Best of Italian Cooking

Rating:
Summary: The Golden (sic) Book of Italian Cooking.
Review: This very small (75 pages of recipes) cookbook warrants a fair evaluation because of its very low list price (about 10 dollars). Without that feature, one would not think twice about getting such a small book on such a large subject as Italian Cooking.

Weighed against my standard for evaluating cookbooks, this gets only three stars because it does almost exactly what you would expect from a book this size. Even there, I may be giving it a few free points, as my experience with thin, oversize books is that they are heavy on good graphics and clever summaries of their subject. This book has neither.

The book is simply a collection of approximately 120 recipes organized in haphazard fashion. The chapters are:

Antipasti
Pasta
Pizza
Rice and Gnocchi
Meat
Fish
Vegetables and Sauces
Desserts
Cakes and Breads

One oddity is that pizza is typically treated as bread in most books. Another is that gnocchi are more commonly treated with pasta than it is with rice. Given the reverence and importance Italians give to vegetables, it is unusual to lump it together with sauces, another subject worthy of its own chapter. It is also odd that the antipasti chapter includes both soups and salads.

Each recipe includes a headnote. These are generally accurate, but at least two contain errors of fact. That raises the question of how many others may be mistaken or misleading.

Many of the recipes are odd for a book like this, or just odd. As this is a 'Best of' recipe book, one would expect the best available recipes, yet the recipe for Tagliatelle Bolognese is a simplified version of the classic. Not what I want from a 'Best of' book. Another recipe with eggplant asks for a small eggplant, chopped, in the ingredients list. Then, in the preparation, it asks us to dice the eggplant. They provide no insight into how to dice a chopped eggplant.

Another annoyance is that some recipe titles are in English and some are in Italian and some are a mix of both. As every good book on Italian Cooking I have read manages to give Italian names for all their recipes, with an English translation, I find no excuse for this.

None of these annoyances are big in themselves, but they all add up to a picture of a shoddy job. With so many good books on Italian cooking available by Bastianich and Bugialli and Hazan and Caggiano and a dozen others, why bother with this one. If you really want a 'Best of', get the 'Cooks Illustrated' volume entitled 'Italian Classics'.

Not recommended.