Favorite Italian Cooking and Wine Books

Italian Wine For Dummies

This book impressed me. The Italian wine world is extraordinarily complex, with a steady stream of new DOCs and DOCGs, frequent changes in the regulations that cover existing appellations, and a host of currents, trends, and styles; on top of it all are the Italian producers, most of whom are individualists bent on going their own distinctive ways either within the appellations they belong to or outside of them. Mary Ewing-Mulligan and Ed McCarthy have captured it all very well, and present it in a delightfully informal style that will keep you turning the pages.

The Flavors of Southern Italy

Erica De Mane is quick to say that her book is not strictly southern, in the sense that she didn't go to the South and write down what people were doing, step-by-step. Rather, she traveled through the South, absorbing culinary atmosphere, as it were, combining it with her family heritage and her experience working in New York's restaurants. What we get is much like what we get from good modern Italian cooks, traditional recipes updated and improvised upon with respect, with their roots quite evident and none of the frank improbabilities one encounters among certain chefs. Couple the recipes with the background and the sidebars, and you have a book that you'll be as tempted to read in the living room as you will to use in the kitchen.

The Innocents Abroad

Nothing new here -- It's by Mark Twain, whom you are almost certainly familiar with if you went to school in the US, thanks to Tom Sawyer and Huck Fin's being on most high school reading lists. "The Innocents Abroad" is one of his first books, cobbled together in 1869 from the reports he made for the Daily Alta California, which paid for his berth aboard the Steamship Quaker City, bound for Europe and the Holy Land in one of the first pleasure cruises to set sail from New York. It's a fascinating book, in part because much of what Twain saw and described is no longer there, or vastly different.

Heat

Have you ever wondered what it's like to work in a restaurant kitchen? Bill Buford gave up a cushy (?) job as an editor at The New Yorker to become Mario Batali's slave, and work his way up the ladder from prep person to line cook and more in a restaurant kitchen. Delightful reading that may have you deciding you want to apply for a job. Or crossing out one possible career path, but no matter: Bill puts us in his shoes and it's a very entertaining ride.

The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating

This is, according to Anthony Bourdain, who wrote the introduction, a "cult masterpiece" that chefs and foodies who went to England to eat in Fergus Henderson's St. John's Restaurant would purchase and then pretend they didn't have for fear someone would borrow it. I had my doubts, but as I began to flip though the recipes, a flipping that quickly became much more interested reading, I changed my mind. It's a fascinating book dedicated to turning what a great many people living in our age of abundance might blanch at into, well, the Italian word is manicarretti, which means deft culinary delights. If you're gastronomically venturesome, it's a book you will very much enjoy.