Posts tagged ‘book review’

The next book from my tag sale bounty is Waverly Root’s The Food of Italy. Before geting to the book I just ask you to say out loud; WAVERLY ROOT. What a great name! It sounds like a posh tearoom in Notting Hill or an heirloom turnip grown in Jamie Oliver’s garden.

Root originally published The Food of Italy in 1971 as a follow-up to his belovedThe Food of France. Both were re-released in 1992 with gorgeous cover art by Louise Fili and are still easily available.  (Side note: As a just-out-of-college graphic designer, I tried desperately to get an interview at Fili’s studio, but she never answered my letters or calls. That was part of a different lifetime, but I’m still a tad bitter.)

Root was a news journalist who spent 50 years as a foreign correspondent in Europe writing for the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post. His text has little flourish but is packed with facts supplied one after the other which quickly becomes addictive and engrossing. As a historian, I truly appreciate the intense background work Root must have done to present the history of Italy and its cuisine so succinctly. First, each region gets its chapter. Then he uses three lenses to examine the chief influences on Italian cuisine: Etruscan, Greek, and Saracen (Arab). While some regions like Tuscany are deservedly longer, he still presents Molise, Calabria, and Basilicata, then poverty stricken and little traveled, with rigor.

Though Root’s writing does not reflect the tenets of New Journalism, it clearly bears its influence.  (Think Gay Talese on food.) The Food of Italy is definitely a product of the early 70’s, yet it’s astonishing that he wrote with such ease on a cuisine which then most Americans associated only pizza and chicken parm. Long before pancetta became a household word, Root was educating us about grana padano cheese and the richness of nero d’avola wine. Every once in awhile, he lets a more personal voice creep in, as when discussing pizza in the Campania chapter:

Drink a rough red wine with it, nothing refined; a suave wine would be wasted on pizza. It wouldn’t help the pizza and the pizza wouldn’t help the wine.

I’m gonna say that to the sommelier at Otto next time I’m there, just to see what happens.

I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti is the first book by author Giulia Melucci. In short, it’s a love-logue/recipe book where Melucci systematically exhumes her most significant relationships, chapter by chapter, along with the meals that accompanied the rise and fall of each of them. While the men in this book are less than, umm…impressive, her recipes are grounded in the comforting and nourishing meals of her Italian-American upbringing.

Melucci certainly has guts to bare it all. She begins with her first real relationship and the story of Kit, a sweet young writer who, over the course of their four-year relationship, descends deeper into alcoholism. (BTW, the first meal she cooks for him is Spaghetti Carbonara.) Melucci displays her sense of humor when she includes a recipe from Kit.

“Kit’s Drunken Soup. Open can of Progresso chicken noodle soup. Put in saucepan over medium heat. Pass out on couch. Cook until girlfriend hears strange crackling sounds and gets out of bed to see what’s going on and turns off burner to deal with the mess in the morning. Time: Usually about four hours. Serves: no one.”

Next up is the classic New York commitment-phobe, then an immature hipster writer, a truly awful older dude, and finally a siphoning Scotsman who so devastates Melucci that she reaches bottom…and decides to write about it all.

While reading ILILIMS, it’s tempting to play armchair psychologist. She does have a tendency to go for the same sort of empty calorie guy over and over again. At times, her pain is palpable and you’ll want to scream, maybe even send her an email that says, “GET OUT NOW!” But that would be missing the point.

The real essence of this book is the desire to share love and affection through food. Food becomes a vehicle for both her best and worst inclinations. Meals like Spaghettini in a White Truffle Oil Peignoir are sensuous love letters. Others become needless stabs at shoring up some security and repeatedly proving herself a good friend, a good lover, a good provider. Melucci wears her smarts and her humor like armor and they serve her well as a writer. I’d love to see more from this author on the heart and art of cooking, for which she seems to have a very natural instinct.