I just received an email from Barron’s announcing a new edition of The New Regional Italian Cuisine Cookbook written by Reinhardt Hess, Cornelia Schinharl, and Sabine Sälzer.
(It was a “dear Blogger” announcement, sometimes a letdown. But then again, does this mean that bloggers are inching up the food chain? Will the big barons of Tee Vee and Publishing be quaking in their boots any time soon?)
I’m looking forward to taking a gander at the book. Still, I have quite the collection of cookbooks and sometimes wonder how many Italian recipes there can be. Can The New Regional Italian Cuisine replace my beloved and tattered copy of Italian Regional Cuisine by Ada Boni?
The New Regional Italian Cuisine has lots of pictures (You can download some sample pages from the link above). This is the new thing, tempting you with photos of food all dolled up fresh from the test kitchen. Ada has a few pictures, but the recipes were printed on a kinda absorbent (read cheaper) paper between the pictures. I can always find recipes I like to prepare often by looking for the biggest olive oil spatters.
But the cookbook I cherish? Ah, that’d have to be Sardinia in Bocca which you see over there on the left. The cover is cardboard. Yes, the same thing as your Amazon orders come in except printed with artwork signed by Rodo in 1977, a Sardinian Shepherd on a horse. The paper inside is rough and brownish, like recycled cardboard.
Rough like the interior of Sardinia.
Each recipe is hand written in Sardo, and printed in Italian and English. The translations are sometimes funny, and sometimes are so precise they point out the mistakes we make in English.
For example, the recipe for Leg of Lamb (“Stewed legs of Lamb”) calls for 2 or 3 per person. Now, before you utter “yipes!” I have to tell you, “yes, Sardinians love their meat, but this is not as unlikely as it seems.”
You see, we make the mistake of calling everything below the hip—minus the feet—a leg. That’s just stupid. What you have, a physical anthropologist will tell you, is a leg and a thigh. So, what we call a “shank” is what the recipe calls for, that little leg, or “piedino” of lamb.
We do get it right when we talk about chicken. That’s odd, no?
Anyway, some of the recipes are quite simple. For example, you might want to know how to cook lamb’s or kid’s offal. So, here’s how:
Put the lamb’s or kid’s offal in the oven until half done. In the meanwhile clean carefully the entrails keeping also the net. Remove the offal from the oven and cut it into pieces….”
From there it’s just a matter of skewering the pieces with some fat and roasted bread and hanging it in the fireplace until browned.
What could be easier? Are we hungry yet?
(Post Scripting: These editions, printed by Edikronos, are becoming collectors items, I’ve discovered. I think I bought mine for a couple thousand lire—a buck or two.)