Customer Reviews

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford Companions)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Love this book - answers any question you have about italian cooking, and in such an engaging writing style - this isn't a boring reference book. I don't know much about Gillian Riley, but I know she clearly loves what she's talking about. A beautiful addition to my food book collection - highly recommended!!!!

Gillian Riley with the help of other contributors has created a comprehensive encyclopedia of Italian food, which is enlivened with mini-essays that display her wit and her erudition. She covers all 20 regions of the mainland, Sicily and Sardinia. She discusses cheeses, sausages, produce, spices, regional dishes, cooking styles, history, cultural influences and important culinary figures, but excludes wine, which would require a volume of its own.

Some pages look like standard encyclopedias, for example, page 322:

Prosciutto (see ham and Parma ham)
Provatura, a pulled buffalo-milk cheese similar to mozzarella
Provola, an aged (or smoked) pulled cheese from the south
Provolone, the same cheese made in the north, where the milk is richer and more abundant
Provola di Floresta, a pulled cheese made from cattle on Mount Etna
Prunes (see plums)
Pudding
Puglia, which continues for several pages.

Essays include:

-- A discussion of Futurist painter Marinetti's attack on pasta for making Italians pacific and listless She points out, as Marinetti never did, that rice was "a patriotic, home-grown food, unlike pasta, which depended on imported grain".

-- Beef Carpaccio was named by Giuseppe Ciprani of Harry's Bar because the color "reminded Cipriani of the deep reds in the paintings in a stunning exhibition in the Palazzo Ducale in 1963 of Carpaccio, a name to conjure with, which is what everyone has been doing ever since".

-- Pirciati are a long hollow kind of pasta similar to bucatini. Although there are no formal recipes in the book, Gillian illustrates the perfect sauce for pirciati with a delightful restaurant scene from one of Andrea Camilleri's Commissario Montalbano books, "Il Colore della Notte". The sauce "burns", as you can tell from the ingredients: oil, onion, two garlic cloves, two anchovies, a teaspoon of capers, black olives, half a chilli pepper, tomato, basil, black pepper and grated pecorino. "Alternating forks of food with gulps of wine, groans of extreme agony and unbearable bliss ... Montalbano even had the courage to mop up the remaining sauce with a piece of bread, wiping his brow from time to time."

-- Cicero, the Roman orator, reportedly gave the family name to chickpeas, whose Latin name is Cicer arietinum (ceci in Italian).

-- Mozzarella di bufala is made from the milk of water buffalo not native to the country. They were brought to Italy from Asia during the late Roman Empire -- a better legacy than garum, a sauce made by fermenting fish and their entrails.

-- The entry for Parmesan runs to more than 2,000 words and includes information on its nutritional value, the region where it is produced, the breed of cow used to produce it (the razza reggiana, or vacche rosse), the role of the cheese maker, the origin of its name, Moliere's deathbed demand for it, its frequent and lustrous depiction in 16th and 17th century paintings, and the proper method of serving: "One disdains the phallic peppermill, but must always appreciate the attentive grating, at the table, of parmesan over pasta or soup, as magical in its way as shavings of truffles."

The book includes extensive cross referencing, a thematic index, a general index, a comprehensive bibliography, and a list of suggested further reading.

I would have liked more illustrations, and perhaps some pronunciation guides. Nonetheless, this is an invaluable resource for anyone searching for information on Italian food, and it is enormous fun to read.


Robert C. Ross 2008

This is an excellent book, but not for beginners. It requires a considerable level of knowledge, but the amount of information -historical, technical, gastronomic- is truly outstanding. Kudos!

This is great. My only issue is that the soft cover over the hard cover arrived slightly damaged from the poor shipping box it comes in.

This is a very uneaven book. For a companion to food, the book has too much a historical focus - and unfortunately is always pre-20th century history. It is always as if Italian food in 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000 does not evolve. I would have loved to get the 20th century history of pasta for instance, but this is not something, in which the author is interested. We are only told that pasta became dominant after the second world war. Period. Naturally, this begs the question 'Why?'. The author is silent.

One gets the impression that the author loves Italy and travels there on vacation, but doesn't know any Italians. There is no information about current chefs in Italy, there is nothing about 20th (or 21st) century food trends, etc. The entry on cookbooks only lists Italian cookbooks written by English speaking authors. Where is the information about Italian cookbooks written by Italian speaking authors? My guess is that the author gets all her information from the British Library in London.

The style is similar to Davidson's "Oxford Companion to Food", but that is a much more fascinating book because it covers such a broad spectrum. I wish the current author would have teamed up with an Italian who knows ingredients and what has happened in Italy during the last 50 years. That would have created a very interesting book. The current book can not be recommended to people who just like Italian food, but if you are crazy about Italian food, please check it out.

the alphabetical index leaves much to be desire. what there is is of excellent quality

THis is a professional chefs dictionary.... Not as explained in advertisements.... I thought this was going to be a collectors Italian "JOY OF COOKING" ...That's why I returned it the same day that I received it....
Sam Campanaro