Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well

I recently heard about, and immediately had to get a copy of Artusi Pellegrino’s Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well. This amazing book is a huge collection of recipes from all around Italy, as they were cooked in the late 1800s. More than just a recipe book though, it includes anecdotes about popular culture and people in society at that time as well as some context for some of the recipes –  the region where it is prepared or even the family who supplied the recipe. I can’t recommend the book enough for anyone with an interest in traditional Italian food, it’s very interesting comparing recipes as we know them now with the versions made 140 years ago. While a lot of things are similar, and arguably modern recipes are more refined in some respects, there are some interesting things here that I am eager to try out.

A few examples that caught my attention – I noted that one of Artusi’s recipes for gnocchi includes chicken breast, mined fine as well as potato. His anolini use a heavily reduced meat broth with beef cooked in broth and simmered for 8-9 hours until a few tablespoons of stock are left – this is used in the filling. The ingredients for Maccheroni Alla Bolognese (Macaroni Bolognese Style) are very similar to how I make it even including bacon, but tomato is not used – although Artusi adds a little tomato paste at a whim to many recipes, the cooking style he advocates is much more fluid than the ingredient lists given in modern cookbooks. The pasta used in this recipe is referred to as denti di cavallo – ‘horses teeth’ sized pasta which are in the form of short tubes, like rigatoni.

I’m a long time fan of Ribolita soup and have always seen recipes that include stale bread in the recipe. Reading the soup recipes in Science in the Kitchen I understand this much better as nearly every soup and many other dishes use cubed bread for thickening or to give body or extra substance. Generally the bread is sliced thin, toasted, then cubed and the soup poured over, although some soups boil the bread along with other ingredients.

There are far too many recipes to detail here but I plan to cook, or at least adapt many of them in the near future. One new pasta shape that I have tried already based on the description in the book is the ‘strichetti’ pictured below, where diagonally opposite corners of a square of pasta are folded together above and below, creating a robust shape that holds sauce very well. This seems to be a variation of the modern, bow-tie shaped version also called farfalle. I’ll write up the recipe soon.

strichetti (4 of 9)
Strichetti, following Artusi’s recipe as well as I can

Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well is available here on Amazon in both hard copy and Kindle versions, including an interesting, quite long introduction with a lot of the back story and history of the book. Although I think the text would be well out of copyright, I haven’t been able to find it on Project Gutenberg etc – please leave a comment if you know where to find a free version. As a footnote – if you’re an offal lover you’ll have a field day here, with recipes and instructions for preparing parts of the animal I didn’t even know people ate. Veal udder anyone? Or maybe you’d prefer some frog risotto?

American Pie – by Peter Reinhart

I’m an avid cookbook collector, but I always gravitate towards books that are more than just collections of recipes, preferring to learn more about the background and general techniques involved in the topic than just cook blindly from a list. For these reasons, I grabbed Peter Reinharts pizza recipe cookbook American Pie as soon as I heard about it!

This book has been out for a few years now, but is well worth tracking down.

American Pie is subtitled “my search for the perfect pizza”, and true to the name the first part of the book tracks Peter’s travels around the world, hunting down great pizza at some well known international destinations. I enjoyed reading about the different pizza styles and toppings in different cities and continents, but if I have one criticism of the book it is that as travel writing, it is a little ‘tame’. Not many great adventures, but I guess that’s not really the point. Many American locations are also featured, with some great descriptions of well known pizza joints like Pizzeria Bianco and their techniques.

The second section of the book is where it gets good though. Peter dedicates nearly 40 pages to different dough styles alone, including many of the recipes described in the first section of the book. This focus on dough is in line with Peter’s statement that for him, a good crust is 80% of the enjoyment of a pizza. For me, it might be a little less than 80% but it’s certainly the most important factor! Delayed fermentation doughs are introduced together with standard enriched doughs, thick and thin crust, and so on. A good recipe for sourdough pizza dough is included, with instructions on raising and maintaining a sourdough starter from scratch.

Following the dough recipes, there is a good range of sauces and other toppings like pesto, flavored oils, purees and so on. The sweet and sour onion marmalade sounded good to me but my first attempt was a mess!

Rounding out the latter section of the book is a large collection of pizza recipes, with most of the recipes from the earlier travel section of the book recreated.
American Pie is available on Amazon for under $20.