Mystery set mainly in ARGENTINA
Ten Great Books set around Food in ITALY
13th August 2024
Ten Great Books set around Food in Italy. From the sun-drenched coastlines to the mountainous regions, each region of Italy boasts its own culinary treasures. Fresh, seasonal ingredients are the heart of Italian cooking. Pasta, in countless shapes and sauces, is a national obsession, but the cuisine extends far beyond this staple.
Pizza, born in Naples, is a global icon. Risotto, creamy and rich, is a northern Italian specialty. Seafood dominates coastal menus, while hearty stews and polenta warm souls in colder climes.
Here are ten of our favourite books set around food in Italy.
The Risotto Guru by Laura Fraser – ITALY
Sardinian wedding feast, the search for the perfect seaside pasta with wild fennel, meeting a risotto master: Laura Fraser journeys from the Spaghettis of her American childhood to savor the best of Italian cuisine and the culture that cooked it up. Using the same dreamy, delicious type of prose that made An Italian Affair a best-selling memoir, these essays will delight readers who loved that book, and all who love Italian food and culture. Sumptuous descriptions of Italian meals—and the passion that goes into them—make this e-book a mouthwatering, uplifting pleasure. In “Italy in 17 Courses,” Fraser uses the pace and order of the dishes in a wedding feast to muse on her own introduction to Italian food, and how it changed her from a diet-obsessed vegetarian to a pasta and pancetta connoisseur. “An Affair to Remember” explores themes of food and nostalgia, and how a good meal can lift the spirit.
Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons by Matthew Fort – SICILY
At the age of twenty-six Matthew Fort first visited the Italian island of Sicily. He and his brother arrived in 1973 expecting sun, sea and good food, but they were totally unprepared for the lifelong effect of this most extraordinary of Mediterranean islands.
Thirty years later, older and a bit wiser – but no less greedy – Matthew finally returns. Travelling around the island on his scooter, Monica, he samples almond ice cream on the spectacular coast and intoxicating mouthfuls of sausage stew in olive groves, and goes fishing for anchovies beneath a star-scattered sky.
Matthew is drawn once again to the intensity of life in Sicily, its dramatic landscape and traditions, and discovers how the island’s vibrant food culture is intertwined with its often turbulent past.
Cooking with Fernet-Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson – TUSCANY
Gerald Samper, an effete Englishman, lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. He is a ghostwriter for celebrities, and a foodie, whose weird tastes include ‘Mussels in Chocolate and Garlic’ and ‘Fernet Branca Ice Cream’. His idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, a vulgar woman from a former Soviet republic now run by gangsters, notably male members of her family. She is a composer in a neo-folk style who claims to be writing a score for a trendy Italian film director. The neighbours’ lives disastrously intertwine. The entourages of the rock star and the director come and go: mysterious black helicopters bring news of mayhem in Voynova, Marta’s homeland: and along the way the English obsession with Tuscany is satirized mercilessly.
The Food of Love by Anthony Capella – ROME
Laura Patterson is an American exchange student in Rome who, fed up with being inexpertly groped by her young Italian beaus, decides there’s only one sure-fire way to find a sensual man: date a chef. Then she meets Tomasso, who’s handsome, young — and cooks in the exclusive Templi restaurant. Perfect. Except, unbeknownst to Laura, Tomasso is in fact only a waiter at Templi — it’s his shy friend Bruno who is the chef.
But Tomasso is the one who knows how to get the girls, and when Laura comes to dinner he persuades Bruno to help him with the charade. It works: the meal is a sensual feast, Laura is utterly seduced and Tomasso falls in lust. But it is Bruno, the real chef who has secretly prepared every dish Laura has eaten, who falls deeply and unrequitedly in love.
A delicious tale of Cyrano de Bergerac-style culinary seduction, but with sensual recipes instead of love poems.
The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi – ORVIETO
Every week on a Thursday evening, a group of four Italian rural women gather in a derelict stone house in the hills above Italy’s Orvieto. There – along with their friend, Marlena – they cook together, sit down to a beautiful supper, drink their beloved local wines, and talk.
