The Cooking of Italy: Foods of the World (1968 Hardcover Printing, 6819230)

The Cooking of Italy: Foods of the World, 1968 Hardcover - The Mother Cuisine - The Modern Cuisine - Regions Of Rome - Florence and Tuscany - Bologna, Northern Center - Venice and the Northeast - Genoa and Liguria - Milan and Lombardy - Turin and Piedmont - Naples and the Deep South - The Islands, Where It Began - "All people are, in a sense, what they eat. Food therefore could be one of the more revealing indexes to personal and national proclivities, provided one could draw stable conclusions from an index so subject to individual and collective preference. The food of one's own country is too familiar to evoke anything but shadowy sensations; other peoples' cuisine may be too startlingly different to be anything but confusing. Perhaps the best way to make a judgment about the matter is to taste one's own cuisine after a long abstention, in order to rediscover its real nature, much as jaded husbands sometimes are advised to do to rediscover their wives' charms. I tried the culinary experiment once. I was a correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera at the time, assigned to cover the marriage of a former King to an American lady, in a château near Tours. Most of the visiting journalists stayed at the Hôtel de l'Univers, in Tours, whose cuisine was above the average. We had time on our hands. The Anglo Saxons dedicated it to drinking a great number of identical drinks; others, myself included, to eating. Every day we chose a different bistro or restaurant to taste the local specialties and the wines that went with them, following the advice of well-qualified local inhabitants. Later, when we could leave the château for a few hours at a time, we began favoring the little buffet of a nearby country railroad station. It belonged to a secondary line on which I never saw a train pass. The stationmaster's wife was the cook and waitress. The menu was so simple that I suspected that we were eating an extension of the family's normal luncheon...