Rating: 
Summary: very good
Review: Covers: Marcella's thoughts on ingredients and buying them, appetizers, soups, pasta (making and sauce) risotto and polenta, fish, poultry and rabbit, meat, vegetables, salads and desserts. I liked the book, I find the recipes easy to follow and pretty tasty. I especially liked the beginning info on olive oil, and parmesan cheese. The book is not a northern italian or southern italian cookbook, it's sort of a mix of all over Italy, which is something to keep in mind. The pictures are very nice, and the quality of the book binding is very sound.
Rating: 
Summary: Marcella does it again
Review: Despite the comments of some readers who found Marcella's devotion to cooking for her husband troublesome, I found it to be quite touching. The goal of women's liberation was not for us to give up such potentially creative tasks as cooking but to give us choices! I choose to cook because I love it and this book with it's rich descriptions, beautiful design and wonderful receipes reminds me why I love to cook...it's a satisfying, sensual experience. By the way, my husband loves my cooking too! Thanks Marcella.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Book
Review: I adore this cookbook. The photographs are beautiful, the story behind each recipe is fascinating, the explanations are clear and the results are superb. I am awed by Marcella Hazan's ability to take simple ingredients and create fantastic results with sheer technique and attention to details, such as slicing vs. chopping garlic, sauteing certain ingredients for a long time and adding others for a short time, using butter here and olive oil there and even just plain vegetable oil at other times. There are two summer pasta sauces with nearly identical ingredients, and, as Marcella points out, completely different results. I have made almost all of the sauces and none have been less than delicious. I have discovered the joy of pancetta thanks to this book. I have learned how to make risotto, very good and not all that difficult. Now I am venturing into the meats - the beef stew with capers, cornichons and pancetta was amazing. I have learned alot about good cooking from this book, and not just of Italian food. Marcella's cooking is alive and accessible and completely masterful at the same time.
Rating:
Summary: one of my all-time favorites
Review: I adore this cookbook. The photographs are beautiful, the story behind each recipe is fascinating, the explanations are clear and the results are superb. I am awed by Marcella Hazan's ability to take simple ingredients and create fantastic results with sheer technique and attention to details, such as slicing vs. chopping garlic, sauteing certain ingredients for a long time and adding others for a short time, using butter here and olive oil there and even just plain vegetable oil at other times. There are two summer pasta sauces with nearly identical ingredients, and, as Marcella points out, completely different results. I have made almost all of the sauces and none have been less than delicious. I have discovered the joy of pancetta thanks to this book. I have learned how to make risotto, very good and not all that difficult. Now I am venturing into the meats - the beef stew with capers, cornichons and pancetta was amazing. I have learned alot about good cooking from this book, and not just of Italian food. Marcella's cooking is alive and accessible and completely masterful at the same time.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful recipes full of flavour
Review: I bought this book thru Amazon before it was distributed in New Zealand and recommended to friends to get this book when it came out here. The recipes are great - easy to follow and taste fantastic. Many of the pasta sauces are easy and quick to do after a long day at work, and I save the long slow cooking ones for the weekend. The prawn & orange salad is fantastic - great for a summertime Christmas, and the peach, berry and sparkling wine fruit salad is also a big hit. Veal patties, fricassed chicken, vegetables..I could go on. Just a note on the political correctness comments - Marcella was a woman of her time and culture - different from modern New Zealanders and Americans, so cooking for her husband should be put in context. Anyway, cooking food is about love for your family and friends and I think that is what she was focusing on rather than 'serving her husband'.
Rating:
Summary: great for gardener/cooks
Review: I love this book. One of the things that makes food in Italy so delicious is they use and combine whatever ingredients happen to be in season. Marcella follows this tradition. I love to pick recipes out of this book and find that everything it calls for is available in my garden, and I can pick fresh and cook.
Rating:
Summary: Wow..ITs Great..
Review: I received this book for my birthday along with this amazing new beverage as an alternative to coffee. Made from 100% soy that's organic, its absolutely delicious! It's caffeine-free and comes in 8 delicious flavors. Just google it under "s oyfee" to find it and you won't be disappointed.
I've had this book for several years and it is used more than any other. Virtually all the recipes have been wonderful. This book has become my recipe staple! I cannot think of any recipe that turned out bad! It has several "dictionaries" for those new to cooking, each recipe has an approx. time from start to finish, and lots and lots of recipes!
Rating:
Summary: A great mistake.....
