Customer Reviews

Savoring Italy: Recipes and Reflections on Italian Cooking (Savoring Series)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I love Italy and even more I love Italian food. This cookbook's lovely pictures of the Italian countryside and delicious food made me want to book a flight immediately! I have gone to cooking school in Tuscany and the recipes sing with essence of the amazing food found in trattorias and restaurants there. This is a good book both for those who are serious about cooking and for those who just love to travel with their senses thru beautiful and thoughtful books.

This book has become one of my favorite Italian cookbooks. The photographs are so glorious, you cannot browse through it without running to the kitchen afterwards, inspired to create some tasty dish. As the Italian Food Host @ BellaOnline, I am always looking for inspiration to create new Italian recipes, and this book has lots! I have made over twenty of the recipes so far for family and friends, and every one has been a big hit. This book is well worth the money!

This book is simply gorgeous. It's recipes are simple but elegant. I recently purchased it and have made several recipes including the panzella (incredible), and only takes 25 min. to do and the prosuitto wrapped asparagus with mozzerella, (amazing) don't forget to sprinkle with paprikah. Most recipes use fresh ingredients, a mainstay of italian cooking, and they are easy yet impressive. This book is a must for all who enjoy cooking and for those who do not, it has wonderful descriptions of the regional origination of each recipe and beautiful accompanying pictures. You can travel to italy without even leaving your kitchen.

I am originally from Genova Italy and one day shopping for a friend's birthday present I came across this book. Not only I belive this is a authentic and unique collection of italian recepieces but for me was a great way of sharing part of me and my country with a special friend.

I love this book. I got it as a Christmas gift and I use it all the time. The photographs are gorgeous and each recipe is illustrated. I like that the recipes are relatively simple and require few ingredients. I also enjoy the descriptions and definitions of terms and regions in Italy.

This is one of those priceless, beautiful cookbooks that can easily do double duty as a coffee table book. Speaking as a grandson of Guido and Katherine Agostinelli, I think I can speak with a certain amount of authority with regard to this cookbook when I say "That's Italian." Readers can be inspired by the photographs to try to improve their own culinary abilities. Personally, I have been known to burn a bowl full of Raisin Bran, (don't ask, I can find a way, believe me,) but with this book I'm inspired to try all kinds of great recipes.

It's divided into sections on antipasti, pizzas, breads, pastas, risotti, soups, fish, poultry, meat, frittatas, seasonal vegetables, salads, cakes, cookies, and fruit desserts. Every section is beautiful, inspiring, and ultimately delicious. Two thumbs up.

I received this as a gift when we decided to go to Italy for our honeymoon. Upon receipt I leafed through the book but did not have the appreciation I do for it how. On the plane home from Italy I could not wait to dig into the book and attempt to cook the wonderful food I had just spent two weeks eating. This book not only serves as a wonderful travel reference guide, it serves up delicious, authentic Italian recipies. All of us who long to spend long evenings in a Florence Trattoria, this is a must-have!

I have a lot of Italian-Cooking-Books but this is by far the BEST ! The recipe are easy to follow, no fency ingredients (the most I have in my Pantry) and the fotos make you cook them all at once ! When I still lived in Germany I traveled a lot to Italy, this are all very authentic Recipes. A good Glas of Wine with this Dishes and you feel like in Italy ! ENJOY !!!

`Savoring Italy' is a title written by Michele Scicolone and published in the Williams-Sonoma series of oversized, lavishly photographed culinary tours of important foodie centers around the world. I bought this book before I was very familiar with Ms. Scicolone's abilities and track record as an Italian recipe writer, so I tended to dismiss it as bargain table fodder. But now, in looking back at my unreviewed backlist, I find this volume is something of a buried treasure.

Scicolone has most recently made a big splash in the Italian cookbook world with her 1000 Italian Recipes book, another highly formulaic volume that I still found very worthy alongside the heavyweights of Italian cookbook writing such as Bastianich, Hazan, and Bugialli. I did compare some recipes in this volume to Mario Batali's latest, `Molto Italy' and found the newly crowned (2005 James Beard Awards) best chef in the country to have the advantage on Ms. Scicolone's 1000 recipes in interest and in quality of procedure.

I have done a similar comparison of our volume `Savoring Italy' to the encyclopedic `1000 Italian Recipes' and find a similar result. For starters, I looked for six different recipes from `Savoring Italy' in the larger book and found only two with exactly the same Italian name. Two of the six had similar recipes in the two books. Two of the recipes in `Savoring Italy' had no close counterparts in `1000 Italian Recipes'.

What is more interesting is that where the recipes had the same or a similar name, the ingredients and procedure in `Savoring Italy' were always more elaborate than the corresponding recipe in `1000 Italian Recipes'. For example, `1000 Italian Recipes' has a recipe for stuffed beef rolls in tomato sauce (`Braciole al Pomodoro') with eight ingredients while `Savoring Italy' has a similar English named dish (`Braciole di Manzo') which has twelve ingredients, adding prosciutto, pine nuts, raisins, and parsley, and substituting Provolone cheese for Pecorino Romano. I see similarly more elaborate treatments for all the recipes I check, including such classics as Caponata. Oddly, while `1000 Italian Recipes' salts the eggplant in its caponata recipe, `Savoring Italy' does not. Like Joel Robuchon (actually, because of Joel Robuchon's statements), I prefer avoiding the eggplant salting and prefer to look for younger fruits to avoid the bitterness of older produce.

I take issue with the reviewer who says these are simple recipes. Compared even to Scicolone's major reference book, they are more complicated.

So, on the recipe front, the big picture book is a totally worthy addition for anyone who happens to collect Italian cookbooks, or happens to like big, glossy culinary books in general.

I am not a very good critic of photography, but my gut feeling about the pics in this book is that they are above average, but not of the very highest quality. The only real technical issue I saw was that inside shots seemed a bit grainy compared to those done in full outdoor sunlight. But, for a book retailing at a smidge below $40, they are pretty good. Their selection of subjects was equally good, in that it did not concentrate too much on the very familiar and avoided the `been there, done that' feeling. My biggest issue with the pics is that there are several on the early pages of the book which have no captions. A naïve eye could put some of the pictures anywhere from California to Greece.

The book has the obligatory culinary map of Italy with provinces and major cities identified by name among all the cute little produce icons. The non-recipe text is good, but has little which is revealing to anyone who has read much of Italian cuisine, or spent more than a few months watching `Molto Mario' and `Mario Eats Italy' on the Food Network. If you want a good overview of Italian regional cuisines, see Claudia Roden's `The Food of Italy, Region by Region' or Waverly Root's `The Food of Italy'.

The glossary on stock foods and wines of Italy is good, but typical of short treatments. It is good for the casual reader, but not all there for the foodie or professional. The edge this has over some other books is that it contains thumbnail instructions on how to make and or prepare things such as breadcrumbs, beans, and anchovies.

This book is all about the sum of its parts. The recipes are probably more lavish than you will fine on Nonna's dinner table. These are the more celebratory versions of classic recipes, saved for special occasions or served at upscale restorantes. But this format calls for lavish dishes to match the oversize scale of the pages and the photographs.

Bottom line is that this book is worth its salt. So, if you are looking for a big, expensive Italian cookbook with evocative pictures and good frills, this one will give you your money's worth.

This is a wonderful book full of great recipes and the seller had a copy in excellent condition. A must have if you love Italian cooking!