OP: Cucina Rustica
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William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1990. Hardcover. Very Good.
Two of our very best writers on Italian home food join forces to provide us a collection of dishes “rooted in country cooking.” This is the real thing—spare, modest, and free of artifice. Viana La Place, who lived and worked in Italy for many years, and Evan Kleiman, chef/owner of the former Los Angeles restaurant Angeli, collaborate to offer food that “places few demands on the cook or the eater, except to succumb to the pleasures of the table.”
The byword of Italian home cooks is simplicity. A few, truly fresh ingredients brought together artfully with a minimum of fuss and bother tells the whole story: risotto with spinach, grilled fish in a plain sauce of parsley and pine nuts, fennel with golden garlic and anchovies. This “rustic cuisine” promotes truly liberated cooking, utterly authentic in its allowance for improvisation, substitutions, and last-minute course corrections.
Cucina Rustica (1990) is one of three books on which La Place and Kleiman collaborated, the other two being Cucina Fresca (1985) and Pasta Fresca (1988).
Very Good, overall.
