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| The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford Companion To...) | 
 enlarge | Author: Gillian Riley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $19.97
You Save: $15.03 (43%)
New (42) Used (12) from $15.91
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 30437
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 672
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.8
ISBN: 0198606176
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.120945
EAN: 9780198606178
ASIN: 0198606176
Publication Date: November 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081203230030T
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| Customer Reviews:
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comprehensive but frustratin November 30, 2008
the alphabetical index leaves much to be desire. what there is is of excellent quality
 Just need less destructive shipping! September 19, 2008
This is great. My only issue is that the soft cover over the hard cover arrived slightly damaged from the poor shipping box it comes in.
 A Disappointment March 28, 2008
1 out of 8 found this review helpful
THis is a professional chefs dictionary.... Not as explained in advertisements.... I thought this was going to be a collectors Italian "JOY OF COOKING" ...That's why I returned it the same day that I received it....
Sam Campanaro
An excellent encyclopedia February 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Gillian Riley with the help of other contributors has created a comprehensive encyclopedia of Italian food, which is enlivened with mini-essays that display her wit and her erudition. She covers all 20 regions of the mainland, Sicily and Sardinia. She discusses cheeses, sausages, produce, spices, regional dishes, cooking styles, history, cultural influences and important culinary figures, but excludes wine, which would require a volume of its own.
Some pages look like standard encyclopedias, for example, page 322:
Prosciutto (see ham and Parma ham)
Provatura, a pulled buffalo-milk cheese similar to mozzarella
Provola, an aged (or smoked) pulled cheese from the south
Provolone, the same cheese made in the north, where the milk is richer and more abundant
Provola di Floresta, a pulled cheese made from cattle on Mount Etna
Prunes (see plums)
Pudding
Puglia, which continues for several pages.
Essays include:
-- A discussion of Futurist painter Marinetti's attack on pasta for making Italians pacific and listless She points out, as Marinetti never did, that rice was "a patriotic, home-grown food, unlike pasta, which depended on imported grain".
-- Beef Carpaccio was named by Giuseppe Ciprani of Harry's Bar because the color "reminded Cipriani of the deep reds in the paintings in a stunning exhibition in the Palazzo Ducale in 1963 of Carpaccio, a name to conjure with, which is what everyone has been doing ever since".
-- Pirciati are a long hollow kind of pasta similar to bucatini. Although there are no formal recipes in the book, Gillian illustrates the perfect sauce for pirciati with a delightful restaurant scene from one of Andrea Camilleri's Commissario Montalbano books, "Il Colore della Notte". The sauce "burns", as you can tell from the ingredients: oil, onion, two garlic cloves, two anchovies, a teaspoon of capers, black olives, half a chilli pepper, tomato, basil, black pepper and grated pecorino. "Alternating forks of food with gulps of wine, groans of extreme agony and unbearable bliss ... Montalbano even had the courage to mop up the remaining sauce with a piece of bread, wiping his brow from time to time."
-- Cicero, the Roman orator, reportedly gave the family name to chickpeas, whose Latin name is Cicer arietinum (ceci in Italian).
-- Mozzarella di bufala is made from the milk of water buffalo not native to the country. They were brought to Italy from Asia during the late Roman Empire -- a better legacy than garum, a sauce made by fermenting fish and their entrails.
-- The entry for Parmesan runs to more than 2,000 words and includes information on its nutritional value, the region where it is produced, the breed of cow used to produce it (the razza reggiana, or vacche rosse), the role of the cheese maker, the origin of its name, Moliere's deathbed demand for it, its frequent and lustrous depiction in 16th and 17th century paintings, and the proper method of serving: "One disdains the phallic peppermill, but must always appreciate the attentive grating, at the table, of parmesan over pasta or soup, as magical in its way as shavings of truffles."
The book includes extensive cross referencing, a thematic index, a general index, a comprehensive bibliography, and a list of suggested further reading.
I would have liked more illustrations, and perhaps some pronunciation guides. Nonetheless, this is an invaluable resource for anyone searching for information on Italian food, and it is enormous fun to read.
Robert C. Ross 2008
Marcella is right February 12, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book, but not for beginners. It requires a considerable level of knowledge, but the amount of information -historical, technical, gastronomic- is truly outstanding. Kudos!
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