Customer Reviews

Sweet Basil, Garlic, Tomatoes and Chives: The Vegetable Dishes of Tuscany and Provence

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there is no cookbook which has ever connected me more to the wide-eyed, wondering discovery of a food culture than Diana Shaw's excellent and readable 'Sweet Basil, Garlic, Tomatoes and Chives.' everything that I know deep down in my heart about authentic cuisine was in some way shaped by Shaw. her methods are both ancient and easily imitated (even in the apartment-above-an-insurance-company kitchen where I first cooked with this book in college), and though it is a vegetarian cookbook it does not try to replace meat with other things, only honors the meatless possibilities in the cuisines of France, Italy and Northern Africa.

this is the cookbook that gets most to the heart of why I cook. as I wrote in Culinate, "She writes about love, and food, and how those are just two ways of saying the same thing. "I love you," and "Here is my baked spinach with eggs and béchamel, my asparagus frittata, my ricotta cheesecake, here, for you" -- these are identical phrases." Shaw's food is love, it is earth-shattering, it is simple, it is delicious.