Angela Hartnett’s Cucina – Three Generations of Italian Family Cooking: Angela Hartnett(2007) Ebury Press, UK.
I enjoy anything Italian, and quite frequently loan Italian cook books out of the library just to look at the photographs of delicious meals. I’m not just talking about how to whip up an average pizza, I’m talking about the red wines pictured being sloshed into the ingredients during preparation,the mountains of garlic, the Luciano Pavarotti or Mario Lanza look-alikes tossing the pasta and salad with exuberance, parmesan cheese flying like snow, and the kitchen scene which I can almost smell the garlic and onions.
The extent of my Italian cooking is dried pasta and ready made bolagnase/pasta sauces. Occassionally I will indulge in adding another tin of tomatoes and lashings of extra garlic, serving up with garlic bread (unfortunately also lovingly prepared by the supermarket!). But I know good value wine when I see it (a trait borne out of our days when husband was at Univerity and I was the income earner – one income no kids, 3 cats, lashings of sausages, mince and pumpkin – pumpkin because it grew prolifically in our garden.
While that was a bit more than 20 years ago, we can now afford something a bit more special, but honestly, I still prefer to hunt down those surprises in a bottle for under $10. Last winter (I tend to drink red wine in winter – unless I am listening to opera in summer, or I am reading Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer, the crusty legal hack Rumpole tends to drink the same as me, cheap, full bodied red plonk which he affectionately refers to as “Pomeroy’s Best Plonk”).
I digress…I found a supply of imported gutsy Italian red wine bottled here in New Zealand which I can pick up for under $10 and tends to make up for the ‘ready made’ nature of my not so original Italian meals. This much said, I have been to Italy, and the wine, the food, the people are just as I had envisaged – warm, wary, and understated. All the men look like potential tenor’s, and the women – like goddesses in the kitchen and the perfect mother. What can you expect from only 5 days assessment!! I digressed again….
Back to this book. I am a judgmental person, or as my daughter would probably say, easily taken in, and sometimes I am drawn in by a flashy cover, only to be disappointed by what I read in the book’s dust cover (inside) or introduction. So many cook books a full of meals that require hours of preparation, and a plethora of supermarket shelf contents to fill the pantry, before you can dice the garlic. Not to mention the photographs looking so fussy, so perfect – fine for someone that cooks like that all the time, but I need something that reveals human nature – room for error/oversight.
This book is sooooo not pretentious. This is what makes it welcoming, its what grabbed me straight away – from cover to cover, it’s simplicity. The cover feels like fabric, like the linen fabric of a table-cloth, and the picture looks better than a photograph – its as if you are standing in the room, it shows a table with a slightly creased white linen table cloth with embroidary in Italian around the edge, and on the table are a couple of loaves of bread.
This picture of homeliness echoes the theme of the author’s book, recipes she has been given from family. There are family photographs accompanied by anecdotes about the people in them, who have given her the recipe or taught her years ago how to prepare the dish. I felt the author had entrusted very special moments of her family life, which for most of us we prefer to keep private, and even more grateful for the simple time-honoured recipes. It was as if I had visited her family home and she had introduced all these special ladies from her extended family.
I will not quote from the book, as I have done with previous reviews, as I feel this would spoil the reader’s first ‘visit’ to the author’s family kitchen. But I strongly recommend that if you are a lover of simple, Italian meals, and love the richness of this culture, then go and have a look at this book. Please don’t dash past the cover though, take the time to feel the texture of it, because this, along with the picture of the sparten table setting, draws the reader in and sets the scene for the wonderful basic recipes and stories.
I rate this book 5 stars *****
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