Gastronomy Of Italy

Rating:
Summary: More than a cookbook...
Review: I haven't dug into this book fully yet, but since there wasn't an in-depth review, I'll add my quick two cents.

Areas covered include a brief history of Italian cuisine, and a region-by-region look at history and specialties. There are recipes, naturally, but the depth of the glossary sections (separate glossaries for ingredients and Italian terms/techniques) can't be overstated. The section on wine was a little too brief, but that information can absolutely be found elsewhere.

I have the paperback version of this book, which I'm guessing is the same version as this one, and feel like I got a heck of a gift from my step-sister this Xmas. While I really like the cookbooks of Lidia Bastianich (pictures are nice - this paperback has none, and the recipe variety is better), this book should be treated more as a reference than a cookbook. A solid addition to your kitchen, or even to your backpack if you're traveling Italy and want to decode the menu.

Rating:
Summary: A very nice reference for terms, recipes, and Italian books.
Review: `the Gastronomy of Italy' by Anna Del Conte is a dandy little reference to regional Italian recipes, products, wines, and techniques. The list of the author's other works and the imprimatur of the Accademia Italiana Della Cucina demonstrates that this is no quickie knock-off by publisher, Barnes and Noble. An examination of the book's contents confirms this first impression with a very nice collection of information for the foodie, the scholar, and the traveler.

The first chapter on the `development of Italian Gastronomy' is too short to compete with full length books on the subject, but it does give some interesting perspective in twelve (12) pages, with the claim that Italians owned the leadership in European cuisine through the Renaissance, only to let it slip away to the French with the political disintegration of the late seventeenth century. By far the most interesting content of this chapter is the account of major culinary works by Italians from the fifteenth century to the present. It is a revelation to hear writers of 400 years ago advising their readers to concentrate on fresh, seasonal produce. So this was not an idea invented by Alice Waters!

The second chapter on the Italian food culture fills out the picture we get from watching `Molto Mario'. It gives a very nice little list of major Italian food markets, which is a useful guide for someone wishing to create a culinary tour of Italy. The only thing I missed was a description of `Enoteca', the name of an Italian wine bar. The chapter on the culinary regions of Italy gets down to serious business. This profile is a great introduction, but again, it cannot compete with complete books written on the subject such as Claudia Roden's `The Food of Italy', Erica DeMane's `The Flavors of Southern Italy', and Micol Negrin's `Rustico' or the classic `The Foods of Italy' by Waverley Root. But, if you just want a quick look around, this will do the job, as long as you realize there is much this chapter is leaving out.

The next two chapters are the heart of the book and the primary reason you will want to buy it. First, there are 130 pages of recipes organized by ingredient or course, with headnotes that often indicate the geographical source of the recipe. Surprisingly, several recipes also come from American and English sources such as Marcella Hazan and Alan Davidson. It is a pleasant surprise to find the recipes in such an omnibus volume written with a keen eye to guiding the amateur to getting things right. A lot of cautions and advice which could easily be taken for granted are carefully spelled out, as when the recipe for polenta describes the delicate task of slowly streaming the corn meal into the pot with one hand while constantly stirring the pot with the other. Well done Anna! The only oddity with this selection of recipes is in the fact that the meat chapter is larger than the vegetable section, with lots of space being given to veal and beef recipes. While not even close to being a `complete' selection, the choice of recipes is very representative of classic Italian dishes.

The next chapter is probably the basis for which most people will buy this book. It is a dictionary of Italian ingredients. The entries are much more than what you will find in a dictionary, but a bit less than you may find in the `Larousse Gastronomique' for French preparations. For basic ingredients such as vinegars, the entries describe how to identify good samples of the product plus a brief idea of how the ingredients are produced. For compound ingredients such as agrodolce (sweet and sour sauce), the entry gives an outline of how the product is made and how it is used, but no complete recipe (as you might find in Larousse, except that Larousse has no entry for agrodolce). Thus, this book is an admirable supplement, filling in for the French classic when it ignores an Italian ingredient. Like Larousse, the entries are written in such a way that it is easy to just start with the A's and read it as if you were reading a memoir or a novel. Well, maybe not a novel, but you get the idea. Some of the more interesting things you will find are the facts that Italy has a name for strudel as made in Venice and a name for the bouillabaisse ingredient, Racasse, which is used in Italian fish stews as a thickener. The separate section on descriptions of Italian food preparation techniques is equally interesting. It is well known that Italian bacon, pancetta, is generally not smoked, yet there is a variety of smoked `pancetta afumicatta'.

The next section on wines will not replace a good book on Italian wines, but it is an excellent resource for finding the terroir of specific wines. It confirmed something I had heard in passing that the first major Italian wines to make an impression on American taste (after the Tuscan cliché, Chianti) were Bardolino and Valpolicello from the lands around Venice. If nothing else, this chapter will impress upon you the great variety of Italian wines and how they are typically used.

My personal favorite section in this and most other books is the bibliography. And, this book has a great one, with lots of entries from both classic and modern Italian sources. Like Germany and France, but unlike the United States, Italian scholarship has produced encyclopedic volumes on regional gastronomy which, if you knew Italian, would make writing this kind of book for American audiences very easy. Makes me want to learn Italian.

While this book overlaps lots of other volumes, its paperback price makes it a valuable book for both reading and reference. If you want to know more about Italian cuisine, you could do a lot worse than to start here.