Tuscan cookbook

[BCarroll05]

Can anyone recommend a good authoritative cookbook on Tuscan food? I'm looking for something along the lines of Coleman Andrew's "Catalan Food" or Paula Wolfert's "Cooking of Southwest France" - full of authentic dishes and loads of detail on culinary history, ingredient guide, etc. Thanks!

-Brendan

[divina]

Nancy Harmon Jenkins?

I would suppose Giullinao bugialli, Lorenza dei Medici... all with weeklong cooking programs here

[StevenC]

Can anyone recommend a good authoritative cookbook on Tuscan food? I'm looking for something along the lines of Coleman Andrew's "Catalan Food" or Paula Wolfert's "Cooking of Southwest France" - full of authentic dishes and loads of detail on culinary history, ingredient guide, etc.  Thanks!

-Brendan

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Apart from maybe Bugialli's book, I'm not aware of an English-language book on Tuscan cuisine that's in the same league as Coleman Andrew's or Paula Wolfert's compendia. (There are, of course, similarly thorough books on the cuisine of other Italian regions--Fred Plotkin's books on Liguria and Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Lynne Rossetto Kasper's volume on the cooking of Emilia-Romagna come to mind immediately.)

It's difficult to say why this is. I think part of the reason is that, despite (as Steingarten says) the "plague of restaurants calling themselves Tuscan" in the English-speaking world, real cucina toscana, with its painfully simple preparations, its saltless bread, and its love of game and offal, might not actually appeal to a broad Anglophone audience, above all in the U.S. But that's just my conjecture.

If you're looking for armchair reading rather than recipes, you might take a look at travel books that specialize in food, some of which are quite thorough.

If you happen to read Italian, I can recommend "Il Grande Libro della Vera Cucina Toscana", which will cost you 36 euros plus shipping on www.internetbookshop.it. Also, there is a huge volume on Tuscan cooking in Newton & Compton's Quest'Italia series... I bought mine in the late 1990s; I don't know whether it's still in print, as today you seem to find that series mainly in secondhand shops. I can also recommend the books on subregional Tuscan cuisines by Muzzio Editore.

Edited August 24, 2007 by StevenC (log)