Time to enrol at the great Italian Cooking School
Learning to cook authentic, trusted and tested Italian dishes has never been so easy, thanks to these new books
Learning new recipes is a doubly enjoyable pleasure. There is the simple delight of cooking and eating new food, and the gratification of mastering new cultural and culinary knowledge.
Of course, not all sources of culinary knowledge are equal. So, as a new academic year starts, we strongly recommend you acquaint yourself with The Italian Cooking School – a series of books which will enable you to prepare some of the most rigorously-tested and most highly regarded recipes ever to have been prepared in the kitchens of Italy.
These simple, affordable titles are part of our Silver Spoon series, our definitive Italian cookbook. As we explained earlier this season, The Silver Spoon was first published just after World War II, when a series of experts were commissioned to collect hundreds of traditional recipes from across Italy, including every regional speciality, as cooked by both housewives and grandmothers and professional chefs.
The Italian Cooking School books are a continuation of this project, enabling culinary ingénues to learn the kitchen secrets of Italian’s most skilful mammas and nonnas.
The three titles cover three distinct sets of recipes: Pizza, Pasta and Desserts. Each is designed with the beginner in mind, and includes a brief introduction covering the main facts and principles behind the dishes, followed by a little over 75 easy-to-follow recipes.
As with all good cookbooks, The Italian Cooking School series offer cultural and culinary insight. The dishes have dual language titles, so you know you’re cooking mini lemon loaf cakes, though you can present them to your guests as tortine al profumo di limone. There are also linguistic notes, explaining for example, that tegole wafers take their name from the term for curved terracotta roof tiles.
The recipes are rated: easy, average or advanced. There are added tips to incorporate once you have covered the basics, as well as minor variations, and a few welcome surprises – look out for a few wonderful tarts and strudels towards the end of the pizza book!
The titles complement our regional Italian cookery books, which cover Sicilian, Tuscan and Pugliese recipes, as well as our other didactic cookery titles, such as Preserving, Toast, and The Larousse Book of Bread.
You can order the Pizza book here; the Desserts book here and the Pasta book here; check back soon for for further servings from each.