Review: I received this book in error because I didn't send back the card to my book club (sorry Amazon) in time. Well, I couldn't be happier. Being an Italian (and an italian cook), I am always looking for new and exciting recipes. Generally, I buy a cookbook, find recipes and modify them for improvement. Mrs. Hazan's recipes are wonderful. No modification necessary. The recipes are simple with few ingredients that are key for incredible flavor. Her writing is both intelligent and eloquent, a rarity for cookbooks. I have many italian cookbooks and they pale in comparison. Last night I prepared her pasta with cherry tomatoes, scallions and chili peppers. It was sooo good. Who would think that 24 scallions can be so subtle and delicious. Molto bene.I am about to order her other books. Mangiare!!.
Rating:
Summary: Great recipes, politically incorrect
Review: Like another reviewer, I too was a bit bothered by the the author's constant attempts to please her husband. To put it succinctly: if he didn't like what she cooked, he should have prepared his own meals! This said, the recipes are fabulous. She includes a description of slow cooking an onion which left me drooling. She is obviously an excellent teacher, and that quality alone makes this book a great buy.
Rating:
Summary: Victor Hazan revealed as key figure in culinary psychodrama.
Review: Marcella fans the world over have almost certainly already added this new book to their kitchen bookshelf with the other oil and tomato sauce-splattered volumes from the deliciously intolerant queen of the Italian kitchen. Fame and glory have clearly had an effect on Marcella. Scorn for food fads, French cooking, vegetarians, or even people vaguely concerned about eating too much salt, have always made her the most entertaining and politically incorrect food writer in the world. But here she goes even further. Marcella Cucina reveals the Marcella id in all its glory and introduces the previously shadowy figure of her husband Victor as a key figure in an Italian culinary psychodrama. The book begins in the usual way with a little essay about the basic ingredients of Italian cooking which is full of the trademark Marcella irritation with ignorant oafs and their idiotic ideas. Take this delightful running kick aimed squarely at anti-butter health nuts, "I am dismayed by the misguided attitude of those who champion olive oil over butter as though it were a cause. How do they make the sauces for their homemade pasta, I'd like to know, or the bases for most risottos? How indeed. Or this head butt to American and English bread eaters "(In America and England)...one slathers it with butter or, in the current lamentable fashion, dunks it in olive oil...We would find it grotesque to waste good olive oil by pouring it into saucers for dipping bread". You go girl! Marcella Cucina contains more recipes in the style of all her previous books. This is one of the wonderful things about the world of Marcella Hazan - its constancy. She is, by her own admission, not interested in "fusion of cross-cultural culinary hybrids" but rather in communicating a clear sense of place. Hers is regional cooking by definition and as such there are few surprises. However, I am glad to see some more rabbit dishes. There is only one other rabbit recipe in any of her books (stewed rabbit with white wine from her first book) and, the few times I have tried it, it was uncharacteristically mediocre. There is an amazing selection of salads and soups here and most of them - like the swiss chard, cannellini bean and barley soup that is simmering as I write - sound wonderful. But what of Victor "for and because of" whom these recipes were created? He crops up unexpectedly all over the place as a dark Svengali figure; the demiurge behind the Marcella experience. Marcella cucina but Victor wears the pants. Readers of her previous books will be familiar with the story of how Marcella learned to cook. A young wife in a foreign city with an important husband out at work all day on lofty missions, she didn't know how to cook and felt inadequate. Not that she hadn't been a career woman mind you, but she had given all that up to please Victor. But if she couldn't cook, how was she going to keep her man happy? Why, by spending countless hours in the kitchen trying to recreate the tastes of her childhood. This oft-told story has always seemed charming in a retro kind of way, but here it is expanded and begins to take on darker overtones: "After (Victor) left in the morning, the days were long and lonely and often I was desperate". She tells us how she planned and cooked a complete Italian meal every day to please Victor when he returned from work. "I described how I made each dish and my husband complimented me on the ones that were successful and, happily less often, consoled me when they were not, suggesting how they might be improved." Victor is a formidable taskmaster who knows how to treat a woman. A recipe for Tuscan beans is attributed to a former housekeeper of his who clearly enjoyed his dominant ways. Marcella tells us that when Victor asked the submissive servant to clean his apartment and cook for him "her face shone as though she had just been awakened from a bad dream by the good prince". But clearly Marcella herself is not always so charmed by his peremptory arrogance. The same recipe opens with the following exchange between Marcella and Victor: ""What do you want to eat today?" I ask my husband. It seems to me a very sweet, solicitous question for a wife to pose, but it never fails to irritate Victor. "I can't think about it now," he usually snaps." Poor Marcella.
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