An Italian Feast: The Celebrated Provincial Cuisines of Italy from Como to Palermo, a Culinary Vade Mecum Illustrated with More Than 800
A sequel to Clifford A. Wright's groundbreaking A Mediterranean Feast, which won the 2000 James Beard award for Cookbook of the Year and the James Beard award for the Best Writing on Food, An Italian Feast celebrates the cuisines of the Italian provinces from Como to Palermo. An illustrated culinary guide and vade mecum (book of ready reference) meant to be the most comprehensive book on Italian cuisine, it includes over 800 recipes from the 109 provinces of Italy's 20 regions.
An Italian Feast is a book about Italian food, how Italians cook, eat, and how their food is an intimate part of their culture, perhaps even a defining element of "Italianness." It is the first book-in any language-to comprehensively explore the gastronomy and cuisine not just of Italy, and not just the regions of Italy, but all 109 provinces of Italy, linking each with each other and their alimentary landscape in terms of history, agriculture, economics, and the material culture of creative food illustrated with 1,000 recipes
An Italian Feast examines how and what Italians cook and eat, why they cook and eat what they do, and how food informs their consciousness, both individual and collective, and therefore their culture. This is not a collection of "typical Italian recipes" but rather a book of exemplary dishes from each province of Italy that hopes to preserve the heirloom recipes that reveal the molecular nature of Italian cooking, with the village as atom and the family as neutron. This book is a culinary archeology meant to honor the old ways and culinary heritage of Italy and provide both historical and philosophical insight into the Italian culinary consciousness. When you prepare the recipes in An Italian Feast, you will be cooking and eating the unaltered and exact food of Italians past and present.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
Clifford Wright has been a significant professional resource for my work over the past 25 years. I believe in learning the rules before I break them so I'm seeking the facts as often as possible. Whether I'm in search of regional origin or recipe origin, Cliff has the story. He records popular recipes and older forgotten ones and moves us through time to understand the influences and evolution of an entire cuisine. It's hard to imagine a book that covers it all, but this masterpiece will be the new authority on Italian cooking.
--Chef Ana Sortun, Partner Oleana, Sofra, Sarma, Cambridge, MA. James Beard winner for Best Chef Northeast, 2005.
When Clifford A. Wright published A Mediterranean Feast in 1999, I was very grateful to have a standard text that simultaneously helped me to understand the cuisines of the Mediterranean in their historical context while providing me with hundreds of recipes. I have always kept that book within reach. Now he goes deep again, with the cuisines of Italy, and this too will be my standard text, or as he rightly defines it, my vade mecum, book of ready reference. It is a fascinating tome, and a delicious one too, that I've been anticipating for a long time. It was worth the wait!!
--Martha Rose Shulman, New York Times contributor and author of Mediterranean Harvest and The Simple Art of Vegetarian Cooking
In 1999 award-winning author Clifford Wright published A Mediterranean Feast, an 800-page tome of extraordinary scope with fine recipes I've turned to literally hundreds of times. An Italian Feast promises the same depth and complexity with regard to the peninsula of food cultures we call Italy. It's easy to relegate Italian food to a few delicious dishes we eat over and over, but the true delight of the cuisine rests in its people and the culture they created and how it continues to evolve, how it simultaneously holds variability and ingenuity created by different geographies and histories within an overarching ethos of frugality and simplicity. I look forward to engaging with this culinary companion for years to come.
-Evan Kleiman, Host of Good Food, KCRW-FM
