A perfect guide to bringing home the traditional and unique flavors of Italy.
A delicious journey through central and southern Italy through recipes.
In this sequel to The Italian Farmer's Table (2009), Scialabba and Pellegrino chronicle their travels to more than 30 farms and share the best recipes from each, using only what that farm produces. "We were deeply moved by the simplicity of cooking with ingredients grown and raised out the kitchen door," they write. “There was something that we connected with, that just seemed real and felt right about washing dirt off freshly picked vegetables, or noting the vibrant orange color of the free-range egg yolks we were using to make fresh pasta." At the beginning the authors provide basic recipes for pasta and crepes, and they include a charming history of the farm, how the family came to agritourism and, of course, the specialties of each house—usually at least one appetizer, entree and dessert. Home chefs can start with a beet carpaccio with pickled onions from Tuscany, move on to polenta with pork and sausage sauce from Umbria and finish with a poached pear and ricotta mousse tart from Basilicata. Some of the mouthwatering recipes are fairly simple, such as the farfalle with zucchini and mussels from Apulia, but others will take time, such as the chicken lasagna from the Michetti Convent in Abruzzo. Scialabba and Pellegrino also make adaptations for home chefs—e.g., replacing quail for Sardinia's indigenous partridges—and they include instructions on where to find wild boar in American and the contact information for all of the farms, among other points of reference.
A perfect guide to bringing home the traditional and unique flavors of Italy.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-7082-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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