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| The Italian-American Cookbook: A Feast of Food from a Great American Cooking Tradition | 
 enlarge | Author: John Mariani
Publisher: Harvard Common Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $4.98
You Save: $14.97 (75%)
New (13) Used (17) Collectible (1) from $4.07
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 484621
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 1558321667
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5945
EAN: 9781558321663
ASIN: 1558321667
Publication Date: November 1, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Ships immediately! Perfect and New! 1st Edition. 2000 Paperback.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 11 | | NEXT » |
 The Best Italian-American Cookbook available! July 4, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
We have purchased and tried many an Italian cookbook but recipe for recipe this one has the best tasting collection. My wife who is not Italian (I am) loves Italian food and when we got the first one of these books she went through it and picked out over thirty recipes to try. Every one of these we tried was excellent and then some. It is rare to get one good recipe from a cookbook, let alone dozens. At the time we purchased our first copy it was a peperback. It is worn out. Also, we have given this cookbook to most of our friends as a gift we we go over to stay. They have all called to thank us for it.
 Generally pretty good, but neither great nor definitive January 8, 2006
I really think this book doesn't know what it wants to be. There are many excellent recipes, but it seems to fall into the trap of treating Italian food from Italy as normative rather than taking Italian-American cooking on its own terms. I think that mars what could otherwise have been a great book.
That said, it does provide a lot of great historical material about the rise of Italian food in the United States. There are a great many personal stories and historical sidebars that make the book a worthy purchase. A lot of classic Italian-American dishes are included, even meatballs and Sunday gravy (though it's known in this book as Galina's Meat Sauce).
Ultimately there's a dryness to the book that drags it down though, and it's a hard thing to put one's finger on where it comes from. It just doesn't have the personality it needs to pull the job off, though it almost makes up for it in other ways. Maybe it's the emphasis on restaurant cuisine, maybe it's the homogenized voice of both authors, maybe just the subtle bias in favor of the Old Country that doesn't exist in other cookbooks based on Italian American cooking. It's not a bad book, but it isn't the definitive book on the subject. That, it seems, has yet to be written.
Book comes close but misses the target November 24, 2005
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
How does anyone write a cookbook about Italian/American cooking without including scungilli. Without even mentioning the word. Has Mr. Mariani ever cooked in a restaurant. I know he has been a critic but has his food been tested by the writing world. Had he gotten any awards. Has he put his money and his time on the line for his cooking or is he just another home cook who gets praised for who he is and not what he's done. Mr. Mariani seems to have his favorites and ignores other obvious places. Little mention of Lombardi's Pizza and Rao's. Even if he doesn't like these places he has to bow to the public support of these restaurants for over 100 years. But then he doesn't think much of the public because he puts down the international dining guide which uses public recommendations to rate restaurants. Couldn't he stipulate in the beginning of the book that the reader should use kosher salt and not have to say in every recipe "salt, preferably kosher."
WOW - what a great italian-american cookbook June 28, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Best Italian/American cookbook ever! Great American/Italian recipes (which is what we are mostly exposed to/enjoy most in America), great narrative/pictures on how the recipes came to be. Awesome organization:
- Ingredients
- Italian Wines
- Antipasti
- Soups
- Salads
- Pasta
- Risotto & Polenta
- Seafood
- Meats
- Poultry
- Vegetables
- Breads/Pizzas/Snacks/Sandwiches
- Desserts & Confections
- Drinks
Very Good Study of Italian-American Cuisine Origins November 23, 2004
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
`The Italian-American Cookbook' is written by John Mariani and wife Galina Mariani. In the rich and varied world of Italian cookbooks, this offering joins `Lydia's Italian-American Kitchen' in the very select niche of works on how Americans, whether transplanted from Italy or from other sources, cook recipes inspired by one of the cuisines of Italy.
Both of these books stand apart and above volumes such as `Eleanora's Kitchen' by Eleanora Scarpetta, a Bronx housewife and `Rocco's Italian American' by Rocco and Mama of the meatballs made famous on `The Restaurant' miniseries. These latter volumes contain many good recipes, but they are a record of a personal cuisine built on their family's Italian-American recipes. Bastianich and Mariani have a much more scholarly goal of presenting a general picture of Italian-American recipes.
