Customer Reviews

Sophia Loren's Recipes and Memories

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Beauty is the theme that runs through "Sophia Loren's Recipes & Memories." The beauty of Italy, whether it be Genoa or Naples, and the beauty of Ms. Loren, and her family, and friends, shine in this wonderful cookbook. It is a Latin custom to share food, recipes, memories, stories, and smiles when one is in la cucina. Ms. Loren is a very down-to-earth cook, and she invites you into her kitchen to share her recipes and memories. She wants to confide the "piccoli secreti" ("little secrets") of her table, her cooking, and her kitchen. She shows treasured photos and her famous zest for life; to her, "family is sacred."

These recipes are authentic. I have tested several of them and find them to be excellent. The recipes are minimalist and leave plenty of room for improvisation, so you can substitute seasonal fresh ingredients or add your own version of a dish to hers. Although this cookbook has meat and meatless recipes, I have found that many of the traditional meat-based recipes may be adapted for a vegetarian without much fuss. Most of the recipes have full-color pictures, with beautiful food styling.

Many of the recipes reflect Ms. Loren's Neapolitan heritage. She offers "Ragù alla Napoletana" (Neapolitan Stuffed Beef Rolls and Sauce), which is a classic meal for Sunday family dinners. The making of the ragù, or sauce, is a ritual in the Italian kitchen. For vegetarians, there are two wonderful recipes: "Spaghetti con Salsa al Pomodoro Semplice" (Spaghetti with Basic Tomato Sauce) and "Spaghetti con Pomodoro Crudo" (Spaghetti with Uncooked Tomato Sauce.)

This cookbook offers recipes and guidelines for preparing everything from Antipasti to Dolci. One can use this book to make an authentic Italian dinner, with all the courses, from start-to-finish. Here is one of my favorite meals for casual entertaining, with recipes taken from Ms. Loren's book: Antipasti ("Melone e Prosciutto" e "Bruschetta"); Zuppa ("Il Minestrone"); Il primo ("Linguine con Salsa Sophia"); Il secondo ("Agnello Bella Napoli"); Dolce ("Torte di Ricotta.")

While Ms. Loren's cookbook does favor Neapolitan specialities, such as pizza, baccalà, and tirami-sù, she also offers classic recipes from Rome, Genoa, and Sicily.

"La cucina sfiziosa" is "the whimsy kitchen." "Sfizioso, -a" is a colorful Neapolitan word that Ms. Loren defines on page 178 as ". . . that little extra touch that takes a dish beyond its traditional form and adds a hint of fancy, sparking the curiosity and satisfying the most difficult palate."

I enjoy the spirit, imagination, creativity, and love that I find in these recipes and memories. Grazie Sophia Loren, la belleza della cucina e del cinema!

The book is filled with loads of recipes for the novice as well as a seasoned cook. I am a vegetarian and I found many recipes that meet my requirements. There is a large variety of recipes, most of which you could serve to your family or to company. The pictures and info on Sophia over the years is a bonus. I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys Italian cuisinne

I loved the book and the receipes are easy to follow and they are good to eat too. I love to cook and since I am Italian and my grandparents came from Naples I really enjoyed this cook book

I love cooking the recipes in this book because they require few ingredients and cook with little preparation. The rustic simplicity of these recipes resonates very well with her childhood and adolescent memories. You get the feeling that the poverty that she endured in her youth has now tempered to only warm memories with time, but you can still read the hunger and deprivation between the lines. She is so gracious! You really feel as if she is handing you her family recipes. I was never a big fan of hers(too young to enjoy her movies) but I appreciate her so much more--she reveals so much if you read between the lines. One of my favorite recipes is spaghetti with lemon. I didn't have any cream so I used butter instead. Came out great. Took absolutely no time to prepare.

Beauty is the theme that runs through "Sophia Loren's Recipes & Memories." The beauty of Italy, whether it be Genoa or Naples, and the beauty of Ms. Loren, and her family, and friends, shine in this wonderful cookbook. It is a Latin custom to share food, recipes, memories, stories, and smiles when one is in la cucina. Ms. Loren is a very down-to-earth cook, and she invites you into her kitchen to share her recipes and memories. She wants to confide the "piccoli secreti" ("little secrets") of her table, her cooking, and her kitchen. She shows treasured photos and her famous zest for life; to her, "family is sacred."

These recipes are authentic. I have tested several of them and find them to be excellent. The recipes are minimalist and leave plenty of room for improvisation, so you can substitute seasonal fresh ingredients or add your own version of a dish to hers. Although this cookbook has meat and meatless recipes, I have found that many of the traditional meat-based recipes may be adapted for a vegetarian without much fuss. Most of the recipes have full-color pictures, with beautiful food styling.

