Each Italian region has its own favourite ingredients and cooking techniques and its own unique character. Common to all regions is the importance of quality ingredients. This book is an authoritative guide to them, and the recipes of Italy.'
This indeed is a good book. It's especially a good book for beginners to Italian Food. It's extremely long with a ton of recipes and explanations about ingredients to keep in the pantry. The first quarter of the book is simply breaking down the individual components of Italian cooking and for that, this book is very good. There are plenty of pictures for it as well. The photos later on in the recipe portion of the book aren't as good and have some poor lighting to be honest. One of the main themes or focuses on Italian cuisine is the quality of the ingredients that determines the quality of the dish. Not the amount of ingredients, presentation or lengthy cooking methods either. That is rather hard to get across in a photo already and I think this book lacked that. Some of the recipes look actually kind of bland. The pasta dishes looked really dry so it doesn't really make me want to cook any pasta. There are a number of great soups, desserts, starters that are really intriguing and are the ones I would like to focus on. The sheer amount of Chicken and beef dishes in this book illustrates how unitalian this book really is. It's as if you did a cookbook about Japanese cuisine but you had a fifth of the book about Mayo.
This is my FAVORITE cook book! I love how they do not waste space explaining to you how to do things that they already explained in previous pages. This book inspires me daily. The pictures are amazing. I see the pages in my dreams!