A good cookbook to gather a hungry crowd and leave them happily satiated.
Caponigri shares her family’s tradition of Sunday dinners.
“Sunday was for gathering, preparing, cooking, eating, sharing, talking, laughing…a time to disconnect from the rest of the world and reconnect with family and friends,” writes the author. In that spirit, she organizes her debut cookbook into “52 Sunday dinner menus in the Italian tradition.” The thematic menus include: antipasto (usually a crostini to pass at the table), a primo (first course), a secondo (main course) served with a single contorno (side dish) and dessert. While some of the recipes are standard Italian fare (veal piccata, spinach lasagna, stuffed mushrooms), others are less common but intriguing (prosciutto soufflé, veal breast stuffed with raisins and pine nuts, hazelnut truffle pie). These are not last-minute items; Caponigri feels preparation should involve a noisy kitchen full of people. She also highlights recipes that are child-friendly to prepare and serve. Caponigri suggests five ways to incorporate Sunday dinners into your routine: Make them a priority, plan ahead, decide the menu and assign the chores together, keep the menu simple, let go and have fun. The book is flavored with Italian aphorisms, informative menu introductions and Caponigri’s family history. Guy Ambrosino provides the enticing photographs, with food styling by former Gourmet editor Kate Winslow.
A good cookbook to gather a hungry crowd and leave them happily satiated.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4027-8482-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sterling Epicure
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
Elvis's infamous fondness for down-home southern cooking (breakfasts of sausage, bacon, and eggs; lunches of mashed potatoes with gravy, sauerkraut, bacon, and biscuits; dinners of fried chicken; fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches for snacks) makes this less a cookbook than a campy tribute to white-trash cuisine and a ``memory book'' (as freelance writer McKeon likes to call it) of the King's days in Hollywood. The author intersperses snippets of information about the Love Me Tender premier, photos of Elvis surrounded by adoring fans, his coffee preferences (very hot with cream and sugar), his constant need to be surrounded by friends, his passion for Pepsi, and his romantic liaisons with various stars (Natalie Wood, Ursula Andress, etc.) with instructions for preparing some of Elvis's favorite dishes. The recipes, organized by course, are easy to follow; but who could go wrong when most have only six to eight ingredients? And is there anyone who thinks so little of cholesterol levels or Elvis's final embarrassing performance that they would serve high-fat bacon-and- cheese pastries along with celery wheels laden with cream cheese, and cheddar cheese potato chips, as one of McKeon's menus suggests? While it is possible to garner a decent, classic southern meal from this book (turnip greens, country fried steak, and corn fritters), these have been done elsewhere—and better. This kind of food led to the King's downfall. Still, a perfect gag gift.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55853-301-X
Page Count: 238
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Nonagenarian Sanford, who most recently memorialized his wife, Maggie (Maggie: A Love Story, 1993), recalls his childhood in Harlem in a memoir that is also a bittersweet apology to his father. In 1904, the year in which Sanford was born, Harlem was "still an out-of-the-way community on the island of Manhattan and almost suburban in its quiet, with frame houses—farmhouses some of them—standing alongside newcome neighbors of brick and yellowstone." He lovingly recalls the childhood landmarks of the place (Reid's Drug Store, Nick Stano Shoe Repair, and Bachrach's Ice Cream Parlor), as well as the apartment houses he lived in: the grand Gainsboro overlooking Mt. Morris Square when the family was flush, the much more modest Cabonak that became home after the Panic of 1907 bankrupted his father, and the apartment on West 117th Street, a place that reflected his grandfather's "unadorned life," where Sanford later lived with his grandparents. These recollections, interspersed with vignettes that anticipate his eventual meeting with Maggie, are secondary to the main theme, which is atonement for a thoughtless youthful act that irreparably hurt his father. Sanford's father was a Russian Jew who came to the US at the age of five. He became a lawyer, and though his practice was only intermittently successful, he was always the most affectionate and generous of fathers. Sanford's mother died when he was ten and thereafter Sanford and his father moved in with her parents. But when his father remarried in 1920, his grandfather and his mother's sister turned so against his stepmother that the boy refused to live with his father in his new home. This act of defiance ultimately broke up the marriage, and he understood too late the "sorrow of a wise father for a foolish and wilful son." The past in soft sepia tones, except for the sorrow Sanford caused, which still remains hard-edged and raw. Quiet but affecting.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56980-018-9
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Barricade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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