Regional Foods of Northern Italy: Recipes and Remembrances [Hardcover]

Marlena de Blasi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 24, 1997

This is a cookbook like no other. It evokes the essence of Northern Italy's traditional foods in a beautifully wrought amalgam of recipe and narrative. It beckons you across the wet stone of Venice's Rialto bridge into a candlelit fifteenth-century cantina. It invites you down a forest road in Umbria, where grappa-fortified fishermen toss trout onto a wood fire and stage a sunset feast. It proffers nearly two hundred recipes from the heart and soul of Italy's North, including:

• Risotto allo Zafferano Milanese • Arista! Arista! •
• Pasta delle Sfogliatrici • Pesce in Saor •
• La Salsiccia alla Moda di Lucrezia Borgia • Fegato alla Veneziana •
• Carbonada d'Enfer Arvier • Pesto di Mandorle e Noci Ferraresi •
• Pollo alla Marengo • Cialzons della Famiglia de Galateo •
• Pagnotta di Patate • Pasta e Fagioli •
• Sogliole in Gratella • Caffe alla Valdostana • Tiramisu •

This remarkable world within a book reflects the honest, authentic tastes of a people for whom food is a cardinal passion. With it in hand, you will perfume your home with the ancient and divine scents of glorious food, calling forth the ineffable essence of this land and its bounty. Let the adventure begin.

About the Author
Marlena de Blasi is an American living in Venice with her husband, Fernando. She has traveled extensively in her adopted country, stopping to savor each region's abundance. A food and wine journalist and culinary historian, her articles on food and travel have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, The St. Louis Riverfront Times, and Sacramento magazine. She is presently writing this volume's sequel, Regional Foods of Southern Italy.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Marlena de Blasi's life-long love affair with cooking began at age 9 on a beach along the coast of Liguria, Italy. There she met an elderly woman roasting potatoes coated with rosemary, olive oil, and salt over an open fire. "It was then," de Blasi writes, "that I began to understand that the way people eat and drink is more a measure of them than all the other measurements...." In her book, Regional Foods of Northern Italy, de Blasi finds that her adopted homeland is filled with tastes, smells, and textures that evoke far more than great meals--they are the stuff of memory and dreams.

Regional Foods of Northern Italy focuses on 10 "gastronomic regions," areas in which the author has worked, lived, and cooked: Tuscana, Umbria, Romagna, Emilia, Veneto, Lombardia, Piemonte, Val D'Aosta, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Marche. The recipes in this book are, as de Blasi explains, only "interpretations" of these regional cuisines, since it would be nearly impossible to replicate the exact qualities of the local ingredients--the sweet white butter of the Romagnans or the chile peppers of La Marche. Still, wherever it's cooked, Pasta di Alberto Bettini, with its lacing of basalmic vinegar, is a loving expression of its native Emilia, while so simple a meal as olive oil drizzled over bread and eaten with a glass of red wine evokes the ageless hills of Tuscany. Whether you live in Stockholm or San Diego, Marlena de Blasi's fine collection of recipes can transport you--for the length of a meal, at least--on an extraordinary journey through Northern Italy. So Buon viaggio--e Buon appetito!

Review

Come, enjoy the flavors of Northern Italy.
Here, you'll embark on a culinary journey that will lift your spirits and inspire you to eat, to drink, to laugh, and to dream.
Benvenuti!

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Prima Lifestyles (September 24, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761509054
• ISBN-13: 978-0761509059
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #729,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marlena de Blasi has been a chef, a journalist, a food and wine consultant, and a restaurant critic. She is the author of two cookbooks, Regional Foods of Northern Italy (a James Beard Foundation Award finalist) and Regional Foods of Southern Italy. She and her husband, Fernando, now direct gastronomic tours through Tuscany and Umbria.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars DESERVES TO BE IN THE KITCHEN OF EVERY SERIOUS COOK, July 20, 2000

By 

"really-siobhan" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Regional Foods of Northern Italy: Recipes and Remembrances (Hardcover)

As I write this review, the book is out-of-stock. I want to share this book with everyone, so I am hoping that my review will change things around. First of all, the recipes in this book are complex -- but -- there are books that are much more challenging. Haute Mexican and Japanese cuisine are more difficult, the first because it grew out of a class culture where the food was cooked by maids the second because it is so unlike western food. There are things in this book that are exotic, even to Bostonians where "the Italian North End" was made such an imprint on the city. There is a pasta based on yeast raised dough that is wonderful on a winter's night when snow is falling. There are superb chicken dishes and magnificent desserts. This one of only two cookbooks that I have wanted to go through, page by page, recipe by recipe, and cook everything.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BEAUTY! LOVE! george's creed in a nutshell, August 17, 2008

By 

G "G" (LA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Regional Foods of Northern Italy: Recipes and Remembrances (Paperback)

You have been told you need the other "classic" Italian cookbooks like Marcella Hazan. You dabble in others like Lydia Bastianich. You collect cookbooks on certain favored regions like Rome. But really, there is nothing like this book by Marlena de Blasi, and her companion book on the foods of Southern Italy. There is an incredible beauty to the recipes, the selections, and the way in which the author weaves the food into narratives and stories about travel through Italy. Her recipes for many, many braised meat dishes are constants on my table. Every five to ten pages, I find a recipe that changes the way I cook and eat. I spend much time just reading the narratives, which I never do with other cookbooks. I have dog-eared and folded over the corners of pages for recipes that I hope to cook soon -- there are years of joy to be made between these cover -- recipes that I have made, recipes that I will make. Places that I will want to visit. All of that. Between these two books, I have been celebrating dinner parties with friends for years. I just adore these books, love them, and wish more and more people would realize what treasures they are.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good effort, but too lost in the romance of the place, April 30, 2006

By 

Brian Connors (Yarmouth, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Regional Foods of Northern Italy: Recipes and Remembrances (Paperback)

I like the recipes in this book. They give a nice cross-section of Northern Italian cooking, and are picked as much for being interesting as typical. Also, the stories and remniscences are those of a first-rate memoirist. The problem is that the two of them combined together make for a somewhat overly flowery reading.

I struggled with the star rating on this one -- it really is a worthwhile book to have, but it has serious flaws, the most glaring being the deliberate omissions of the regions of Trentino-Alto Adige and Liguria; the author's logic is that Trentino food is largely Austrian and that of Liguria more southern Italian in style, not helping the reader to know northern Italy, but that seems to me to be an overly romantic way of looking at it. I don't really like it when cookbook authors pare down their work for reasons of accessibility or percieved consistency, because the book loses a segment of the whole picture.

It's a pity, really, because it probably is one of the better books for understanding the food of northern Italy. The flowery tone of the book that I do not particularly enjoy actually does appeal to some, and the personal stories do give a context to the book that more technical cookbooks lack. If it was a more expensive book, I probably wouldn't recommend it, but it's a little like the idea of a film reviewer saying "wait for the DVD" -- it's not that pricey, so grab a copy and see what you think. (And I do like the Modenese pancetta-and-egg scramble in the book -- very tasty.)