The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford Companions) (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: hitter orange juice, fcnncl seeds, pork tat, Ada Boni, Vincenzo Corrado, New World (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Admitting that no one book can adequately cover Italian food, Riley, a British author and food historian, promises to “convey the delights and excitement of the pursuit.” She certainly does this in a scholarly yet entertaining volume. The more than 900 entries, arranged in dictionary format, read like essays. There are no recipes as such, but many dishes describe the ingredients and methods of cooking. All aspects of food are mentioned—ingredients, implements and methods of cooking, chefs, regions of the country, etc. Convenience foods, Cookbooks, and Coriander are all described in entries of 2 pages. Chickpeas and Parmesan each merit 3 pages. Pig has 5 pages, followed by separate entries for the fat, head, offal, and other pig parts. Various aspects of pasta are discussed in 11 entries over 13 pages. Riley quotes excerpts from literature (some only in Italian) to illustrate the use of a food. One of her favorite writers is Andrea Camilleri. In the entry for Sand smelt, there is a half-page description of Montalbano (Camilleri’s fictional detective) eating fritters made with the tiny fish. A few small but artful black-and-white photographs accompany the text. A detailed bibliography and a comprehensive index add to the usefulness of this volume as a research tool. Recommended for all culinary reference collections, but those who love Italy or Italian food will enjoy reading it for pleasure. --Christine Bulson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"Italian Food shouldn't remain on the shelf; instead, it should be savored."--Chicago Tribune
"Exhaustive."--Saveur Top Ten Reads
"Italian food buffs on your list may welcome a mini-encyclopedia that turns out to be almost an anti-encyclopedia: Gillian Riley's determinedly personal, quirky, wide-ranging The Oxford Companion to Italian Food".--Anne Mendelson, The New York Times
"Food historian and gastronome Gillian Riley's witty, expansive compendium deftly deconstructs everything from antipasto ("benign titillation of the palate with only a few delicacies") to zeppole ("overkill can be achieved with a filling of custard")."--Bon Appetit
"A magisterial (recipe-less) book that anyone even mildly interested in the subject must own....encourages you to read entry after entry for the pleasure of learning marvelous oddments about the obscure and the familiar."--The Atlantic
"[Riley is] a good, spunky writer who really knows what she's talking about...a master of the pithy observation."--Russ Parsons, The LA Times Blog
"Erudite, witty, and stuffed with gems"--The Telegraph
"She writes in [a] characteristically colloquial but never too casual tone, a lovely, rare style...laden...with humor, sly political commentary, and a general sense of the author's total immersion in and great passion for Italian cuisine and its connection to all other aspects of Italy."--Bookforum
"A scholarly yet entertaining volume. Recommended for all culinary reference collections, but those who love Italy or Italian food will enjoy reading it for pleasure."--Booklist
"A grand buffet of curious delights. Riley writes to entertain as well as to inform, and never holds back when there is a choice anecdote to relate....essential browsing for the serious Italo-foodlie."--John Dickie, The Guardian
"Authoritative, erudite, and unexpectedly entertaining."--The Independent
"For anyone who takes these styles of cooking seriously, these books are essential....First is Gillian Riley's The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, a fascinating encyclopedia of the Italian food world. Though it contains no recipes, it is a wonderful resource for understanding Italian recipes and how to cook them."--Associated Press
"WORTH READING: [This] new book will do more than spruce up your coffee table...The Oxford Companion to Italian Food reads like a literary dictionary, with entries covering all aspects of Italian cuisine paired with striking illustrations."--La Cucina Italiana
"Gillian Riley has assembled between the covers of this volume more useful information about the foods of Italy than is available in any other form, or in any other language, Italian included. Anyone with more than a passing interest in this seminal cuisine should be grateful to her, as I am."--Marcella Hazan
"Erudite, engaging, and captivating: an indispensable guide for Italophiles, food lovers, and the greedily curious."--Nigella Lawson
"A great tribute to a rich and complex culinary culture: the Italian. It contains all the essential information and more, from the earth to the table, within a historical, artisanal and cultural context. This is a must-have reference book for any serious lover of Italian food."--Lidia Bastianich

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Reprint edition (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195387104
• ISBN-13: 978-0195387100
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #246,728 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you wanted to know about italian food - right here, November 11, 2007

By	Ms. Readsalot (Yorktown Heights, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford Companion To...) (Hardcover)

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!!!!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent encyclopedia, February 13, 2008

By	Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford Companion To...) (Hardcover)

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

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marcella is right, February 11, 2008

By	Prof. R. Paris (Arlington, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford Companion To...) (Hardcover)

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!