ok book
Not as good as I expected. book came in perfect condition. Seller is good. But book was not as good as I expected.
Home cooking, with elegance
This is really two books, largely interleaved with each other. The cookbook is the more obvious one. It's where Lidia - never truly separable from her husband Felice - exposes the secrets of her kitchen. Correction: kitchens, plural. These are the recipes that have kept the lines long outside of her restaurants back to the early 1970s. Struggling against American palates trained on TV dinners, they addressed and quite possibly created a clientele who discovered that there was more to Italian food than tomato sauce.
Lidia has extensive professional education, undertaken while she was a young mother and beginning restauranteur (this is the weaker sex?!?). She and her husband traveled most of Europe, studying the national and even regional specialties of each culinary tradition. Although training and research inform this book, that's not where it really comes from. It comes, through her personal alchemy, from her grandmother's truck garden. That's where the second book within this one binding comes in. That book is Lidia's culinary biography, from her earliest girlhood in Adriatic Italy up to the book's 1990 writing.
The family wasn't rich. Meat was a rarity, and every part of the animal went into the pot: heart, kidney, liver, blood for black sausage, and (in this pre-BSE book) brain. Produce was fresh from the garden, though, and slaughtering the animal was part of cooking with meat. Plain cooking can be exquisite cooking, however. Lidia's close contact with every aspect of the food gave her a bone-deep appreciation for unique character of ever plant and animalin her kitchen. Her secret is really no secret at all: it lies in using the finest and freshest ingredients, and in knowing the preparation that lets each be the best it can.
//wiredweird
Some reservations about this book
I love Lidia and love her style of cooking. This was her first book and therein lies the rub. I found this book almost inpenetrable. Great stories about her childhood in Istria, but the recipes are almost universally unusable. Octopus salad, cuttlefish sacs, etc. Not the kind of thing you'd be inclined to try in your own kitchen. Lidia is very bright, that much is obvious. But I think she'd tried too hard to impress us with her intellect. I'd try another of her titles, if I were you.
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