Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History

by Alberto Capatti, Massimo Montanari, Aine O'Healy (Translator)

Overview

This magnificent new book demonstrates the development of a distinctive, unified culinary tradition throughout the Italian peninsula. Thematically organized and beautifully illustrated, Italian Cuisine is a rich history of the ingredients, dishes, techniques, and social customs behind the Italian food we know and love today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231509046
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	11/05/2003
Series:	Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Alberto Capatti is author of several books on food and eating and editor of the food section of Einaudi's History of Italy. Massimo Montanari teaches medieval history at the University of Bologna and is the preeminent historian of Italian food and eating habits. He is author of A History of European Nutrition and The Magic Pot, and co-editor of Food: A Culinary History (Columbia, 1999).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Identity as Exchange
Italy: A Physical and Mental Space
The Italian Way of Eating
The Formation of Taste
The Sequence of Dishes
Communicating Food: The Recipe Collection
The Vocabulary of Food
The Cook, the Innkeeper, and the Woman of the House
Science and Technology in the Kitchen
Toward a History of the Appetite

What People are Saying About This

Frances Mayes

Alberto Cappatti and Massimo Montanari deserve a feast. They have thoroughly researched and described the cultural context of Italian food throughout history. Why are prosciutto and melon paired? What did people eat in the middle ages? Who invented sorbet? A fine tour of the history of the peninsula with a fork in hand. This book will live on my desk right beside the Italian dictionary.

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich

Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History is the book I have been waiting for. It gives the history of the Italian eating tradition, exploring ingredients and recipes of the Italians within an economic and topographical context. This is a great book with layers of information, research and examples of what constitutes the Italian culinary tradition.

Cesare Casella

This book is an amazing resource for anyone interested in how the world ended up loving pasta, mozzarella and osso buco–and the cultural story Italian food tells. All you have to do is dip in and out of a few chapters and you'll feel like you've graduated from a culinary history class lead by the masters, from Apicius to Platina to Artusi.

publisher

"Alberto Cappatti and Massimo Montanari deserve a feast. They have thoroughly researched and described the cultural context of Italian food throughout history. Why are prosciutto and melon paired? What did people eat in the middle ages? Who invented sorbet? A fine tour of the history of the peninsula with a fork in hand. This book will live on my desk right beside the Italian dictionary."
-Frances Mayes, author of Under a Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany

"This book is an amazing resource for anyone interested in how the world ended up loving pasta, mozzarella and osso bucoand the cultural story Italian food tells. All you have to do is dip in and out of a few chapters and you'll feel like you've graduated from a culinary history class lead by the masters, from Apicius to Platina to Artusi."
-Cesare Casella, author of Diary of a Tuscan Chef

"Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History is the book I have been waiting for. It gives the history of the Italian eating tradition, exploring ingredients and recipes of the Italians within an economic and topographical context. This is a great book with layers of information, research and examples of what constitutes the Italian culinary tradition."
-Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, cookbook author, public television host, and restaurateur

Editorial Reviews

In this history of Italy's food, cooking, and eating, the authors have opted for an "everything including the kitchen sink" approach. Throughout, Capatti, who has written several books on food and eating, and Montanari (history, Univ. of Bologna) offer extensive lists of foodstuffs and names of dishes, sometimes to the detriment of the point they are trying to make. Organized topically rather than chronologically, the book constantly folds back on itself, leaving the reader with an ongoing feeling of familiarity with recurring names but not with an appropriate context. Although the topics range widely, from the lexicon of Italian food to the dress code for kitchen staff, one senses that there are still gaps. The 20th century and the effects of the open European Community on Italian eating, for example, are scarcely touched. The wealth of notes and suggested readings are the book's greatest offering. Suitable for academic libraries.-Peter Hepburn, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Italian Cuisine is not simply another history.

— Priscilla Ferguson

Journal of Modern History

A must-buy if you love Italian cuisine.

— Antonio Carluccio

The Daily Express

A scholarly, discursive exploration of techniques, taste, service and technology.

Time Magazines Literary Supplement

With an authoritative command of the subject, Capatti and Montanari trace the changing vocabulary of Italy's earliest cookbooks from classical Latin to vernacular Italian, showing how this shift reflected the increasing significance of passing culinary skill from one generation to the next... This relentlessly academic work has an impressive bibliography of historic Italian sources.

Booklist - Mark Knoblauch

An exhaustive and detailed investigation and will prove to be a valuable textbook for many foodies.

Economist

A scholarly, discursive exploration of techniques, taste, service and technology.

Times Literary Supplement

With an authoritative command of the subject, Capatti and Montanari trace the changing vocabulary of Italy's earliest cookbooks from classical Latin to vernacular Italian, showing how this shift reflected the increasing significance of passing culinary skill from one generation to the next... This relentlessly academic work has an impressive bibliography of historic Italian sources.

— Mark Knoblauch

Booklist

Adds a world of history to our understanding, making the case for the existence of a true Italian culinary tradition in spite of the regionality of product.... It is an engrossing, richly documented text.

Bell'Italia Magazine

Italian Cuisine is not simply another history.

Journal of Modern History - Priscilla Ferguson

A must-buy if you love Italian cuisine.

The Daily Express - Antonio Carluccio