Cookbooks that work. A constantly updated list

This is quite an unusual first post of the year. I’ll leave my good intentions, our new projects, new recipes and the word I chose for 2019 to the upcoming posts. Today I want to talk about cookbooks, today I want to celebrate small victories rather than listing big fails. 

The year that we just filed has been rewarding, generous but extremely demanding. We had so many projects and goals, and we had to downsize our ideas, or postpone some of them to this year. But if there’s one thing I’ve been extremely proud of, that is our weekly newsletter. We kept quite a constant rhythm, sharing behind the scenes moments, personal updates and seasonal recipes, along with the new blogposts and the upcoming events. We believe in content, here and in the newsletter. 

In the last months I’ve been sharing also a new cookbook – or a food related book – a week. It was a way to keep trace of the new cookbooks I bought and cooked from, but also an excuse to go through my huge collection, picking old books and falling in love with them again. 

So we thought it was about time to collect all the books we’ve mentioned in the past newsletters in this post: these are cookbooks that work, the most precious species of cookbooks. I decided to add also some of the books I’ve written about in these ten years of blogging.

This will be a constantly updated post, as more titles will come: there will be new books shared through our weekly newsletter (by the way, you can subscribe here!), new food-crushes and new must-haves. In the meantime, as you go through this list, feel free to share your favourite ones in the comments, as I’m always in search of new cookbooks to read, cook from and review!

Cookbooks that work 

Holiday and Celebration Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Zoë François and Jeff Hertzberg

Everyone can bake fresh and fragrant bread every day, with just 5 minutes of work. This is the philosophy behind Zoë François and Jeff Hertzberg new cookbook, Holiday and Celebration Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It is empowering and inspiring, just like Zoe’s feed on Instagram. The book is choke full of festive ideas, you would want to bake everything!

There are clear explanations about ingredients, techniques, basic recipes and brilliant adaptations, from challa bread to babka, from the simplest bread for breakfast to panettone.  I baked the white bread master recipe to make small burger buns and the challa dough, with which I made a coconut chocolate twist and fragrant twisted cinnamon buns. That’s the magic of this book!

Eat this poem, by Nicole Gulotta

This is not just a cookbook. Eat this Poem is a beautifully written book, with recipes you want to cook again and again, personal stories you relate to and poems to discover and love. With this book Nicole Gulotta helped me to appreciate poetry again, when I discovered how many things a good poem and a good recipe have in common. I’ve suggested this book to all my food lover and poetry lover friends. 

Tartine Bread, by Chad Robertson

I admit the reason why I bought this book, Tartine Bread, almost seven years ago, was mainly for the stunning photography of Eric Wolfinger, which make this a book you want to keep around, to left through, to admire. Then I read it, I understood all the amazing passion Chad Robertson put in this book, to explain us how to create our sourdough starter, how to keep it alive, how to make a fantastic bread of out of it. This is where I found my go-to recipe for sourdough bread, this is where I found a good recipe for pizza dough, too.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nostrat

Samin Nostrat is a cook, a teacher, a writer for the New York Times. You might have seen her documentary on Netflix, something I highly recommend. She also published her first book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, an informative, amusing, illuminating cooking manual. Her idea is that we can cook consistently well if we learn to master these four cornerstones: salt, fat, acid and heat. This book is constantly shaking my beliefs. I learnt to cook thanks to my grandma’s example and through lots practice, with this book I’m finally finding a sense in everything I do and going beyond my limits.

The Christmas Chronicles, by Nigel Slater

Pride and Pudding, by Regula Ysewijn

Our cookbooks

I love Toscana. Colours, taste and flavours

I love Toscana is my second cookbook, published by Food Editore. In this book there is all my family and my love for Tuscany and its products. There are our family recipes, those of my grandmother with which I grew up and that welcomed me home from school every day, the recipes that mum taught me step by step on our Sunday mornings spent in pyjamas, those of my great-grandmother, of Aunt Teresa and Aunt Silvana, of Gelsomino and of other relatives and friends who generously told me their lives through the alchemy of ingredients and secrets.

There is my family and our memories: the war experienced by my grandmother as a young girl in the countryside that I got to know only through her stories, there are the afternoons spent at the beach with my cousin Margherita and those in San Gimignano with my granddad Remigio and my aunt, the wooden trays made by my grandfather Biagio, the walks and the afternoons at home with Claudia and a bowl of custard.

