recreate at home. With Mario's book you can bring your vacation home to your own kitchen. His directions are extremely easy to follow, dare I say they appear to be foolproof.
My husband loves to look at the glossy pictures in the book and pick out dinner. If you like to see pictures of the finished dishes this book has plenty of pictures to satisfy that desire.
I use this cookbook on a weekly basis and have been pleased with every recipe that I have tried. Mario's recipe for Osso Buco (page 363) is worth the price of the book alone. My husband loves the Chocolate Hazelnut fritters (page 477). I believe that there is something for everyone in this book.
If you are looking to expand your Italian cookbook library, take a look at the "Harry's Bar Cookbook". It is written by the owner of the famous bar in Venice, and is a fabulous addition to any cookbook library for those that love authentic Italian food.
You cannot go wrong with this book if you love serious Italian food. This is one of the most used books in my cookbook collection. Even with 500 cookbooks to choose from I frequently find myself reaching for this book. Unlike other cookbooks, this one obviously had all its recipes tested many times. I have made more than 50% of the recipes in this book and everyone has turned out well. Kudos to Mario for a fantastic effort and an exceptional end result.
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64 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
requires effort, commitment, January 22, 2006
i guess you could say calling this "simple italian recipes" could be a bit misleading. going into this expecting 300 recipes that you can whip up in 15 minutes with $10 worth of ingredients from a run of the mill supermarket could leave you a bit disappointed.
the first thing you need to know is that batali is fanatical about quality. this means that while some of these recipes may not call for a laundry list of ingredients, getting the quality he's looking for is going to cost you either time, money or both. for instance, he's not telling you to buy the $2 can of 4c grated cheese - it's the $15 a pound stuff imported from italy. and when it's time for a special cut of meat, you need to be prepared to make a trip to a butcher. depending on what part of the country you live in, some traditional ingredients could occasionally be hard to come by, so be prepared.
the second thing you may want to know is that if you're expecting a lot of traditional italian-american style dishes, this book doesn't have them. for the most part these recipes are straight from different parts of italy, unaltered unless stated otherwise. if you're not familiar with what constitutes different types of authentic regional italian cuisine, it would make sense to read through some of the recipes to decide whether or not this book is really going to give you what you want.
these 'warnings' aside, this book is amazing for several reasons. first, the aforementioned commitment to quality and effort that batali is so hung up on. in a society where quick fix foods are replacing any semblence of respectable authentic cuisine, batali's call to arms on this subject runs a lot deeper than your local grocery store. it's a call to a different way of life. you could say he comes off as a bit of a snob, but i think that would be inaccurate. he clearly has a passion for the art of italian cuisine, and almost begs the reader to share that passion with him.
with regards to the physical book itself, i have no real complaints. there are many useful photographs of the dishes - not all of them - but i wouldn't say it's lacking. the layout is logical and easy to negotiate. batali adds on plenty of little asides to mention things that are important to specific ingredients - like how to select a good eggplant or how to make sure your octopus isn't rubbery (boil it with a cork!).
and last but not least, the food. what can i really say here? the recipes are authentic, delicious and most of all inspiring. they make you want to make them - especially the simplest recipes. and this is where the beauty of these dishes shows through - the simplicity of the ingredients. with the exception of a few things that have many ingredients, batali tends to send you to the store to buy five or so items that you can turn into an authentic dish that lets you appreciate the flavors of the ingredients you bought. and since you bought only the best as i mentioned earlier, it tastes pretty darn good.
this book requires that you give in order to get back. incorporating this way of cooking into your life will most likely mean you have to change the way you do some things. change the way you shop. change how much time you get to watch tv at the end of the day. change how much time you spend in the kitchen. but something tells me these tradeoffs will be worth your while at the end of the day.
great book. recommended.
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