The Italian Cooking Encyclopedia

by Carla Capalbo

a true, state of the art, encyclopedia and professional guide to Italian ingredients, recipes, cooking techniques with lovely, color photographs, explanation of spices. Fantastic book.

Genres: Cookbooks

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

Reviews

[Augusto Bernardi]

This indeed is a good book. It's especially a good book for beginners to Italian Food. It's extremely long with a ton of recipes and explanations about ingredients to keep in the pantry. The first quarter of the book is simply breaking down the individual components of Italian cooking and for that, this book is very good. There are plenty of pictures for it as well. The photos later on in the recipe portion of the book aren't as good and have some poor lighting to be honest. One of the main themes or focuses on Italian cuisine is the quality of the ingredients that determines the quality of the dish. Not the amount of ingredients, presentation or lengthy cooking methods either. That is rather hard to get across in a photo already and I think this book lacked that. Some of the recipes look actually kind of bland. The pasta dishes looked really dry so it doesn't really make me want to cook any pasta. There are a number of great soups, desserts, starters that are really intriguing and are the ones I would like to focus on. The sheer amount of Chicken and beef dishes in this book illustrates how unitalian this book really is. It's as if you did a cookbook about Japanese cuisine but you had a fifth of the book about Mayo.

[Donna Robinson]

Overall a pretty good Italian cookbook! There were plenty of recipes to choose from and I really look forward to trying them out in he future.

[Celeste Nicole]

This is my FAVORITE cook book! I love how they do not waste space explaining to you how to do things that they already explained in previous pages. This book inspires me daily. The pictures are amazing. I see the pages in my dreams!