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Fifteenth century chef Maestro Martino of Como has been called the first celebrity chef. This volume includes the first English translation of his text, a historical essay by Luigi Ballerini, and 50 modernized recipes by acclaimed Italian chef Stefania Barzini.
Feasting as a window into medieval Italian culture
Traditionally grand ducal Tuscany and its cultural politics have been viewed through the lens of absolutism. Based on a wide range of newly found sources and building on recent revisionist scholarship, this study uses the universities of Pisa and Siena to expose the contradictions and the tensions which characterised the grand duchy. Setting the universities against the diplomatic, military, administrative, economic, ecclesiastical, and cultural development of the grand duchy, it shows how innovation mixed with tradition and local privileges were not only upheld but extended significantly.
More than a cookbook, In Late Winter We Ate Pears is a love affair with a culture and a way of life. In vignettes taken from their year in Italy, husband and wife Caleb Barber and Deirdre Heekin offer glimpses of a young, vibrant Italy: of rolling out pizza dough in an ancient hilltown at midnight while wild dogs bay in the abandoned streets; of the fogged car windows of an ancient lovers' lane amid the olive groves outside Prato. The recipes in In Late Winter We Ate Pears are every bit as delicious as the memories. Selections such as red snapper with fennel sauce, fresh figs with balsamic vinegar and mint, and frangipane and plum tart capture the essence of Italy. Following the tradition of...
First published in 1891, Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangier bene has come to be recognized as the most significant Italian cookbook of modern times. It was reprinted thirteen times and had sold more than 52,000 copies in the years before Artusi's death in 1910, with the number of recipes growing from 475 to 790. And while this figure has not changed, the book has consistently remained in print. Although Artusi was himself of the upper classes and it was doubtful he had ever touched a kitchen utensil or lit a fire under a pot, he wrote the book not for professional chefs, as was the nineteenth-century custom, but for middle-class family cooks: housewives and their do...
Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the ...
"John Varriano's book is not only a delightful read but draws fascinating parallels between two hitherto disparate fields: art history and the history of food in the Renaissance. Outstanding scholarship that opens whole new venues of inquiry."--Ken Albala, author of Eating Right in the Renaissance and Beans: A History "Art history and food history have traditionally been separate disciplines, parallel universes. In this book John Varriano makes a cosmic leap and lures the two into a stimulating, provocative, and always entertaining study--a tasting menu of gastronomic and visual delights."--Gillian Riley, author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food "With wit and erudition, John Varriano s...
This magnificent new book demonstrates the development of a distinctive, unified culinary tradition throughout the Italian peninsula. Thematically organized and beautifully illustrated, Italian Cuisine is a rich history of the ingredients, dishes, techniques, and social customs behind the Italian food we know and love today.
What is Italy without pasta? Come to think of it, where would the rest of us be without this staple of global cuisine? An acclaimed Italian food writer tells the colorful and often-surprising history of everyone’s favorite dish. In this hugely charming and entertaining chronicle of everyone’s favorite dish, acclaimed Italian food writer and historian Luca Cesari draws on literature, history, and many classic recipes in order to enlighten pasta lovers everywhere, both the gourmet and the gluten free. What is Italy without pasta? Come to think of it, where would the rest of us be without this staple of global cuisine? The wheat-based dough first appeared in the Mediterranean in ancient tim...