The Medieval Kitchen Recipes from France and Italy
June 30, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
The Medieval Kitchen Recipes from France and Italy
An English-language edition of La Gastronomie au Moyen Age: 160 Recettes de France et d’Italie, published in Paris in 1993, this volume of medieval recipes adapted for the modern cook is both usable and informative. Redon (Univ. of Paris), Fran?ois Sabban (L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), and Silvano Serventi, an independent researcher, have combined their knowledge of languages, food, and history to create this fascinating collection of 153 recipes, ranging from soups and pasta to meats, sauces, and desserts. Each recipe is presented in its original form, in translation, and adapted for modern cooks. A brief passage also explains the significance of the recipe and its relation to other dishes. Although it is not the only title covering medieval cookery (see, e.g., Madeleine Cosman’s Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony, LJ 1/15/77), this well-organized and entertaining work is recommended for specialized food or medieval collections in large public and academic libraries.AMary Martin, CAPCON Lib. Network, Washington, DC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Timeless recipes
This is a well researched and written cookbook. It gives the history of what items were available at the particular time in the Middle Ages and how they were used in various recipes. Other historical culinary tidbits are included and are quite interesting and informative.
The dishes made from these recipes are quite delicious and make it worth hunting out some of the more difficult to find ingredients. Where possible, alternative ingredients are suggested. It is especially enjoyable - when your guests exclaim their pleasure over a tasty dish - to inform them of the antiquity of the recipe.
This book makes an excellent gift for those cooks who especially enjoy history. I highly recommend The Medieval Kitchen to anyone with an adventuresome culinary spirit.
4 Stars Delightful but incomplete
This book is as good as all the other reviewers say, but didn’t they eat breakfast in the Middle Ages? The book should be retitled - Medieval Dinners.
5 Stars An excellent resource
My mother gave me The Medi
The Best of Gourmet Sixty five Years Sixty five Favorite Recipes
June 29, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
The Best of Gourmet Sixty five Years Sixty five Favorite Recipes
Grilling has come a long way in America over the past decade, and now Gourmet shows you how to fire up your grill in style with a Sizzle in the City dinner that applauds Latin flavors. Yuca chips, avocado jicama salsa, and pink daiquiris are a colorful beginning, then it’s on to grilled matambre (spinach-and-carrot-stuffed flank steak). Coconut tuile cones with passion-fruit ice cream add a final touch of chic to a very fashionable party. This is just one of the dozens of remarkable menus you’ll find in this volume of The Best of Gourmet.
And speaking of sophistication, this year’s Cuisines of the World section turns to San Francisco, a city that blends global cuisines for a taste all its own. Here you’ll find a celebration feast inspired by the vibrant Italian community of North Beach, a glamorous Food Noir dinner, a handful of local favorites like crab Louis and Hangtown fry (fried-oyster omelet), and several dishes featuring the irresistible artichoke.
Indoors or out–let The Best of Gourmet, Featuring the Flavors of San Francisco make a stylish difference in your entertaining.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Fabulous Gourmet
The Best of Gourmet 2007 is a collection of popular recipes featured in Gourmet Magazine. It is also a must-have for anyone who wishes to produce a meal or dessert that is out of the ordinary. If you want to dazzle your guests or surprise the green-bean casserole lot at the next potluck, use one of the recipes in this book.
I was recently asked to prepare some desserts for a Christmas-themed cocktail party. Besides a fruit tarte, cheesecake, and small assortment of pastries, the hostess asked if I would make a red velvet cake. I wanted to do something different, something unexpected, because a red velvet cake is really just a chocolate cake with a lot of food coloring.
Anyway, I used a white chocolate cream cheese frosting and decorated the cake with a recipe I found in The Best of Gourmet. The recipe calls for rice noodles, soaked in water, dried, deep fried, and sprinkled with sugar. In the book, these resemble great white coral leaves and are placed on top of a mound of mango sorbet. I did a little twist. I shaped the noodles to resemble snowflakes, then sprinkled them with sparkling/silver sugar. I had these sticking out of the top and sides of the cake and it looked amazing. It was easy, spectacular, and completely unexpected.
The recipes can be complicated but are well worth the effort.
The unique recipes, fabulous layout, and clever “menu” concept make this a book that is easy for me to recommend.
5 Stars Another tummy tome from ‘Gourment’ Great Entertaining’
`The Best of Gourmet 2007′ is a 65th Anniversary edition of recipes collected from `Gourmet’ of both the last year and from the previous 65 (up to 2005) years. In most ways, it is very similar to `The Best of Gourmet 2006′, which means it’s an excellent source of menus for entertaining 6 to 8 people at dinner on a regular basis, when you have an aversion to repeating yourself too often.
The book begins with the collection of 65 `favorite’ recipes. This collection is not uniformly easy, difficult, or popular. Some, like their versions of cabbage and noodles and Caesar salad, are simple and common while the chocolate souffle cake and the Vietnamese Pho Bo (Hanoi Beef Noodle soup) are complex and exotic. This makes the section good foodie reading, to see what it is which tickles the fancy of the `Gourmet’ editors.
