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Summary: Great, delicious food that is easy to prepare
Review: Someone gave my wife and I this book, and we have used this as our primary cook book for the last three years. Every dish in this book is excellent - and the best Italian is the Italian you make at home. Using this book as a guide, we have been making dishes that easily surpass almost every restaurant out there. The ingredients are simple, and the cooking is easy, though some dishes do take time. Try the bolognese sauce! or the smothered onions!
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Summary: If you're going to buy just one Italian cookbook...
Review: If you're going to buy just one Italian cookbook, in my opinion this should be the one. The 20 odd pasta sauces alone would be enough to keep you busy and sated. Marcella Hazan's brand of cookery is not the most showy. I am constantly surprised how often I can prepare the dishes with ingredients I have on hand. If you follow her instructions carefully you'll wind up with a marvellous alchemy: the simplest ingredients yield the richest of flavors. I would definitely pay attention to her description of ingredients as our American version of some of them (parmesan and ricotta come to mind) are decidedly different from what she intends. I'll conclude by encouraging you to give the Chicken Cacciatore a go--the best ever.
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Summary: Indispensible
Review: Fork over the cash now. You need this on your kitchen shelves.If you really want authentic, full bodied Italian tastes in your dishes, you must have this on the shelf. This book is to Italian cookery what Pierre Franey is to French. Hazan outlines all of the necessary ingredients and the methods behind preparing them. The recipes are solid, but the method allows you to move beyond the formulae.
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Summary: A Goddess in the Kitchen
Review: What can I say that hasn't already been said? This woman (and some italian friends) have taught me anything I know italian food. Combining the two vols. is brilliant and, if there weren't any other reason, the recipe for pasta w/chicken liver sauce would make the price worth it. Marcella: I wan't to have your baby! xoxox
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Summary: Taught me to cook Italian. Taught me to cook, period.
Review: This book is wonderful. The recipes are easy to follow and never fail. Marcella is very opinionated about ingredients and you know, she's probably right: canned tomatoes from italy are better than canned tomatoes from America. They are better than anything but the sweetest ripest off the vine plum tomatoes you can only get a few weeks a year by growing your own. Her recipes aren't full of gimmicks, and short cuts that sacrifice flavor. They are often labor intensive or require more than twenty minutes of cooking time. But they work and are often an absolute revelation in taste. As someone else mentioned, the tomato/butter and onion sauce is to die for good and unbelievably simple. The best thing is the way success with these recipes has built my confidence. You can start off with a simple pasta sauce and work toward making your own pasta, pizza and other more complicated recipes. After success at making homemade gnocci with a simple sauce, I was inspired to move on. I have used ingredients I never would have touched in the past (anchovies??, Chestnuts??? and prosciutto??) and have gotten over my worry that if it took longer than 20 minutes to make that it wasn't worth the hassle. Good food is worth the hassle. And also there's the fact that so many of her recipes use staple ingredients that after you're familiar with the Essentials of Italian Cooking, you will always have around. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn to cook, but is unsure of where to begin. I would also highly recommend this book for gardeners since so many of the recipes are built around seasonal veggies like zucchini, tomato, eggplant, basil and greens you'll never again give your surplus zukes to the neighbors!
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Summary: The only Italian cookbook you'll need ...
Review: ... and maybe the only cookbook you need at all. Hands down the best; for content, ease of use, layout, and of course, those wonderful recipes. The Lemon Chicken is head-thumpingly easy, the Tomato Sauce with Butter and Onion is enough to justify the cost of the whole book (my husband and I stood over the pot with spoons and just ate!). The Sauce Bolognese - milk? Who knew? Since buying this book, I've collected all of Hazan's cookbooks, and attended a class taught by Hazan at the French Culinary Institute in NYC. Of all of those, the Essentials of Italian Cooking still holds the #1 spot. Simple is good.
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Summary: The Best
Review: Along with Ada Boni's Regional Italian Cooking (sadly out of print), this is the best Italian Cookbook I have ever come across. The recipes are magnificent, easy to follow, and a great introduction to real Old World Italian cooking for Americans and other English speakers. The soggy spaghetti drowning in tomato sauce and pizza buried under mountains of meat and cheese, which often passes for "Italian" cooking in the United States bears little resemblance to the real food of Italy. In this wonderful book, Marcella not only provides great authentic recipes but discusses in detail how to eat in the Italian style. She lays out the logic of eating in courses (a very civilized way to eat) and even discusses how to select the freshest produce, so essential to great Italian cooking. And unlike many cookbook writers, she is literate and entertaining! My one small criticism of the book is that she does not include the Italian names for the recipes: It would be nice to see these below the English names, but this is a minor point. I would agree with other reviewers: If you only buy one Italian cookbook in your lifetime, this should be it.
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Summary: Comprehensive and easy to follow
Review: What more could you ask for in a cook book? Excellent recipes that are relatively easy to follow. Comprehensive in scope. You could use this book for a lifetime and never exhaust it. Every recipe I've tried has worked out beautifully. A must for anyone who loves Italian food.
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Summary: Puro Italiano
Review: I cook from this book every night, and I give it to everyone I know. My Italian husband was skeptical at first because the recipes are in English (!), but he and his parents no longer tease, particularly after the time his mother "improved" Marcella's recipe for gnocchi di semolina and they didn't hold their shape. If you want to eat the same food the Italians are eating, buy this book and cook some up!
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Summary: The Best Cookbook I Own
Review: I gave my first copy of this to one of my best friends in 1999. I have been searching for one ever since. Now I have it, thanks to Amazon.
This book does what every cook in the world would like to do; ensure that every recipe comes out like it should. The book is flawless. The directions are from a woman who has been a chef forever. She has used every recipe. How many of us have bought a cookbook that did not show the recipes were tested?
If you buy this book and are a person with a limited budget, you are golden to go.
I have been cooking for 10 years with an army wife budget, and when I use these recipes, I get requests for the secrets. This book is the key to good cooking. It uses good ingredients, easy instructions, and the stories behind them leave the chef with a feeling of history.
Food should be so.
It is a celebration of meeting, eating, and tradition.
You can not go wrong with this book.
I love you Marcella.
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