Adventures of an Italian Food Lover or Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World

Adventures of an Italian Food Lover: With Recipes from 254 of My Very Best Friends

Author: Faith Heller Willinger

Faith Willinger has spent three decades exploring Italy, traveling from the Alps to Sicily to visit its artistic and architectural wonders and track down the best restaurants, regional cooks, winemakers, and food markets. Along the way, she’s made many friends, eaten lots of tasty meals, and collected a wealth of authentic Italian recipes. Now, in Adventures of an Italian Food Lover, she pays tribute to her friends and to the food and wine she’s enjoyed in their company. If you plan to visit Italy, you can use this book as a guide to finding some of Willinger’s favorite places, from tiny shops stocked with foods available nowhere else in the world, to outdoor markets overflowing with an incredible variety of fish, cheese, fruit, and vegetables, to great restaurants in big cities and small villages. If you can’t travel to Italy as soon as you’d like to, Willinger’s recipes from real Italian kitchens, her warm, engaging profiles of the cooks who perfected them, and her sister’s charming watercolors of Italian friends and scenery beautifully evoke the essence of this enchanting country.

The recipes all start with great ingredients—extra virgin olive oil, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, heirloom wheat pasta, salt-packed capers, and other Italian pantry favorites—and use the freshest meat, fish, and seasonal produce. Willinger’s friend and neighbor in Florence shares her recipe for the delicious home-style Turnips and Their Greens with Garlic and Chili Pepper; the chef-owner of a bustling Neapolitan trattoria combines the freshest ingredients from the sea and the field in his Pasta with Mussels and Zucchini Flowers;and a Milanese marketing consultant who inherited his family’s vineyard in Le Marche and started an enological revolution in the region provides the recipe for the rustic Polenta with Tomato Sauce and Sausage Ragù he often serves to guests in the elegant formal dining room of his art deco villa.

Part cookbook, part travelogue, Adventures of an Italian Food Lover is an insider’s guide that will bring the best of Italy into your home and into your heart.

Table of Contents:

Introduction     7
Northern and Central Italy     13
Tuscany     89
Southern Italy and the Islands     159
Acknowledgments     250
Recipes by Region     251
Index     252

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Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes

Author: Lilia Zaouali

Vinegar and sugar, dried fruit, rose water, spices from India and China, sweet wine made from raisins and dates--these are the flavors of the golden age of Arab cuisine. This book, a delightful culinary adventure that is part history and part cookbook, surveys the gastronomical art that developed at the Caliph's sumptuous palaces in ninth-and tenth-century Baghdad, drew inspiration from Persian, Greco-Roman, and Turkish cooking, and rapidly spread across the Mediterranean. In a charming narrative, Lilia Zaouali brings to life Islam's vibrant culinary heritage.
The second half of the book gathers an extensive selection of original recipes drawn from medieval culinary sources along with thirty-one contemporary recipes that evoke the flavors of the Middle Ages. Featuring dishes such as Chicken with Walnuts and Pomegranate, Beef with Pistachios, Bazergan Couscous, Lamb Stew with Fresh Apricots, Tuna and Eggplant Purée with Vinegar and Caraway, and Stuffed Dates, the book also discusses topics such as cookware, utensils, aromatic substances, and condiments, making it both an entertaining read and an informative resource for anyone who enjoys the fine art of cooking.