Italian Regional Cooking by Ada Boni, a very useful classic
My great aunt Connie was regarded as the best cook in the extended Riccetti family in the Chicago area. She still gets plaudits at family reunions many years after her death. I can’t imagine that she had too many cookbooks, like most Italian-American women of her day. She was a skilled and very practiced in the kitchen who had grown up cooking the dishes of her southern Italian family that of my uncle’s. But, I remember a cookbook that she had and touted, Italian Regional Cooking by Ada Boni that was published in the U.S. in 1969.
Intended for American and British audiences, the cookbook provides regional dishes from throughout Italy, spanning a great diversity of items and culinary influences. For my aunt, I imagine part of the attraction was the showed different, sometime very different aspects, of Italian cuisine that she would not have otherwise known living in Chicago from a family who came “from a mule’s day ride to Naples.” Another reason was certainly the quality of the recipes. That’s been my experience; I’ve been regularly using the cookbook for nearly two decades. I think that my mother, another big fan of the cookbook, has made sure that each of her children have copy.
Among the 600 or so recipes, savory and sweet and from antipasti to simple and elaborate main dishes to desserts, in over 140 large-formatted pages, are preparations spanning the breadth of Italy that are truly Italian recipes, not Italian-American or meant to necessarily to appeal to foreign tourists traveling to Italy. The dishes range from elaborate and sometimes baroque to rustic and many that are quite straightforward and, so, perfect for the contemporary urban or suburban kitchen and family. There famous, older dishes that are rarely made in this country like Tournedos con Finanziera (a dish of veal and sweetbreads from Turin), Veal Marengo, (the famed French dish that was seemingly once cooked near its namesake village), and a grand land-centric Fritto Misto from Emilia. And there excellent recipes for dishes that have remained classics like Saltimbocca, Ribolitta, Cacciucco, and Mozzarella in Carozza that I made the other night. And true to its title, as an Italian regional cookbook, there are also numerous, more humble dishes like those featuring tripe, calf’s liver (pig’s liver, too), frogs, calf’s foot, and brains (a similar dish I had in Rome last year was excellent). But, there are hundreds of recipes that might appeal to the most squeamish of cooks and diners.
Many of these are recipes based on dried pasta: Spaghetti alla Puttanesca, Ragù alla Napoletana, Sugo di Pomodoro Fresco, and Sugo Finto (a Roman-style tomato sauce). I frequently refer to its versions of the Roman classic pasta dishes, which are still seemingly required on every trattoria menu in Rome: Spaghetti all’Amatriciana, Cacio e Pepe and Rigatoni alla Carbonara (all on page 170). These are more trustworthy, and time-tested, than the many other recipes I have for these. Author Boni was a Roman, after all.
In addition to interesting and useful recipes, another attraction of the cookbook for me is snapshot into Italian cooking and eating practices of the mid-century as Italy was becoming more industrialized and modern, when local and regional dishes were more distinct and often unknown in other parts of Italy, and the rest of the world. These are dishes that might be more classic, in some sense. I even found an example from Capri that fish and cheese sometimes met on a plate in Italy even decades ago.
Italian Regional Cooking is actually much lesser known than Ada Boni’s The Talisman Italian Cookbook, which was very influential first in Italy and, in its postwar English-language translation and modification, in this country. Nach Waxman, the owner of Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore in Manhattan, has written that Talisman was one of the most influential Italian-themed cookbooks before the release of Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking in 1973. I have both of Boni’s books. Italian Regional Cooking is the much better of the two, with better and much more useable recipes.
It’s out of print, but you can easily find used copies on Amazon and elsewhere. It is worth the investment if you enjoy cooking Italian food even every once and while.
Intended for American and British audiences, the cookbook provides regional dishes from throughout Italy, spanning a great diversity of items and culinary influences. For my aunt, I imagine part of the attraction was the showed different, sometime very different aspects, of Italian cuisine that she would not have otherwise known living in Chicago from a family who came “from a mule’s day ride to Naples.” Another reason was certainly the quality of the recipes. That’s been my experience; I’ve been regularly using the cookbook for nearly two decades. I think that my mother, another big fan of the cookbook, has made sure that each of her children have copy.
Among the 600 or so recipes, savory and sweet and from antipasti to simple and elaborate main dishes to desserts, in over 140 large-formatted pages, are preparations spanning the breadth of Italy that are truly Italian recipes, not Italian-American or meant to necessarily to appeal to foreign tourists traveling to Italy. The dishes range from elaborate and sometimes baroque to rustic and many that are quite straightforward and, so, perfect for the contemporary urban or suburban kitchen and family. There famous, older dishes that are rarely made in this country like Tournedos con Finanziera (a dish of veal and sweetbreads from Turin), Veal Marengo, (the famed French dish that was seemingly once cooked near its namesake village), and a grand land-centric Fritto Misto from Emilia. And there excellent recipes for dishes that have remained classics like Saltimbocca, Ribolitta, Cacciucco, and Mozzarella in Carozza that I made the other night. And true to its title, as an Italian regional cookbook, there are also numerous, more humble dishes like those featuring tripe, calf’s liver (pig’s liver, too), frogs, calf’s foot, and brains (a similar dish I had in Rome last year was excellent). But, there are hundreds of recipes that might appeal to the most squeamish of cooks and diners.
Many of these are recipes based on dried pasta: Spaghetti alla Puttanesca, Ragù alla Napoletana, Sugo di Pomodoro Fresco, and Sugo Finto (a Roman-style tomato sauce). I frequently refer to its versions of the Roman classic pasta dishes, which are still seemingly required on every trattoria menu in Rome: Spaghetti all’Amatriciana, Cacio e Pepe and Rigatoni alla Carbonara (all on page 170). These are more trustworthy, and time-tested, than the many other recipes I have for these. Author Boni was a Roman, after all.
In addition to interesting and useful recipes, another attraction of the cookbook for me is snapshot into Italian cooking and eating practices of the mid-century as Italy was becoming more industrialized and modern, when local and regional dishes were more distinct and often unknown in other parts of Italy, and the rest of the world. These are dishes that might be more classic, in some sense. I even found an example from Capri that fish and cheese sometimes met on a plate in Italy even decades ago.
Italian Regional Cooking is actually much lesser known than Ada Boni’s The Talisman Italian Cookbook, which was very influential first in Italy and, in its postwar English-language translation and modification, in this country. Nach Waxman, the owner of Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore in Manhattan, has written that Talisman was one of the most influential Italian-themed cookbooks before the release of Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking in 1973. I have both of Boni’s books. Italian Regional Cooking is the much better of the two, with better and much more useable recipes.
It’s out of print, but you can easily find used copies on Amazon and elsewhere. It is worth the investment if you enjoy cooking Italian food even every once and while.
