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Searching... Stillwater Public Library | Q 641.5945 DEM | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The author has compiled recipes from historic menus, ancient diaries, and early classic cookbooks. This old-world cookery, gathered from every region of Italy, is complemented by over 260 color photos and 150 art reproductions. An incredible book!
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This dignified oversize volume may better reign over a coffee table than perch on a kitchen counter, where the slip of an eager cook could mar its august beauty. Queenly color illustrations dominate, with sleekly styled photos of all recipes, as well as reproductions of paintings and prints that depict Italian cooking and eating through the ages. Despite a disappointing translation, the text is a bewitching combination of food history and recipes. We learn that Horace liked his pasta with leeks and chickpeas, and that one Renaissance cookbook advised radicchio for those ill with venereal diseases. De' Medici ( The Renaissance of Italian Cooking ) has mined historical cookbooks, reprinting original recipes along with contemporary interpretations. Fifteenth-century directions for making a pie of live birds--``you set the pie before some gentlemen and ladies, if you wish to have a little fun, and when they open the pie the . . . birds will fly away''--are accompanied by an updated version using a dozen carefully cooked quails. Although the modern recipes inconveniently measure ingredients by weight, they are temptingly toothsome. Author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Beneath its coffee-table format and interspersed among its art-book illustrations, this book offers both interesting comments on the roots of Italian cuisine and a number of unusual recipes. De'Medici's Italy the Beautiful Cookbook (1988) and The Renaissance of Italian Cooking [BKL O 15 89] concentrated on contemporary developments and regional cooking styles, but here the author delves back into the foundations of the Italian fashion of cooking and eating. Reinterpreting ancient and traditional dishes for today, de'Medici unearths a wealth of inspiration as she sifts through early cookbooks and old documents. That many of these dishes will seem not all that familiar to lovers of Italian food proves several points: first, the true Italian tradition is much broader and complex than most people realize; second, there's a big difference between restaurant and home cooking. De'Medici shows how to incorporate these dishes into the modern kitchen as well as she arranges the recipes into a historical narrative course by course. And if the reader is browsing rather than cooking, there are all those gorgeous art reproductions and tempting color photographs of finished dishes. Bibliography; index. ~--John Brosnahan