A primer for authentic Italian cooking from the host of the long-running PBS show Ciao Italia.
Esposito (Caio Italia Five-Ingredient Favorites, 2009, etc.) returns with Italian recipes both familiar and unfamiliar; her section on sauces not only includes recipes for pesto and tomato sauce, but also Salmoriglio, a Sicilian sauce made with lemon and olive oil. The author provides a helpful resource for cooks wishing to deepen their knowledge of the principles behind Italian cooking, while simultaneously broadening their repertoire of Italian dishes. Esposito begins with an introduction to “Italian Pantry Basics,” a helpful encyclopedia of the ingredients that appear most often. Organized according to different main ingredients and rife with anecdotes, history and additional information about techniques, the book emphasizes local, seasonal and organic produce and meat. Even so, most ingredients can be easily found in any chain grocery store. Recipes range in difficulty but are clear and easy to follow. Readers who wish to use store-bought pasta are accommodated, as are those who want to try their hand at homemade Spinach Pasta. Most recipes are well within the range of a moderately experienced cook. Uncooked Cherry Tomato Sauce could easily be put together by a child, and Creamy Cauliflower Baked in a Mold, though requiring more skill, would undoubtedly make an impression at a dinner party. Complete, authoritative and accessible guide to Italian ingredients, cooking and cuisine.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-57121-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
While he wastes some time exposing cliches—Indians in westerns, unworthy sequels—that are cliches to expose, Eco...
Popular novelist (The Name of the Rose, 1983; Foucault's Pendulum, 1989) and notorious semiologist (at the Univ. of Bologna) Eco shows himself to be a journalist as well with this generally diverting volume of short pieces.
Eco calls these short essays diario minimo—minimal diaries—after the magazine column where he first published a series of such efforts (previously collected in Misreadings). The work presented here, much of which dates from the late '80s and early '90s, celebrates, or more often condemns, postmodern life in a style familiar to American readers. Occasional parodic fantasies in the mode of Borges or Calvino find Eco exploring the intriguing, if absurd, notion of a map in 1:1 scale, chronicling race relations in a future universe populated by humorously bizarre alien life-forms, or describing watches whose features cause one to lose track of the time. But Eco focuses on articulating his amusing complaints, analyzing our quotidian myths with light touches and lamentations that will recall Andy Rooney and Erma Bombeck—at best, an academic Mike Royko—sooner than Roland Barthes. Pieces on once-current events have been carefully excluded, but most of these essays remain essentially journalistic in their devotion to exploring contemporary life. The title piece pits Eco against an English hotel bureaucracy intent on making it difficult for him to refrigerate an expensive salmon that he has brought from Copenhagen; others mock "how-to'' essays—on fax machines and cellular telephones, for example; there are cautionary tales of encounters with Amtrak trains and Roman cabs. All have as their subtext the chaos brought in the wake of unbridled technological innovation and intercontinental travel.
While he wastes some time exposing cliches—Indians in westerns, unworthy sequels—that are cliches to expose, Eco entertains with his clever reflections and with his unique persona, the featured player in his stories.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100136-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Esposito may not tell all, but he comes close in this brutally honest, yet loyal, memoir of his days with the King. From when they met in the Army to the afternoon when he was one of the first to discover the dead body of Elvis Presley where he had collapsed from his toilet throne (Esposito was the one who raised his pajama trousers to avoid embarrassment), Presley's right-hand man was in a position to know the inside scoop. He and Oumano (Paul Newman, 1989) describe Elvis as being like a little boy who spent his wealth making himself and the people around him happy. The anecdotes are endless as this pivotal member of the ``Memphis Mafia'' comes clean on the partying Elvis's parade of girlfriends and his suitcase full of sexy videotapes and Polaroids of Priscilla (Esposito handed it to her the moment she arrived at Graceland for the funeral). Esposito tells of the Elvis who stopped passersby to give them money or gifts, who would decide suddenly that ten or so of his friends all needed Harleys to race around Bel Air, who would not flinch at buying a car for family or friends who were loyal to him, and who made an infamous visit to see President Nixon. But he also gives up the goods on the Elvis who was hopelessly self-indulgent, constantly demonstrating his dubious karate skills, buying people off with expensive gifts rather than admitting he was wrong, and finally dying a prisoner in his own bedroom, uninterested in facing new challenges and addicted to prescription drugs. Video rentals of Girls! Girls! Girls! are sure to surge so people can look for the scene in which Elvis sports an erection in his too-tight pants. While apologetic and loyalist at times, Esposito doesn't let the King off too easy. (16 pages of b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79507-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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