Here, surrounded by candle light, good food and friendship, Miranda, Ninucia, Paolina and Gilda tell their life stories of loves lost and found, of ageing and abandonment, of mafia grudges and family feuds, and of cherished ingredients and recipes whose secrets have been passed down through the generations. Around this table, these five friends share their food and all that life has offered them – the good and the bad.
The Golden Tide by John Guy – SICILY
Green activist Simone struggles with her beliefs when she meets journalist Michiel, who shows her how an oil spill threatening Sicily is a bonanza for many locals. Compensation and clean-up money floods into the community, creating conflicts between politicians, the oil company, environmentalists and locals. Simone and Michiel fight to save the coastline, putting them into a tense and dangerous confrontation with powerful forces which have a different agenda.
The Little Italian Bakery by Valentina Cebeni – ITALY
The scent of freshly baked biscuits, lemon and aniseed reminds Elettra of her mother’s kitchen. But her mother is in a coma, and the family bakery is failing. Elettra is distraught; she has many unanswered questions about her mother’s childhood – Edda was a secretive woman. The only clue is a family heirloom: a necklace inscribed with the name of an island.
Elettra buys a one-way ticket to that island, just off the coast of Sardinia. Once there, she discovers a community of women, each lost in their own way. They live in a crumbling convent, under threat from the local mayor and his new development plan. It is within the convent’s dark corridors and behind its secret doors that Elettra discovers a connection to her mother’s past. She also falls in love again: with friendship, baking and adventure.
The Tuscan Year by Elizabeth Romer – TUSCANY
In a green and secret valley in Tuscany, life is firmly moulded by the past. In this beautiful account of traditional life and cooking, Elizabeth Romer introduces the Cerotti family who farm one section of the valley and vividly describes, month by month, the Tuscan year – January’s prosciutto and salame, cheese-making in March, threshing the corn in high summer, the game and chanterelles of autumn, the chestnut woods and zabajone of November and December. In the heart of the Cerotti house, wonderful meals are prepared using fresh and simple ingredients, governed by the rhythms of the changing seasons. This magical book reveals the secrets of an ancient way of life and cuisine, with dozens of delicious recipes to bring the flavour of Tuscany to any kitchen.
Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller – ITALY
The best Italian extra-virgins are made by authentic artist-craftsmen, who combine traditional farm wisdom and cutting-edge extraction technology to produce the finest oils in history. Despite the unprecedented quality and popularity of their oils, however, top Italian producers are being steadily driven from the market by fraud. Extra-virgin olive oil is difficult and expensive to make, yet alarmingly easy to adulterate with inferior grades of olive oil, cheap seed and nut oils, or worse. Skilled oil criminals are flooding the market with low-cost, faux extra-virgins, reaping rich profits and undercutting honest producers. Yet the Italian government does little to fight this corruption. Extravirginity introduces olive oil’s saints and sinners, whose conflicts, over the next decade, will determine the fate of quality olive oil worldwide: a feisty pugliese woman of sixty struggling to keep the family business afloat: her mafiosa neighbour who has grown wealthy on adulterated oil: a terminally-ill manager from Milan who is dedicating his last years to preserving high-quality olive oil: and a Catholic priest in Sicily who harvests olives and makes oil on lands confiscated from Cosa Nostra, despite regular death-threats. Extravirginity is rich with classical allusion, with the integral cultural significance of olive oil, and the passion of those who produce it.
The Art of Killing Well by Marco Malvaldi – TUSCANY
Nothing could please a chef more than a chance to learn the secrets of a Baron’s castle kitchen. Having travelled the length and breadth of the country compiling his masterpiece, The Science of Cooking and The Art of Eating Well, Pellegrino Artusi relishes the prospect of a few quiet days and a boar hunt in the Tuscan hills.
But his peace is short-lived. A body is found in the castle cellar, and the local inspector finds himself baffled by an eccentric array of aristocratic suspects. When the baron himself becomes the target of a second murder attempt, Artusi realises he may need to follow his infallible nose to help find the culprit.
Marco Malvaldi serves up an irresistible dish spiced with mischief and intrigue, and sweetened with classical elegance and wit. His stroke of genius is to bring Italy’s first cookery writer to life in this most entertaining of murder mysteries.
Enjoy your ten great books set around food in ITALY!
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