Southern Italian Farmer's Table: Authentic Recipes And Local Lore From Tuscany To Sicily

by Matthew Scialabba, Melissa Pellegrino

The Southern Italian Farmer’s Table is a sumptuously illustrated cookbook featuring authentic recipes from over thirty agriturismi (working family farms that provide room & board to travelers) in central and southern Italy, where the cuisine served epitomizes the farm-fresh movement underway in the United States, the UK, and beyond. Visitors to agriturismi , who come from all over Europe and North America, indulge in such delights as vibrant green olive oil fresh from the press, a myriad of hand shaped pastas cooked to perfection, and wedges of aged  pecorino redolent of verdant green pastures.   Professional chefs who are fluent in Italian, Matthew and Melissa have transcribed more than 150 authentic Italian recipes from these family farms—few of which are found in cookbooks available outside of Italy. Full-color photographs and anecdotes about the farms and their residents bring Italy’s glorious countryside to life and complement such recipes as fried spaghetti nests, crepe lasagna with pork ragu, spicy Calabrian chicken, and sweet cakes filled with ricotta and chocolate.  All recipe ingredients are given in both U.S. and metric measurements.

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Cooking

336 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2012

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors, Scialabba and Pellegrino, are chefs fluent in Italian who traveled for months through Italy cooking and learning. Recipes start with a few basics and then are ordered around region. Small color pictures throughout focus on food and people, but don’t expect a picture for each dish. Short essays discuss local foods, farms and preparations. Regional glossaries would have been useful to get a sense of what foods differentiate the different areas and help with pantry assessment in prepping dishes.
Recipes include Italian name, servings, ingredients and good directions. Dishes tend not to be very complicated and not to require difficult to get ingredients. Though wild boar, rabbit and duck fat do show up. The homemade pasta preparations are the most complicated in the book. Though pasta is not a major feature of the cookbook which focuses more on greens, beans and meat. Some dishes will be familiar to most cooks like lentil soup with sausage and rosemary while most are more unusual like spinach and Swiss chard roulade or the black olive, orange and fennel crostini. It’s these unusual dishes as well as the cheese stories that make this book worth purchasing.