Recipe Roaming the Italian Landscape

Italian cookbooks continue to pour forth. Not all do much honor to Italy or the American publishing business, but a surprising number can make you think of Italian food as some radiantly unspoiled new discovery.

The ones that do may be heavy-duty manuals of cooking principles, brief special-subject forays or--like Michele Scicolone’s newest--just records of dishes the author has found and liked. What they have in common are recipes that feel like real, natural cooking. In this book, the recipes give a sense that the ingredients have gracefully lined themselves up of their own volition.

Scicolone gave up her original plan of a regional cookbook because she concluded it was actually impossible to duplicate regional styles outside Italy. (Her focus on unusual dishes not already enshrined in cookbooks would have skewed any attempt to portray regional cookery anyway.) In the end Scicolone wisely left the idea behind the book undefined--except for one remarkable insight early on: “I prefer to think of America as a separate culinary region of Italy.”

It’s a useful thought. In the nuovo paese of America, any dedicated cook can at least search for good local ingredients and draw inspiration from the original dishes of all those other Italian provinces.

Three broad categories of recipes stand out. One is hardscrabble, something-for-nothing Italian subsistence food as modified for more comfortable times--for example, potato soup a la bread and water (roux-thickened, vinegar-laced water) with just a few good seasonings. This is the sort of food I can never get enough of. It’s handsomely represented here: diced potatoes thriftily simmered in a sauce for stubby pasta like tubetti, fettuccine with stewed lentils, polenta served as a porridge with a vegetable and bean medley, fava bean puree with seven “salads” (accompaniments like radishes, pickled peppers and several greens).

There are also a lot of dishes that in my house would be viewed as ideal company (or special family) food--substantial, out of the ordinary, but without a smidgen of misplaced pretension. These include a Neapolitan rice sartu (timbale) filled with sliced sausage, small meatballs, cheese and peas in a porcini-tomato sauce; grilled swordfish cutlets wrapped around a bread crumb stuffing; poached salmon in a slightly sharp green sauce; a big bollito misto from Emilia-Romagna and a modest cousin from Naples; and a lamb stew finished off with a topping of beaten eggs.

Lastly, Scicolone’s regional roaming has turned up some old local specialties that will be fascinatingly new to many or most of us, such as a sort of semolina pudding from Parma bearing the name pasta antica (old-style pasta), a Friulian “strudel” that consists of a potato-based dough enclosing a spinach filling, a pasta torte that is a little like a frittata made with spaghetti, eggless homemade semolina pasta in several guises, or a Pugliese chickpea stew serving as the sauce for both boiled and crisp-fried strips of yet another kind of fresh pasta (tria).

As a cook, Scicolone has a disciplined and careful hand and firm notions of what Italian cooking isn’t. “Don’t be tempted to muddle the flavors of Italian dishes by adding a lot of herbs,” she begs. Her seasonings are judged for each individual dish--nothing to excess, everything to fresh effect. She knows how to make the most of an unusual accent without harping on its unusualness, whether it be fresh mint in a beet salad, green apples in a risotto, a dash of bittersweet chocolate in an oxtail stew, a horseradish “sauce” (actually just freshly grated horseradish with a little olive oil) for grilled pork tenderloin, a pomegranate-juice glaze and gravy for roast capon, or the “rubies” (coarsely chopped beets) of spaghetti con rubini. It’s an example for those with just a few cliched preconceptions of Italian flavors.

The recipes are painstakingly written and the ones I tried were glitch-free, though they might not be completely so for a beginner. The best were a lusty sage-accented duck ragu for a hollow pasta such as rigatoni and a sweet-and-sour eggplant appetizer rendered sensational with just a little chocolate. (The sort of thing a novice might have trouble with is “salt to taste” as the suggested amount for drawing the juices out of the eggplant; this is a matter of chemical action, not taste.)

A mushroom soup with potatoes and barley was also deeply satisfying, and a simple mesclun salad with wedges of a layered goat cheese and olive combination will probably make many more appearances on my table. A recipe for chestnut tart worked like a charm, but I craved for some contrast--lemon zest?--to the pleasant but bland filling.

For all the excellence of the recipes, they appear on pages of a studied-looking higgledy-piggledy design that sticks all sorts of material into the margins: travel notes, addresses of restaurants from which recipe ideas were drawn, assorted culinary tips (saving Parmesan cheese rind to flavor soups) and mini-lessons (how to shop for artichokes), engaging recollections of the author’s family’s home-cooking, historical anecdotes, and miscellaneous quotations from every imaginable source (Michelangelo to Dickens to Cindy Crawford). Little of this is even mentioned in the index and much of it seems fundamentally un-anchored.

The idea of making cookbooks into cutely tricked-out smorgasbords for people with short attention spans does seem to be the wave of the publishing world’s future, but I don’t think it always serves the books well, certainly not this one.

The new publishing house Broadway Books has lavished attention on precisely the wrong details in this, its first hardcover cookbook. It has been printed in an eye-catching scheme of puce and purple, employs a clever set of typographical effects and is randomly splashed with unremarkable color photographs and replicas of old travel postcards (usually unidentified and often hard to make out; what a trivialization of potentially marvelous material!)--but there are no maps or instructional drawings for people who might want to know just where Friuli is or how to shape pasta strands into strozzapreti.

Since we aren’t about to return to the days of clearly and functionally designed cookbooks, I guess we’d better just welcome this green-and-purple extravaganza for the sake of its illuminating, sensible contents. People who collect Italian cookbooks will surely want it--but I also think it’s more than worth considering as someone’s first or only Italian cookbook. It conveys a remarkable amount of the real basics in a clear, non-intimidating way, and it contains about 260 vivid object lessons in the way ingredients should come together.