As with all `Gourmet’ recipes, at least all I’ve seen over the past four years that I’ve been reading the magazine, the instructions are detailed and quite precise; however, being true to the magazine’s name, they have something about them which makes them more interesting than the average `Joy of Cooking’ or even `Good Housekeeping’ recipe. The very best thing about the selection of `Gourmet’ recipes for me is that they carry lots of recipes for classic types of dishes which are simply a bit beyond the pale of the ‘30 Minute Meal’ crowd. This includes recipes for gratins, tarts, breads, crackers(!), souffles, braises, cakes, pies, and assembled desserts such as a charlotte. The excellent index does, however, provide nifty little clock icons by each recipe that can be done in that famous ‘30 minutes’ or less. This being `Gourmet’, I may take this with a grain of salt, and stick with Rachael Ray if you are seriously interested in FAST dishes.
After the ‘65 Favorite Recipes’ comes 18 menus, with each recipe within a menu calibrated to produce the same number of servings, something not everyone with the same objective can seem to pull off. There is no obvious pattern to the choice or arrangement of menus. The overriding criterion was, I’m sure, did it appear in `Gourmet’ in the previous 12 months (in 2006, actually). Some are oriented to a location (New Mexico, Naples, Greek Seaside, Provence), some are keyed to a season (summer, winter, fall harvest), some are for a specific meal (breakfast, lunch, supper), and some are for a particular holiday (Lunar New Year, Thanksgiving (2), Christmas cocktail party, Christmas feast). The shotgun selection is less random if you happen to own several of the previous yearly `Gourmet’ collections. Put them all together and you have a really fine collection of hundreds of different menus, all with the `Gourmet’ imprimatur. This is by far the best auxiliary I know of to a copy of Martha Stewart’s classic `Entertaining’. It’s even better than anything I’ve seen from Martha and company. Each menu, even those for breakfast, include one or more wine selections for the menu, and they are very specific, down to the chateau and vintage year! About half of these recipes are showcased in quarter, half, or full-page pics. Unfortunately, the good editors are often not able to put the recipe and pic on the same or facing pages. Pity.
Following the 18 menus, with approximately 100 recipes, is `The Recipe Compendium’, with a dozen or more recipes in each of the following categories:
Appetizers
Breads
Soups
Fish and Shellfish
Meats
Poultry
Breakfast, Brunch, and Sandwiches
Pasta and Grains
Vegetables
Salads
Condiments and sauces
Desserts
These recipes are not accompanied by photographs. Unlike the menu recipes, they are almost uniformly calibrated to `Serve 4′. This is nice, as it makes it a lot easier to match up recipes to create a menu of your own. All recipes also contain two timings, one is `active’ time and the other is `start to finish’.
Where appropriate, each recipe also cites special equipment and references to a `Sources’ glossary where the ingredient or equipment is not available at the typical supermarket. I found two quirks in these features. One was the fact that sometimes there were references to `Sources’, but the item was nowhere to be found in this glossary. The other was the reference to an `adjustable-blade slicer’. Now in a moment of cognitive befuddlement, I could not for the life of me imagine what that was, until I realized they were talking about a mandoline! This is a case like those in cookbooks translated from the French where `Herbes de Provence’ is translated to `French herb collection’. The fact is that anyone who owns three cookbooks and watches the Food Network at least 2 hours a week will know what `mandoline’ and `herbes de Provence’ mean, and will be befuddled by a `translation’. But so much for that little linguistic rant.
At a list price of $40, these books are just a bit pricy, but there is a great synergy to be had in owning several in the series. If you are really interesting in cooking and have little interest in travel or expensive restaurants, the cost of these books is a far better investment than the cost of 12 issues of `Gourmet’. One can hope that Conde Nast will come out with an index to all these volumes (It may exist, I haven’t looked for it yet).
Great resource for entertaining.
Italian Two Easy Simple Recipes from the London River Cafe
June 27, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
Italian Two Easy Simple Recipes from the London River Cafe
Cutting live crabs, slow roasting a pork shoulder and skinning a bone-in eel don’t usually call to mind “easy” cooking, but Gray and Rogers, cofounders of the River Cafe in London (and authors of the River Cafe cookbook series), include the above culinary tasks in their follow-up to 2004’s Italian Easy. The authors have compiled a collection of 150 regional Italian recipes, haphazardly divided into chapters such as Mozzarella, Tomato Pasta and “Fish with….” The odd organization obscures a strong collection of appealing and time-conscious regional recipes such as Fried Eggplant, Basil and Tomato; Orecchiette, Tomato, Ricotta; Sea Bass Baked in Sea Salt; and Chocolate and Coffee Sorbet. Full-page color photos and a list of Italian food suppliers make the book somewhat user friendly, yet basic information such as serving sizes (listed away from recipes) and curiously placed headnotes, which warn of unusual ingredients or difficult preparation (placed at the end of instruction), are counterintuitive. (June)
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Sophia Lorens Recipes and Memories
June 25, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
Sophia Lorens Recipes and Memories
Sophia Loren is more than a beloved movie star–she’s a cook. The author of two personal cookbooks, she’s been recognized by the Italian government for her culinary prowess. In Sophia Loren’s Recipes & Memories, she offers a hundred or so recipes arranged by course–antipasti through desserts. With a like number of photos, most in color, and all sorts of Sophia memorabilia–a shot of the 16-year-old Sophia shows us just how early Sophia was Sophia–the large-format book is also filled with reminiscences of family, home, and work. Cooks shouldn’t be disappointed, though. Sophia’s recipes, taken from all over Italy as well as her table, include pizzas and risottos, hearty soups, savory fish dishes, and simple but satisfying sweets. The repertoire is basic but tempting; Sophia’s Saltimbocca, for example, is the familiar dish yet again, but there are a few original and “undiscovered” dishes, such as Eggplant Cooked in the Manner of Mushrooms. Standout dishes include a lovely herb-perfumed lamb stew from Naples and a sweet-savory rice dish made with turkey, chestnuts, and dried fruit. The recipes are models of clarity, and Sophia’s introductory notes and other asides leave no doubt that the author is a serious, passionate cook. Reading her book and trying her recipes, we come to applaud the star in her apron as well as on the screen. –Arthur Boehm
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Wonderful simple Italian recipes!
