Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0198606176
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Average Customer Review: 
(From 4 total reviews)
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description:
Here is an inspiring, wide-ranging A-Z guide to one of the world’s best-loved cuisines. Designed for cooks and consumers alike, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food covers all aspects of the history and culture of Italian gastronomy, from dishes, ingredients, and delicacies to cooking methods
and implements, regional specialties, the universal appeal of Italian cuisine, influences from outside Italy, and much more.
Following in the footsteps of princes and popes, vagabond artists and cunning peasants, austere scholars and generations of unknown, unremembered women who shaped pasta, moulded cheeses and lovingly tended their cooking pots, Gillian Riley celebrates a heritage of amazing richness and delight. She
brings equal measures of enthusiasm and expertise to her writing, and her entries read like mini-essays, laced with wit and gastronomical erudition, marked throughout by descriptive brilliance, and entirely free of the pompous tone that afflicts so much writing about food.
The Companion is attentive to both tradition and innovation in Italian cooking, and covers an extraordinary range of information, from Anonimo Toscano, a medieval cookbook, to Bartolomeo Bimbi, a Florentine painter commissioned by Cosimo de Medici to paint portraits of vegetables, to Paglierina di
Rifreddo, a young cheese made of unskimmed cows’ milk, to zuppa inglese, a dessert invented by 19th century Neapolitan pastry chefs. Major topics receive extended treatment. The entry for Parmesan, for example, runs to more than 2,000 words and includes information on its remarkable nutritional
value, the region where it is produced, the breed of cow used to produce it (the razza reggiana, or vacche rosse), the role of the cheese maker, the origin of its name, Moliere’s deathbed demand for it, its frequent and lustrous depiction in 16th and 17th century paintings, and the proper method of
serving, where Riley admonishes: “One disdains the phallic peppermill, but must always appreciate the attentive grating, at the table, of parmesan over pasta or soup, as magical in its way as shavings of truffles.” Such is the scope and flavor of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food.
For anyone with a hunger to learn more about the history, culture and variety of Italian cuisine, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food offers endless satisfactions.
Customer Reviews
A Disappointment by SAM J. CAMPANARO
THis is a professional chefs dictionary…. Not as explained in advertisements…. I thought this was going to be a collectors Italian “JOY OF COOKING” …That’s why I returned it the same day that I received it….
Sam Campanaro
An excellent encyclopedia by Robert C. Ross
Gillian Riley with the help of other contributors has created a comprehensive encyclopedia of Italian food, which is enlivened with mini-essays that display her wit and her erudition. She covers all 20 regions of the mainland, Sicily and Sardinia. She discusses cheeses, sausages, produce, spices, regional dishes, cooking styles, history, cultural influences and important culinary figures, but excludes wine, which would require a volume of its own.
Some pages look like standard encyclopedias, for example, page 322:
Prosciutto (see ham and Parma ham)
Provatura, a pulled buffalo-milk cheese similar to mozzarella
Provola, an aged (or smoked) pulled cheese from the south
Provolone, the same cheese made in the north, where the milk is richer and more abundant
Provola di Floresta, a pulled cheese made from cattle on Mount Etna
Prunes (see plums)
Pudding
Puglia, which continues for several pages.
Essays include:
– A discussion of Futurist painter Marinetti’s attack on pasta for making Italians pacific and listless She points out, as Marinetti never did, that rice was “a patriotic, home-grown food, unlike pasta, which depended on imported grain”.
– Beef Carpaccio was named by Giuseppe Ciprani of Harry’s Bar because the color “reminded Cipriani of the deep reds in the paintings in a stunning exhibition in the Palazzo Ducale in 1963 of Carpaccio, a name to conjure with, which is what everyone has been doing ever since”.
– Pirciati are a long hollow kind of pasta similar to bucatini. Although there are no formal recipes in the book, Gillian illustrates the perfect sauce for pirciati with a delightful restaurant scene from one of Andrea Camilleri’s Commissario Montalbano books, “Il Colore della Notte”. The sauce “burns”, as you can tell from the ingredients: oil, onion, two garlic cloves, two anchovies, a teaspoon of capers, black olives, half a chilli pepper, tomato, basil, black pepper and grated pecorino. “Alternating forks of food with gulps of wine, groans of extreme agony and unbearable bliss … Montalbano even had the courage to mop up the remaining sauce with a piece of bread, wiping his brow from time to time.”
– Cicero, the Roman orator, reportedly gave the family name to chickpeas, whose Latin name is Cicer arietinum (ceci in Italian).
– Mozzarella di bufala is made from the milk of water buffalo not native to the country. They were brought to Italy from Asia during the late Roman Empire — a better legacy than garum, a sauce made by fermenting fish and their entrails.
– The entry for Parmesan runs to more than 2,000 words and includes information on its nutritional value, the region where it is produced, the breed of cow used to produce it (the razza reggiana, or vacche rosse), the role of the cheese maker, the origin of its name, Moliere’s deathbed demand for it, its frequent and lustrous depiction in 16th and 17th century paintings, and the proper method of serving: “One disdains the phallic peppermill, but must always appreciate the attentive grating, at the table, of parmesan over pasta or soup, as magical in its way as shavings of truffles.”
The book includes extensive cross referencing, a thematic index, a general index, a comprehensive bibliography, and a list of suggested further reading.
I would have liked more illustrations, and perhaps some pronunciation guides. Nonetheless, this is an invaluable resource for anyone searching for information on Italian food, and it is enormous fun to read.
Marcella is right by Prof. R. Paris
This is an excellent book, but not for beginners. It requires a considerable level of knowledge, but the amount of information -historical, technical, gastronomic- is truly outstanding. Kudos!
Everything you wanted to know about italian food - right here by Ms. Readsalot
Love this book - answers any question you have about italian cooking, and in such an engaging writing style - this isn’t a boring reference book. I don’t know much about Gillian Riley, but I know she clearly loves what she’s talking about. A beautiful addition to my food book collection - highly recommended!!!!
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