Author(s): John Mariani
Publisher: Harvard Common Press
Publication Date: 2000-11-01
Pages: 400
Review: I grew up in Westchester County, NY with the same last name as the author, so I was interested in the Italian recipes that may match my mothers cooking. I am second generation full-blooded Italian. I was very pleased with the book in all aspects of food and heritage, and reading about family as well. I enjoy family cookbooks and the author’s back story of their personal family life. I have a fine collection of cookbooks from southern, cajun, etc.

Dolores (Mariani) LiucciMy family loves the recipes in this cookbook and we probably use it weekly. This week we are making 3 recipes from it! It is absolutely my favorite for quick, simply and robustly delicious meals. The recipes are deceptive. Sometimes they look very simple and burst with flavor, sometimes they look complicated and take a mere 30 minutes from start to finish.

I would recommend this cookbook to anyone who likes italian. We have purchased and tried many an Italian cookbook but recipe for recipe this one has the best tasting collection. My wife who is not Italian (I am) loves Italian food and when we got the first one of these books she went through it and picked out over thirty recipes to try. Every one of these we tried was excellent and then some. It is rare to get one good recipe from a cookbook, let alone dozens. At the time we purchased our first copy it was a peperback. It is worn out. Also, we have given this cookbook to most of our friends as a gift we we go over to stay. They have all called to thank us for it.I really think this book doesn’t know what it wants to be. There are many excellent recipes, but it seems to fall into the trap of treating Italian food from Italy as normative rather than taking Italian-American cooking on its own terms. I think that mars what could otherwise have been a great book.

That said, it does provide a lot of great historical material about the rise of Italian food in the United States. There are a great many personal stories and historical sidebars that make the book a worthy purchase. A lot of classic Italian-American dishes are included, even meatballs and Sunday gravy (though it’s known in this book as Galina’s Meat Sauce).

Ultimately there’s a dryness to the book that drags it down though, and it’s a hard thing to put one’s finger on where it comes from. It just doesn’t have the personality it needs to pull the job off, though it almost makes up for it in other ways. Maybe it’s the emphasis on restaurant cuisine, maybe it’s the homogenized voice of both authors, maybe just the subtle bias in favor of the Old Country that doesn’t exist in other cookbooks based on Italian American cooking. It’s not a bad book, but it isn’t the definitive book on the subject. That, it seems, has yet to be written. How does anyone write a cookbook about Italian/American cooking without including scungilli. Without even mentioning the word. Has Mr. Mariani ever cooked in a restaurant. I know he has been a critic but has his food been tested by the writing world. Had he gotten any awards. Has he put his money and his time on the line for his cooking or is he just another home cook who gets praised for who he is and not what he’s done. Mr. Mariani seems to have his favorites and ignores other obvious places. Little mention of Lombardi’s Pizza and Rao’s. Even if he doesn’t like these places he has to bow to the public support of these restaurants for over 100 years. But then he doesn’t think much of the public because he puts down the international dining guide which uses public recommendations to rate restaurants. Couldn’t he stipulate in the beginning of the book that the reader should use kosher salt and not have to say in every recipe “salt, preferably kosher.”
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