From the Markets of Tuscany. A Cookbook

From the markets of Tuscany. A cookbook is our fifth cookbook, available in Italian as La Cucina dei Mercati in Toscana. Tuscan cooking is made at home, in grocery shops, in the local vegetable gardens and among the stalls of a market. This book is a collection of traditional and seasonal recipes and a guide to the best food markets in Tuscany. I will bring you with me on a tour through the most famous and lesser known areas of one of the most popular regions in the world, from the streets of Florence to those full of charm and mystery of Volterra, from Garfagnana to the wild Lunigiana, from the velvet hills of Val d’Orcia to those covered with vineyards and olive groves in the Chianti area. This book is an excuse to describe with pictures, words and recipes the historical markets like San Lorenzo and Sant’Ambrogio in Florence, the weekly markets, so longed for by everyone in small villages and towns, and the organic markets of local producers. There are also the coastal fish markets and the little huts of fruit and vegetables to be found along the road in Maremma.

Divided into 12 chapters, the book presents the typical dishes of each area. There are the traditional breads, from the bland Tuscan bread, made without salt, to the chestnut flour bread of Lunigiana and the potato bread of Garfagnana. Many are the meat dishes, including game – wild boar and hare for example – and quinto quarto, offal. We ventured also to the coast to add the best fish recipes, from the cacciucco in Livorno to the whole fish baked with vegetables in Maremma.

Memoirs

Toast, by Nigel Slater

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, by Laurie Colwin

Then I stumbled upon this article on the New York Times, I discovered a woman I now admire, a food writer whose books are now on my bed table. She makes me feel normal, both in the way I live my life and in the way I cook. Laurie Colwin is an American novelist, born in Manhattan, who published many short stories and wrote for Gourmet Magazine. Her passion for food writing was second only to the pleasure of sharing that food with friends. She also published two collections of essays, recipes and memories, Home cooking and More home cooking. 

Her books are light, funny, but in the same time you can find many ironic or deep reflections among easy recipes and warm memories. Laurie Colwin is a woman you would like to call a friend, the one that passes you recipes hand written on a slip of paper, the one that makes you believe you can make it just right even in your tiny and poorly equipped kitchen. She doesn’t take herself too seriously – after all she is writing about food, not saving the world. She is fun, genuine, spontaneous, a burst of pure energy, a real source of inspiration.

She describes herself as a homebody in the first pages of Home Cooking, and I can relate to every single word:

“Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home. (…) I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in. The best dinner party I ever went to was a black-tie affair to celebrate a book, catered by the author’s sister. When the food appeared at this party I could scarcely contain my delight. It was home food! (…) The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people.”

Cooking for Mr. Latte, by Amanda Hesser

Amanda Hesser, co-founder of Food52, is a brilliant food writer. She has a striking imaginative language – the salted water for pasta which should taste like seawater and the spaghetti al dente, that are like biting into a new piece of gum, are just two of the many sentences I underlined and learnt by heart. I was also incredibly influenced by her approach to food and recipes. In one of the chapters of her book, Cooking for Mr. Latte, which is also a food lover’s courtship, she explores the concept of having a cooking repertoire.

It has been the most nourishing food for thought, as it made me reflect on my own cooking repertoire, on the identity you slowly shape adding recipes to your favourite list, on the never ending and vital process that brings you to introduce new recipes.

“When you make a dish again and again, altering it to your liking, it becomes an expression of your aesthetic, of your palate, of who you are. And when you serve that dish to guests, they come to understand you a little better. Elizabeth told me that she thinks of a cooking repertoire as a way to stay connected to all who are important in her life. She uses recipes from friends and family, as well as her own. Without a handful of recipes to start you off, cooking seems overwhelming.”

A home-made life, by Molly Wizenberg

Man, she knows how to use words! Light, witty, ironical and fun, she tells you recipes interwoven with her personal life, she shows you with vivid images why you will eventually find yourself in love with a recipe, and it happens without fail. After a few pages of her book, A Home-Made life, or blog posts you consider Molly one of your friends, you find yourself sharing the same memories and emotions.

One of the first recipes of her book is a banana bread, I read the recipe smacking my lips and bookmarked it. After a few days I made it. It’s the kind of thing that begs to be cut into big, melty slices while the loaf is still hot… and so I did. 

Delancey, by Molly Wizenberg

Delancey has this powerful force, it’s packed with recipes which demand to be enjoyed with the people you love. Molly shares the kind of food which makes you feel immediately welcomed and loved, a food which nurtures your stomach, makes your belly happy and your soul warmer: fried rice with pork and kale, sautéed dates with olive oil and sea salt, meatloaf. She gives you a method, ideas on how to serve the dish, occasions, she holds your hand in the kitchen, but she’s there to laugh with you, too, and help you create a memorable dish. She sincerely cares for you. Then you have a story, a good one, a story which makes you reflect, laugh, sometimes shed a tear.

I made her chilled peaches in wine. Simple as you can imagine reading the recipe title, these peaches give their best the day after, when they get translucent and boozed up with the wine.

Cookbooks for Italian food lovers 

The Talisman. Italian cookbook, by Ada Boni