Many of the recipes reflect Ms. Loren's Neapolitan heritage. She offers "Ragù alla Napoletana" (Neapolitan Stuffed Beef Rolls and Sauce), which is a classic meal for Sunday family dinners. The making of the ragù, or sauce, is a ritual in the Italian kitchen. For vegetarians, there are two wonderful recipes: "Spaghetti con Salsa al Pomodoro Semplice" (Spaghetti with Basic Tomato Sauce) and "Spaghetti con Pomodoro Crudo" (Spaghetti with Uncooked Tomato Sauce.)

This cookbook offers recipes and guidelines for preparing everything from Antipasti to Dolci. One can use this book to make an authentic Italian dinner, with all the courses, from start-to-finish. Here is one of my favorite meals for casual entertaining, with recipes taken from Ms. Loren's book: Antipasti ("Melone e Prosciutto" e "Bruschetta"); Zuppa ("Il Minestrone"); Il primo ("Linguine con Salsa Sophia"); Il secondo ("Agnello Bella Napoli"); Dolce ("Torte di Ricotta.")

While Ms. Loren's cookbook does favor Neapolitan specialities, such as pizza, baccalà, and tirami-sù, she also offers classic recipes from Rome, Genoa, and Sicily.

"La cucina sfiziosa" is "the whimsy kitchen." "Sfizioso, -a" is a colorful Neapolitan word that Ms. Loren defines on page 178 as ". . . that little extra touch that takes a dish beyond its traditional form and adds a hint of fancy, sparking the curiosity and satisfying the most difficult palate."

I enjoy the spirit, imagination, creativity, and love that I find in these recipes and memories. Grazie Sophia Loren, la belleza della cucina e del cinema!

More than just a collection of family recipes, "Sophia Loren's Recipes and Memories" is a sumptuous and often intimate journey into the life of one of the world's classiest and most admired and loved movie stars. The 100 traditional and improvised recipes are accompanied by insightful anecdotes about the movie business, acting, family life, the art of cooking, and growing up in her home country of Italy, with gorgeous photographs that bring Ms. Loren's passion for her past, and her present, to glorious life.

With such a legendary acting career to her credit, Ms. Loren has met and worked with many of the greats in the business, and she talks about her behind-the-scenes experiences, peppered throughout the book in between the real highlights, the recipes themselves. Many come from long-standing family traditions passed down from generation to generation, but many are also more modern, improvised takes on Italian dishes that Ms. Loren discovered on various locations of her many movies, or created herself from her vast knowledge of the culinary arts (this is not her first cookbook!).

The photographs by Alison Harris chronicle the evolution of both Ms. Loren's long and illustrious career, and her home life in Italy and abroad, with lush and colorful glimpses into a life centered around the pleasures of home and the family kitchen, as well as behind the camera. That Ms. Loren loves food is obvious in this beautiful, coffee-table style cookbook. That she loves life is even more so.

As an Italian-born woman I found the receipes in this cookbook to actually be very authentically Italian and delicious. Not sure I buy the fact that Loren makes these dishes, but whoever cooked them up did a great job! Buon Appetito!

When I was in my early twenties I enjoyed cooking Italian dishes with my grandmother every Tuesday. My grandmother is a true Italian woman, raised in New York and believes a family should eat a homemade meal every night. She gave me this book as she thought it was a suberb Italian cookbook. I couldn't agree more. As a young person, this is a great book because the receipes are not too comlicated, as common Italian dishes and taste delicious! Almost every recipe has a color photo too. My favorite recipes in the book are: Bucatini alla Carbonara, Spaghetti al Limone and the lentil soup.

"Sophia Loren's Recipes & Memories" is a book to be treasured, read and re-read, for its charming insight into the life and times of one of the world's great actresses, and for its wonderful, traditional Italian recipes, laced with more than a little spice-of-life.

Buy two of them! One for you to savor, one for a special gift for a favorite person in your life. I read this photo-filled book cover-to-cover the minute it arrived, and then enthusiastically ordered a second copy for my favorite cook, my son, the pastry chef. The first sentence in this memoir is "According to an old adage, the best condiment for any food is hunger." This book will make you passionately hungry for the best of Italian cooking, and it will inform you in the lovliest way possible, about old-world Italian kitchen traditions, not to mention a fascinating vision of Ms. Loren's life in film.

This is a treasured book to have. Sophia's own personal Neapolitan recipes and great pictures. It is a wonderful addition for any home and sort of a personal gift from Sophia to the world.Very happy with this purchase.