When I was in my early twenties I enjoyed cooking Italian dishes with my grandmother every Tuesday. My grandmother is a true Italian woman, raised in New York and believes a family should eat a homemade meal every night. She gave me this book as she thought it was a suberb Italian cookbook. I couldn’t agree more. As a young person, this is a great book because the receipes are not too comlicated, as common Italian dishes and taste delicious! Almost every recipe has a color photo too. My favorite recipes in the book are: Bucatini alla Carbonara, Spaghetti al Limone and the lentil soup.
5 Stars A Delicious, Heart-warming Book!
“Sophia Loren’s Recipes & Memories” is a book to be treasured, read and re-read, for its charming insight into the life and times of one of the world’s great actresses, and for its wonderful, traditional Italian recipes, laced with more than a little spice-of-life.
Buy two of them! One for you to savor, one for a special gift for a favorite person in your life. I read this photo-filled book cover-to-cover the minute it arrived, and then enthusiastically ordered a second copy for my favorite cook, my son, the pastry chef. The first sentence in this memoir is “According to an old adage, the best condiment for any food is hunger.” This book will make you passionately hungry for the best of Italian cooking, and it will inform you in the lovliest way possible, about old-world Italian kitchen traditions, not to mention a fascinating vision of Ms. Loren’s life in film.
5 Stars BookIdeas.com Book Reviewer Marie Jones says:
More than just a collection of family recipes, “Sophia Loren’s Recipes and Memories” is a sumptuous and often intimate journey into the life of one of the world’s classiest and most admired and loved movie stars. The 100 traditional and improvised recipes are accompanied by insightful anecdotes about the movie business, acting, family life, the art of cooking, and growing up in her home country of Italy, with gorgeous photographs that bring Ms. Loren’s passion for her past, and her present, to glorious life.
With such a legendary acting career to her credit, Ms. Loren has met and worked with many of the greats in the business, and she talks about her behind-the-scenes experiences, peppered throughout the book in between the real highlights, the recipes themselves. Many come from long-standing family traditions passed down from generation to generation, but many are also more modern, improvised takes on Italian dishes that Ms. Loren discovered on various locations of her many movies, or created herself from her vast knowledge of the culinary arts (this is not her first cookbook!).
The photographs by Alison Harris chronicle the evolution of both Ms. Loren’s long and illustrious career, and her home life in Italy and abroad, with lush and colorful glimpses into a life centered around the pleasures of home and the family kitchen, as well as behind the camera. That Ms. Loren loves food is obvious in this beautiful, coffee-table style cookbook. That she loves life is even more so.
5 Stars simple recipes emotional depth
I love cooking the recipes in this book because they require few ingredients and cook with little preparation. The rustic simplicity of these recipes resonates very well with her childhood and adolescent memories. You get the feeling that the poverty that she endured in her youth has now tempered to only warm memories with time, but you can still read the hunger and deprivation between the lines. She is so gracious! You really feel as if she is handing you her family recipes. I was never a big fan of hers(too young to enjoy her movies) but I appreciate her so much more–she reveals so much if you read between the lines. One of my favorite recipes is spaghetti with lemon. I didn’t have any cream so I used butter instead. Came out great. Took absolutely no time to prepare.
5 Stars Great Authentic Italian Meals!
As an Italian-born woman I found the receipes in this cookbook to actually be very authentically Italian and delicious. Not sure I buy the fact that Loren makes these dishes, but whoever cooked them up did a great job! Buon Appetito!
Italian Diabetic Meals in 30 Minutes or Less
June 23, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
Italian Diabetic Meals in 30 Minutes or Less
Every luscious Italian entree one can think of is here, made healthy and diabetes-friendly thanks to food master Robyn Webb. Who can resist sinking a fork into veal marsala or salmon with leeks and mushrooms? Some of the 150 dishes are low in carbs, and all of them are easy to fix—many can be cooked in one pan! It comes with complete nutritional analysis and meets all ADA guidelines. Meals include pastas, meats, vegetarian dishes, and light desserts, all with a taste of Tuscany.
