anyone got this? any good?

The Art of Eating Well: An Italian Cookbook
by Pellegrino Artusi

piedmont > wrote:

> anyone got this? any good?
>
> The Art of Eating Well: An Italian Cookbook
> by Pellegrino Artusi

Many would say it is a great book, written by a great man. I agree,
but not necessarily with its premise. The premise is, is to present
a first unified Italian cookbook. It might have been be a worthy
undertaking from a political viewpoint, but not necessarily from
the culinary one. Culinarily, regional divergence rule, as far as I am
concerned.

However, the answer to your question as to whether it is "any good"
depends on your wants/needs and your expectations. If you want a
cookbook teaching you the fundamentals of Italian cooking techniques,
then this book is not for you, for the recipes included are mostly
schematic, aimed at those who already know the fundamentals. If you
want an overview of the whole of the wealth of Italian regional
cuisines, you will find some of it, but only a part of the whole. If you
are interested in the recipes of a certain part of Italy, from a certain
time period, written from a certain historical and political
perspective, you will mostly find what you need.

Pellegrino Artusi was not a chef or a professional gastronome but a
merchant and a lover of fine food. He was also a writer and a great
supporter of the Italy's unity, cuisine and language including. It is
from this perspective that his cookbook, a kind of a survey of what was
supposed to become the basis of the national cuisine, needs to be
appreciated. It is a collection of some 800 recipes from different
regions of Italy, but mostly from the northern part of the country.
It is written in the Tuscan dialect, considered, at the time at least,
to be the preferred literary language of the newly united nation.
Artusi, himself a Romagnolo, used to live in Tuscany.

In Artusi's hometown, Forlimpopoli in Romagna, there is a restaurant,
Ristorante di Casa Artusi, serving dishes cooked according to his
recipes, even including references to the pages of his famous book on the
menu.
<http://www.casartusi.it/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=1372&name=DLFE-5561.pdf>

From today's perspective, there are more useful cookbooks if you are
looking for the explicit explanations of the cooking techniques and of
the cultural and historical background of certain dishes. There are
also better and much fuller compilations of Italian regional recipes,
covering the whole of Italy, even if the recipes are often just as
schematic as the ones Artusi included.

Victor

"piedmont" > ha scritto nel messaggio
...
> anyone got this? any good?
>
> The Art of Eating Well: An Italian Cookbook
> by Pellegrino Artusi

Yes, and I like it. There are two translations available in English. If
you get a chance, look at both. Although you can use Artusi to check on
your idea of an Italian dish, this isn't really a cookbook so much as a
history book written by a man who loved food, much in the vein of
Brillat-Savarin. The recipes instruct you how to cook central Italian (for
the most part) dishes in a fireplace, no stove. It also presumes you have
at least one servant, as any Italian who could read probably did at the
time. The goal is to help an Italian middleclass homemaker to instruct her
servants to cook food well and to educate slightly about how approaches
differ from place to place within the newly united boot.

(Victor Sack) wrote:
>piedmont wrote:
>
>> anyone got this? any good?
>>
>> The Art of Eating Well: An Italian Cookbook
>> by Pellegrino Artusi
>
>
>
>the answer to your question as to whether it is "any good"
>depends on your wants/needs and your expectations.

The above is the only meaningful thing you wrote, all the rest was
pontificating verbose grandstanding bullshit. Did Victor ever
actually cook anything, of course not.