"For starters, Urban Italian is a beautiful book. Flip through the pages and the rustic-urban feel and dynamic colors just pop off the pages. You want to invite yourself to every meal Andrew Carmellini is cooking. The recipes are completely accessible with complex, rich, exciting flavors. I come away with recipes that are always filed under: "make this again."
In Venice, the restaurateur behind Polpo, Russell Norman, explores the simplicity and wonder of Venetian home cooking across the seasons, from Grilled Spring Vegetable Pizza to a wintry Slow Roasted Veal Shin. Interspersed between 130 inspiring and accessible recipes for everything from pizza, pasta, risotto, meat dishes and plenty of seafood, as well desserts and authentic cocktails, you'll find notes on Russell's favourite markets, suppliers and places to visit, complete with stunning photography of this beautiful city. This book will give you serious wanderlust.
Pesto – Probably Liguria's most famous recipe, widely enjoyed beyond regional borders, is a green sauce made from basil leaves, sliced garlic, pine nuts, pecorino or parmigiano cheese (or a mix of both) and olive oil. Traditionally used as a pasta dressing (especially with gnocchi or trenette, it is finding wider uses as sandwich spread and finger-food filler)
From inception, this was destined to be a classic. Del Conte details – and in 1987 it was the first time anyone ever had – all of Italy’s regions, ingredients, techniques and dishes. The organisation by alphabetical order makes it as perusable and practical as an actual dictionary. If you consider that at that point Italy, as a unifed whole, was a mere centenarian, wrestling the diffuse, intensely regional nature of its geography and its cuisine into something this digestible really took some doing. A herculean effort, lauded as loudly abroad as it was at home.
The quickest way to discover and fall in love with Italy is at the table. Italian cuisine prides itself on simple delicious combinations of the finest, freshest ingredients available. For example, fresh ricotta with tartufo; mozzarella di bufala with basil, tomato and extra virgin olive oil; and San Daniele prosciutto with ripe melon are all extremely simple combinations which are much loved in Italy.

Dining is of course analogous to social time in Italy. It is a time when friends and family get together to tell stories and joke and enjoy one another’s company as well as enjoy great food. Whether you are interested in finding the best places to dine when in Italy, want to learn more about the history of Italian food, or hope to add some new Italian recipes to your repertoire, you are looking in the right place, right here at Made-In-Italy.com
“How we cling to our myths, we English”. The year is 1963, and in the intro to the first Penguin edition of this venerable tome, David is describing the disdain with which her countrymen viewed the culinary cultures of both France and Italy when she set about writing it, in 1954. Research for the book elicited in her a potent sense of discovery, and incredulity: “How wrong they had been, from Mrs Beeton down to my own contemporaries. Where had they been looking? Had they been looking at all?” Given the entrenched supremacy of Italian cookery on our contemporary menus – and the ubiquity of this book on our kitchen shelves – it borders on surreal to think there was a time, pre-David, when we might have been so collectively deluded. The four books that follow here can each be described as definitive, and best-selling, but one suspects they’d be neither, in this country, were it not for Elizabeth David and her ability to find gold, and, with such compulsion, to share it.
Dining is of course analogous to social time in Italy. It is a time when friends and family get together to tell stories and joke and enjoy one another’s company as well as enjoy great food. Whether you are interested in finding the best places to dine when in Italy, want to learn more about the history of Italian food, or hope to add some new Italian recipes to your repertoire, you are looking in the right place, right here at Made-In-Italy.com
I'm going to have to go with the classic Silver Spoon book. Yes, it's got a lot of problems—the recipes are maddeningly under-detailed and under-tested. The instructions rely on vague timings instead of specific visual cues (how do I know my Coda Di Rospo Con Salsa D'Acciughe looks the way it's supposed to after baking for 30 minutes? What if my half lemon has less juice than yours?). There aren't a whole lot of pretty pictures, nice illustrations, or clear instructions on how to select ingredients, implement techniques, or any of the other details that make for a great, informative cookbook. What it does have, on the other hand, is a ludicrously comprehensive index (over 3,000 recipes) that spans throughout Italy. I'd never rely on it for a usable recipe, but as a database for ideas and as an encyclopedia on Italian dishes, it can't be beat."—J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, Chief Creative Officer
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