Appropriate to Mariani's vocation as a professional writer, his book has a much more scholarly tone than chef and culinary teacher Bastianish. This emphasis is set by a truly erudite 22 page opening essay on the origins of the Italian American cuisine from the political fragmentation of the Italian peninsula after the fall of the Western Roman empire to the flowering of the Italian American restaurant epitomized by Manhattan's famous `Mama Leone's' restaurant. Mariani immediately earned my respect when he pointed out that such classic American dishes as Philly's cheese steak and Kraft's `Mac and Cheese' are both sucker branches from the great Italian stem of cuisines. Very early on, Mariani shows a lot of respect for Italian-American cuisine as a distinct culinary genre which deserves to stand on its own rather than to be belittled as a pale shadow of `true' Italian cooking. As the book progresses; however, Mariani seems to loose his bearings and appears to be presenting purely Italian dishes as the ideal and American takes on these dishes as derivatives, rather than as true evolutions, just as Homo Sapiens is a distinct evolution from Homo Erectus and an improvement over Homo Neanderthalis. The clearest evidence of this is his recitation of Italian wines rather than coverage of American wines that originated with native Italian grapes. He does point out that many of the early California vintners were Italians such as Mondavi and Gallo, but nothing is said of their wines. So, on the issue of scholarship and `keeping on message', I come away just a little disappointed with this otherwise excellent embassy on Italian American cooking to the lay foodies.
So what about the recipes? Starting from my impression stated in the previous paragraph, I feel that the best description of the recipes in this book is that it presents those Italian recipes which are most commonly cooked in American households and in `Italian' restaurants in the United States rather than being a rigorous examination of the transformation of recipes from Italy to America. The first implication of this selection is that it is heavily weighed toward recipes whose origins lie in Southern Italian provinces of Campagnia (Naples), Apulia, Sicily, and Lazio (Rome). One sure symptom of this emphasis is in Mariani's including fourteen (14) recipes for spaghetti, including the Italian classics `alla Carbonara' and `Puttanesca'. A telling comment in the headnote on spaghetti and cauliflower is Mariani's stating that cauliflower is a much more common ingredient on the Italian table than it is in the Italian American restaurant. Why is this cauliflower recipe then in a book about distinctively Italian American recipes? By contrast, Bastianich has only four (4) recipes for spaghetti in her index and the Carbonara and Puttanesca are missing. On the other hand, Mariani has only six (6) recipes with spinach while northerner Bastianich gives us fourteen (14) recipes with spinach. For recipes on veal, especially veal scaloppine, the two books are very close in both the number and selection of recipes. Both include the classic recipes for `Scaloppine alla Marsala', `Saltimbocca alla Romana', and `Scaloppine Piccata' (with lemon-caper sauce).
Since `What is Italian-American cuisine' may be only slightly more interesting than the number of angels jigging on a pinhead, the real value of Mariani's book may simply be the quality of his recipes. On this point, my summary judgment is that his recipes are better than Rocco DiSpirito's traditional family recipes, and they are not quite as good as teacher and chef Lydia Bastianich's recipes in her work on Italian-American cooking. Part of this difference is that Ms. Bastianich simply explains things better. A small example of this is their respective instructions on combining the sage and prosciutto with the scallopine to create the saltimbocca. I have done Bastianich's instructions several times with no problems. Mariani's instructions leave me scratching my head trying to figure out exactly how he meant me to apply the toothpick and fold the results of this marriage of ingredients. Another point in Ms. Bastianich's favor is that her recipes are a bit more respectful of ingredients in the manner so well explained by Marcella Hazan. In Bastianich's recipe for sausage and peppers, the meat and the peppers are sauteed separately before being roasted together to complete the dish. She also does not drown the meat and peppers in canned tomatoes or gild the lily with oregano or dried pepper flakes. Instead, she adds fresh mushrooms and whole cherry peppers. I do not know which recipe is more authentically `Italian-American' but I know I prefer eating Ms. Lydia's dish. On this basis, it is no surprise that Bastianich won an IACP award and Mariani was a runner-up.
The list of suppliers at the back of Mariani's book is just a bit weak and out of date. Balducci's in New York City has gone out of business and his list does not list DePalo's cheese shop, one of the best sources of homemade mozzarella and ricotta in Manhattan.
I recommend Mariani's book especially for his excellent wine and food pairings, but suggest you get both Mariani and Bastianich.
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