My favourite Italian cookbooks

The classics, plus a few more.

I recently wrote an article for Saveur on top Italian cookbooks according to food writers — I spoke to Diana Henry, Kristina Gill, Renee Erickson and Corriere editor Angela Frenda for their insight too.

I loved that they were mostly all cookbooks that I too love and have in my own collection, in particular Elizabeth David’s Italian Food and Carol Field’s brilliant book of artisan baking, The Italian Baker. Read this article from my blog with an ode to her legacy and links to her recipes that I love, including Roman maritozzi with cream and Milanese pantramvai, one for raisin bread lovers.

Two that I had to include myself were Ada Boni’s Talismano della Felicità (known as The Talisman in its abridged English version and, my much-loved, The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews. Published in 1981 and now out of print (you can still find second hand copies floating around though), the recipes and the stories recounted by Edda Servi Machlin are of her childhood in Tuscany's deep south in the flourishing Tuscan-Jewish village of Pitigliano – it’s like time-travelling directly to this fascinating town in the Maremma of the 1930s, into a community that today no longer exists.

Machlin was born in the stunning medieval town of Pitigliano (below) in 1926. After narrowly escaping extermination camps during the second world war, her family settled in the US in 1958. This first cookbook of hers is full of unfussy, simple family recipes, a wonderful mix of Tuscan, Roman and Jewish specialties, from ricotta-filled pizza, deep fried artichokes (her 'hymn to an artichoke' essay is one of my favourite pieces of food writing) and fried mozzarella sandwiches, pappa al pomodoro, polenta pasticciata (a hearty peasant dish of baked polenta with a porcini mushroom and cheese sauce — could do with a pot of this right now), beet risotto (“add rice and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon, until rice begins to make a sharp, dry noise”) and gems like olio di arrosto (oil from a roast), but also lost specialties of this part of Tuscany like borricche (cinnamon pastries) and sfratti (honey and walnut logs), which I featured in my book Acquacotta.

But what really makes this such a special book is Machlin's moving memoir that recounts a “vanished way of life” with old black and white photographs and menus of Jewish celebrations. This is a book for anyone interested in food or war history, disappearing traditions and this largely unknown part of Tuscany's Maremma, on the border of Lazio, and it is also of course a book of excellent, incredibly simple, Italian recipes that happen to be kosher, too.

There are a few more books that I really love that you can see in the top photo and when I posted this on Instagram recently, it not only generated a great conversation about Italian cookbooks (including introducing me to a book I was not aware of — Giuliano Bugialli’s The Fine Art of Italian Cooking) but some of you asked for more about these.

Food historian Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Popes, Peasants and Shepherds is one of the most recently written book in this pile (2013) and is dedicated to the cuisine of Rome and Lazio. It’s a book for getting a sense of the where and why things are the way they are in this region, which is so frugal and essential, depending on ingredients like ricotta, olive oil, lamb and pork. Accompanied with black and white historical photos (but no recipe photos), this is one for people who really want to delve into Roman cuisine. I about to make the lattughe farcite (stuffed lettuces) where small heads of romaine lettuces are stuffed with anchovies, capers and black olives, then wilted in a pan over very low heat with a little olive oil.

Pellegrino Artusi and his 1891 cookbook you may have heard me talk about already if you’ve followed my blog over the years, as I mention him quite a bit since I started learning about Tuscan cuisine by cooking my way through his 790 recipes (I have cooked many but barely scratched the surface here — his book does make a good read too, though!) but one that may not be on everyone’s radars is Helena Attlee’s The Land Where Lemons Grow.

I don’t know if you would really classify this as a cookbook. It’s more, an investigation into citrus in Italy — part travel, part history, part food — and it happens to have some recipes too, including this wonderful, eye-opening citron rind salad. I absolutely loved this book, and plan on devouring it again soon while I pick bitter oranges and make marmalade this February.

Another not-quite-cookbook but historically rich is Giacomo Castelvetro’s The Fruit, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy, written in 1614. Castelvetro had very narrowly escaped the Inquisition in Venice three years earlier, rescued by British ambassador Sir Dudley Carleton, and the book was written while in exile, apparently inspired by the fact that he noticed the British ate too much meat and sweets (he concludes that one of the reasons Italians eat more fruit and vegetables than meat because of the heat). Written by order of season, with simple preparations, recipes and notes for the gardener for what would be many unfamiliar plants, he hoped to get his manuscript translated into English to inspire the British to embrace more fruit and vegetables. Sadly he died just two years later and this edition, in 1989, was the first one translated into English by Gillian Riley.

It is full of historic gems and yet the message of eat more fruit and vegetables would be appreciated today. I love the tips like how to prepare and eat pumpkin shoots or how you can grow sweet fennel from the bitter kind by planting the seed inside a dried fig, or why celery salad is served by young wives to their impotent husbands. “Peaches certainly taste much better with wine, and I notice that nobody ever throws away the wine that they have soaked in, or come to any harm from drinking it,” he writes, of the practice of placing peach slices in wine “to draw out impurities.” I adore the still life paintings (like this Caravaggio-esque one) scattered throughout in this book too.

How about you, what are your favourite classic Italian cookbooks? And do you share a love of some of these books?