Product Description
They are Val d’Aosta cheese producers. Grandchildren of Sicilian sharecroppers returning to the soil. A restaurateur’s family specializing in glorious peppers. They’re Italian farmers, vintners, ranchers, market gardeners, olive growers. They’re as passionate about cooking and eating food as they are about rasing it, and they each have their own segreti–secrets–of cuisine and craft. Now Susan Herrmann Loomis, the critically acclaimed author and farmhouse cookin… More >>
#1 by Anonymous on March 30, 2010 - 1:10 am
Although the recipes are uninteresting at best and the writing dull and comically pretentious the worst part of this book has to be the art direction since these books are intended to be looked at and not as cookbooks. The illustrations are terrible but someone had to pick the artist. The layout is uninspired and filled with clutter. The fonts are particularly annoying and seem like a copy of countless other Italian cookbooks. In summary, this book is a total waste of money and the people responsible should be fired forthwith.
Rating: 1 / 5
#2 by Anonymous on March 30, 2010 - 1:54 am
One wonders why anyone would work so hard to bring together a collection of unappealing recipes.
Rating: 2 / 5
#3 by Hans Nicolaisen on March 30, 2010 - 2:21 am
I have tried to like this book, but have been unsuccessful. It is more of a chatty travelogue than cookbook so I am, regretfully, returning it.
Rating: 1 / 5
#4 by Jody on March 30, 2010 - 4:01 am
Cookbooks! I love them all, from the fancy shmancy hardbound glossies with full color illustrations on every page, to the modest spiral bound church lady offerings that have vegetables with cute little faces drawn in every margin. I also know that however fun and interesting they are to moon over, only a scant handful of the recipes will actually make it into my kitchen repertoire once the honeymoon phase is over; hours and hours of toiling away, book tightly clutched in one hand while shelling chestnuts (surely the nastiest job on the planet), reducing sauces and zesting lemons with the other.
Two stellar recipes from this book have permanent places in my kitchen and have won ovations from everyone I’ve fed them to. I’ll never make a salad dressing again without Rosemary-Lemon Salt (which is also delish on roasted potatoes), and my freezer is crammed with little packages of Light and Lively Tomato Sauce (which sounds like a nasty diet food and in no way indicates its divinely intense summer flavor) made with homegrown heirloom tomatoes. We use it as a base for everything from pasta sauce to soup to chili and it’s much simpler and better than any other tomato sauce I’ve ever made.
I’ve read this book cover to cover three times and tried the Zucchini Pasta and a couple of chicken dishes, but let’s face facts. If you’ve roasted one chicken with herbs, then give or take a couple of sprigs of tarragon you’ve pretty much roasted them all. I’m a lazy cook and thought most of the other recipes sounded like more trouble than they’d be worth (and where am I going to find wild boar in NW Ohio?) but this book is worth buying because it’s a lovely and soothing book to read, filled with insights on the culture as well as the cuisine of rural Italy. It’s as much about gardening and farming as it is cooking, and Ms. Loomis’ stories of the land, how the ingredients are grown and the personalities who harvest and cook them during the cycle of the seasons are as delicious as her mouthwatering descriptions of the recipes I love to read and know I’ll probably never make.
I have Ms. Loomis’ French Farmhouse Cooking, which is also really good, though the ingredients are more elitist (except for the boar). It’s clear that Ms. Loomis’s French is much better than her Italian, but that in no way detracts from the charm of this book. It’s more the difference between a museum tour conducted by a working artist and one conducted by a guide with a graduate degree in art history. Both are extremely knowledgeable but from different points of view. The Italian Farmhouse Cookbook is a tour of rural Italian cuisine from a visitor’s perspective, and Ms. Loomis manages to convey the repect her subjects have for the land and for the food they grow and eat. That’s not an easy thing to effectively translate.
I’m giving it five stars, because Italian Farmhouse Cooking as much ABOUT cooking as it is a cookbook, and in that genre it’s a winner!
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by Gina M. Micheli on March 30, 2010 - 4:32 am
These are simple recipes that are easy to improvise on and inspiring. It makes me long for Italy all of the time. A must have for lovers of Italian food in all the regions of Italy.
Rating: 5 / 5