Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen: Or How to Cook Vegetables

by Janet Duff-Gordon Ross

Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen was first published in 1899 and became a classic both in its own time, and from the many later printings, a classic to generations of cooks after. It was a pioneer in the field of cookery books and appeared at a time when vegetables were considered merely as an adjunct to the main course, and little attention was paid to good fresh vegetables as a dish on their own.

The author, Janet Ross (1842-1927) lived at Poggio Gherardo, a villa outside Florence and was a well-known writer and figure in the Anglo-American community of Florence in her day. Her own account of her life and her friendships can be found in her book, The Fourth Generation (London 1912). Janet Ross was the daughter of Lucie Duff Gordon (1821-1869), author of the magnificent Letters from Egypt. The recipes which Janet Ross collected and faithfully recorded in Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen were those of Guiseppe Volpi, her cook for over thirty years.

In 1973 Michael Waterfield, Janet Ross' great-great-nephew, at that time himself a cook of renown and a restaurateur, edited and adapted the original edition. Now over thirty years later he has revised and updated that 70s edition and had added a number of new recipes.

Though the preparation and cooking of fresh vegetables is the book's main theme, recipes for risottos, pasta, and soups are included. The vegetable recipes run in alphabetical order and each is given a brief descriptive paragraph. Now that all of the vegetables, which hitherto were found only in markets in Italy, are obtainable from our own gardens, farmer's markets or supermarkets, never has there been a more appropriate time for this much loved book to reappear in handsome new livery, bringing the delights of true Italian home cooking to all to try.

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Nonfiction

171 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1899

About the author

Janet Ann Ross (née Duff Gordon; 1842–1927) was an English historian, biographer, and Tuscan cookbook author.


Janet Duff Gordon was the daughter of Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon and Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon. Her father held a number of government positions, including Commissioner of Inland Revenue and her mother wrote the classic Letters from Egypt. She had a brother, Maurice and a sister, Urania.

Reviews

[Georgia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last night I got a call from a friend. We go back years, back to when we watched boys chase tennis balls with hockey sticks in the street. Our town then had no rink but had a hockey team and bred the captain of the US team who helped beat Russia in the Lake Placid Olympic games. She wondered how I was doing out in Poland, you know, so near to a war. I'm getting these calls a lot these days.
I'm also getting good at turning the topic to safer things. Soon, the tension has slipped from my friend's voice as sure as a bone from her throat. She's her usual bouncy self. That kid at the make out parties when Elton John sang "Bennie and the Jets" is back. She's giving me a recipe for . . . Beer Can Chicken. Hearing her describe how to stuff the can (take a few sips first) into the cavity of the bird, I become the one whose throat feels constricted. This is when I knew I had to recommend this cookery book, the first I owned and a first love that travelled several continents with me. From my Cotswold country house kitchen with no heat in England, the kitchen with no oven in my Japanese home, the kitchen in Poland during food rationing in the 1980s, to more kitchens I've had, Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen was at my side.

It is a slim, small book, with a few pencil sketches of vegetables. That's all. Minimalism for cooks. Each recipe is like the repetition of a few bars of Tchaikovsky. Repetitive and mesmerising. Their simplicity is their excellence. As Leopold Mozart wrote Wolfgang "What is little is great if it is natural, if it flows along smoothly and is well put together. It is more difficult to write that way than to produce complicated harmonies that are difficult to perform and not understood by most listeners. Good writing, well ordered, il filo - that is what distinguishes a master . . . . "

Pour the beer. Pile the cans on a beach wall. Don't oh don't put it inside a chicken. Just cook good vegetables. Fresh. In season. Minimal cooking time. Lashings of olive oil. Ecstasy.

[Lee Broderick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The other review presently on GoodReads and some I've seen elsewhere discuss how mind-blowing this book must have been upon initial publication in 1899. Far more amazing, I think, is just how contemporary it feels. OK, there are no illustrations, but we all know what a courgette looks like, don't we?

Except for the forewords and the editor's introduction, all there is here is a list of recipes: that is the one and only way in which the book shows its age. Beyond that, the recipes are grouped by principle ingredient - useful if you're trying to cook seasonally, for example if you have a garden or subscribe to a box scheme.

The recipes themselves cover the gamut of starters, mains and side-dishes and most of them are very simple (this is Italian food as the 19th century petty landlord had it; not as it's served in a chain restaurant). Some of these recipes contain meat (I mention it in case there are concerned vegetarians reading this) but those make up a very small minority.

I'm left wondering if the book could provide a template for some modern cookbooks in terms of how to lay out a recipe. Each uses the full width of the page, with the ingredients on the right, for example:

Melanzane al Forno

Peel strips off...........................THREE LARGE AUBERGINES
and cut their stalks. Slice obliquely and put into a colander with
a...........................................................SPRINKLING OF SALT
until the bitter juice is drawn out.

Meanwhile, peel and slice..............6 LARGE RIPE TOMATOES
Crush over them.....................................3 CLOVES OF GARLIC
and make a mixture of................................50g BREADCRUMBS
.....................................................GRATED RIND OF 1 LEMON
.........................................................50g GRATED PARMESAN
Pour a little.................................................................OLIVE OIL
into the bottom of a large, fairly shallow oven dish, arrange layers of aubergine and tomato, add a little more olive oil, press down and sprinkle with the breadcrumbs and parmesan.

Bake in a rather hot oven for about half an hour.

How simple and logical is that? A lot of the recipes, predictably, are the sort of basic thing that most cooks must know how to do ('Cabbage with Melted Butter', for example). Despite that though, I can see this book getting quite a bit of use as the winter winds on (What, more cabbage? Is there anything else I can do with it?).

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Italian cookbook from 1899, focused on vegetables, and still very modern. I learned about this from Beevor’s biography, A Tuscan Childhood. Anyone interested in culinary history would be interested—of particular interest are the odd measurement sizes! It’s out of copyright and available digitally from Google Books.

[Telyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first cookbook published in Britain that focused on vegetables. It must have been a revelation to Edwardian housewives, who had probably never even seen an artichoke, let alone cooked one. I enjoyed reading this book tremendously, and found some excellent culinary inspiration, but can't imaging putting a lot of these recipes into practice as written—there's one that calls for what would probably be $5000 worth of truffles! And I never appreciated before how much cream and butter went into 19th century Tuscan cooking. Ah, the good old days!

[Jessi Waugh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this after reading A Tuscan Childhood, hoping for something more revelatory than basic vegetable cooking. Most of the recipes were repeats of the same thing with a different main ingredient. I did like how it was organized by vegetable; I skipped the veggies we never eat like jerusalem artichokes, chickory, and fennel. One recipe for sauteed peppers reminds me of my Sicilian g-ma's pepper casserole, and there was a pasta recipe I copied down. Other than that, not much new.