Synopses & Reviews
Balsamic vinegar, olive oil, mozzarella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, prosciutto, fresh pasta - these are the cornerstone ingredients of great Italian cooking. Italian Food Artisans celebrates the art and origins of these wonderful foods and many others. Profiling some of the finest food artisans working today, this beautifully photographed book takes readers on a journey through the countryside and villages of Italy - where tubs of purple and green olives await a cold pressing, capers are picked by hand, and paddled water wheels power millstones that grind the grain for bread. The featured food artisans reveal age-old secrets of their trades and offer up stories of a place where good food, lovingly prepared, is still a way of life. With over 50 simple and robust recipes that evoke the Italian countryside, Italian Food Artisans will entice and delight Italian food lovers everywhere.
Review
By Florence Fabricant
It's partly an attractive guide to Italian ingredients and partly a collection of thumbnail biographies of the people who produce them. But most of all, Italian Food Artisans by Pamela Sheldon Johns provides behind-the-scenes descriptions with alluring photographs to show how more than a dozen traditional Italian food are made. The author also outlines the qualities that set those foods apart form their commonplace industrial versions.
She writes, for example, of a fourth-generation company in central Italy, Rustichella d'Abruzzo, which makes dry pasta with handcrafted bronze molds, resulting in pasta with a roughened texture that makes sauce cling invitingly to it. Unlike commercial pasta, which is usually dried at high temperatures for about 12 hours, this pasta is slowly air-dried for more than four days, which maintains the flavor of the wheat.
Handmade details and the time to do things right both of which are costly and avoided by big companies are lavished on many of the products described in the book, including deeply flavorful cured meats, fine balsamic vinegar, rustic caciocavallo cheese and fruity estate-bottled extra virgin olive oil.
In a chapter about fresh truffles, Johns explains not only the white ones, for which Italy is famous, but also the black variety, which is gathered in Umbria. She gives advice about using truffles and how to select truffle oils and pastes.
This useful book also lists salamis and cheeses by region and has a buying guide to food products in Italy and the United States.
Synopsis
This book celebrates the art and origins of the cornerstone foods of Italy, profiling some of the finest food artisans working today. 50+ recipes. 125 color photos.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 164) and indexes.
About the Author
Pamela Sheldon Johns is the program director for the Avignonesi Wine and Food Workshops in Tuscany. The author of several books, including Healthy Gourmet and Parmigiano!, she lives in Italy.
John Rizzo is a photographer whose work has appeared in magazines including Bon Appétit, Wine Spectator, Life, and Food and Wine.