The Italian Cook Book

Description

Maria Gentile’s Italian Cook Book gathers practical recipes from the Italian kitchen: broths and soups, pasta dishes, pastries and sweets, frozen delicacies and syrups, each set out with step-by-step instructions clear enough for a beginner. The book opens with basics — broth, simple pasta preparations — before ranging across both familiar dishes and less-known regional ones.

Gentile’s preface argues the case for Italian cooking on three grounds: that it is palatable, healthy and economical. Written when thrift was on everyone’s mind in the years following the Great War, the book treats resourcefulness as a virtue rather than a hardship. For a modern reader it shows Italian food arriving in English-language kitchens not as luxury but as sensible economy, and records what an everyday Italian table looked like before the dishes now taken for granted became standard.