Italian Home Cooking: Authentic Dishes from All of Italy's Regions

It is easy to forget just how local Italian cooking can be. Italian Home Cooking draws on Slow Food Europe’s extensive archive of recipes from families, trattorias, and osterias to travel through all twenty of Italy’s regions, collecting more than 100 dishes that show how dramatically the cooking can change along the way. 

There are baked cabbage soup and hazelnut-almond wafer cookies in tiny Valle d’Aosta; agnolotti in roasted-meat sauce and chocolate-amaretti pudding in Piedmont; cheese and bread dumplings in Trentino-Alto Adige; and Gorizian goulash in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Farther south, the book turns to jumbo shrimp and wild chicory soup from Molise, fava beans with chicory in Puglia, eggplant meatballs in Calabria, and, in Sardinia, shellfish soup and pasta filled with potatoes and mint. 

The collection comes out of the Slow Food movement’s decades of work documenting and protecting local food traditions, which began in Italy in 1986. These aren’t presented as museum pieces: recipes have been adapted where necessary to make them workable in a contemporary home kitchen, and every dish is photographed. 

For anyone accustomed to thinking of Italian cooking through its most widely exported dishes, the pleasure here is in the specificity. Instead of another unified version of “Italian food,” Italian Home Cooking makes its way around the country one local specialty at a time. 

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.