Essentials of Italian Cooking is a culinary bible for anyone wishing to master the art of Italian cooking, combining Marcella Hazan's best-selling books, The Classic Italian Cook Book and More Classic Italian Cooking, into a single volume. It is intended as a basic manual for cooks of all levels of expertise, from beginners to seasoned professionals, and it includes both an accessible and comprehensive guide to techniques and ingredients, as well as a collection of the most delectable recipes from the Italian repertoire.

With super helpful illustrations, the author explains how to master all of the Italian techniques and flavors, so even the most experienced chefs can find something new to learn. Home cooks who have used Marcella's classic books for years (and whose copies are now splattered and worn) know that no one is more gifted at teaching us exactly what we need to know about the taste and texture of a dish and how to achieve it, and no one is more passionate and inspiring about authentic Italian food.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/039458404X

The Silver Spoon, the most influential and best-selling Italian cookbook of the last 50 years, has been updated and revised. This bible of authentic Italian home cooking includes over 2,000 revised recipes and 400 new full-color photographs. A comprehensive and lively book, its distinctively stylish and user-friendly format makes it approachable and enjoyable to read. The new updated edition includes new introductory material on topics such as how to prepare a traditional Italian meal, typical food traditions of the various regions, and how to set an Italian table. It also includes a new section of menus prepared by celebrity chefs who specialize in traditional Italian cuisines, such as Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, Tony Mantuano, Rich Torrisi, and Mario Carbone.

The cookbook, which is divided into eleven color-coded chapters by course, is a design as well as a content feat. Sauces, Marinades, and Flavored Butters, Antipasti, Appetizers and Pizzas, First Courses, Eggs, Vegetables, Fish and Shellfish, Meat, Poultry, Game, Cheese, and Desserts are among the chapters. It includes everything from coveted authentic sauces and marinades to irresistible dishes like Penne Rigate with Artichokes, Ricotta and Spinach Gnocchi, Tuscan Minestrone, Meatballs in Brandy, Bresaola with Corn Salad, Pizza Napoletana, Fried Mozzarella Sandwiches, and Carpaccio Cipriani.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/0714862568

Food trends come and go, but pasta remains popular year after year. Despite its simple ingredients (flour and water or flour and eggs), the magic, rituals, and art of making pasta date back five centuries. Two ingredients are transformed into hundreds of stuffed, rolled, extruded, dried, stamped, and hand-cut shapes, each with its own distinct provenance and enrobed in a favorite sauce.

NYC chef Missy Robbins discovered Italian food and pasta twenty-five years ago. Since then, she has been cooking, researching, and studying her way across Italy, which has led her to open two of America's most renowned pasta restaurants, Lilia and Misi. This is the hard-working manual for home cooks who want to master the art of pasta cooking, with illustrated step-by-step recipes for handmaking forty of the most versatile pasta shapes and one hundred recipes for Italian American, regional Italian, and Robbins' own best pasta dishes, plus two dozen vegetable sides. This is a richly illustrated ode to the ingredients, recipes, and craft that have made pasta the most popular fare, with nearly 100 full-color mouthwatering photos of pasta dishes and twenty images from Italy.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/1984857002

Ken Forkish is the expert you need to talk about breaking down the fundamentals of cooking. His first book, Flour Water Salt Yeast, won a James Beard award for its baking expertise—and the pizza base contains the same ingredients, so you can trust him. This pizza cookbook breaks down each step of the process, from dough-making to shaping to cheese selection to toppings, so you can be confident that the pizza you make will be far superior to delivery.

His clear, expert instructions in The Elements of Pizza will have you shaping pies and loading a pizza peel like a professional pizzaiolo in no time. And his inventive, seasonally appropriate topping ideas will surprise and delight any pizza lover—and inspire you to create your own signature pies, just the way you like them.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/160774838X

Pasta Grannies is a wonderful collection of time-perfected Italian pasta recipes from the people who have spent a lifetime cooking for love, not a living: Italian grandmothers. It is inspired by the hugely popular YouTube channel of the same name. A nonna's definition of love is putting food on the table, and pasta is the ideal vehicle for making precious ingredients go further.

With simple and approachable recipes from all over Italy, you will be transported into the heart of the Italian home to learn how to make delicious Italian food. Every nonna has her own special recipe, from pici – a type of hand-rolled spaghetti that is simple to make – to lumachelle della duchessa – tiny, ridged, cinnamon-scented tubes that require patience and dexterity. Pasta Grannies celebrates the vast variety of these authentic dishes, as well as the expertise, life, and extraordinary stories of the incredible women who created them.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/1784882887

Elizabeth David's Italian Food was one of the first books to demonstrate the vast variety of regional cooking in Italy. For David, the foods of Italy extended far beyond minestrone and ravioli to the intricate traditions of Tuscany, Sicily, Lombardy, Umbria, and many other regions. David shares her knowledge from her many years in Italy, where she explored, researched, tasted, and tested dishes.

Her love of real food, luscious, hearty, fresh, and completely authentic, will inspire anyone wishing to recreate Italy's abundant and highly unique regional dishes. The title is simple, but the impact of this humble cookbook on the world was enormous. When it was published in 1954, English writer Elizabeth David's book demonstrated the incredible variety of regional cooking within Italy, beyond the spaghetti and minestrone that her home country was familiar with.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/0141181559

A group of Italian scholars gathered fifty years ago to discuss a problem: how to preserve traditional Italian cooking. They established the Italian Academy of Cuisine to preserve classic recipes from all over Italy. The academy's over 7,000 associates spread out across the country, interviewing grandmothers and farmers at their stoves and transcribing their recipes, many of which had never been documented before. This is the result of that research, an incredible feat—2,000 recipes representing the heritage of Italian country cooking.

Each recipe is labeled with the region of origin, and not only the ingredients but also the techniques change with geography. Historical recipes are interspersed throughout the book, providing fascinating insights into the folk culture from the past. There are no fancy flourishes or shortcuts here; this is genuine down-home cooking. The book is an excellent everyday resource for simple recipes like White Bean and Escarole Soup, Polenta with Tomato Sauce, and Chicken with Lemon and Capers. There are four different indexes for your convenience. La Cucina is a must-have addition to any cook's library.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/0847831477

Vetri's personal stories of travel and culinary discovery in Italy appear alongside his detailed, easy-to-follow instructions for making and enjoying fresh handmade pasta. Whether you're a home cook or a professional, you'll learn how to make over thirty different types of pasta dough—from versatile egg yolk dough to extruded semolina dough to a variety of flavored pasta—and shape them into familiar and unique shapes. Vetri shares his coveted recipes for stuffed pasta, baked pasta, and pasta sauces in dishes ranging from classic to innovative. He also demonstrates how to make light-as-air gnocchi and the perfect risotto.

Mastering Pasta is jam-packed with useful information, such as the best way to cook and sauce pasta, suggestions for substituting pasta shapes and advance preparation and storage tips. Vetri delves deep into the science of various types of flour to explain pasta's uniquely satisfying texture and how to craft the very best pasta by hand or with a machine for cooks who want to take their knowledge to the next level. Mastering Pasta is the definitive work on the subject and the only book you'll ever need to serve exceptional pasta dishes in your own kitchen.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/1607746077

Food features prominently in all of Frances Mayes' best-selling memoirs about Tuscany. This cuisine transports, comforts, entices and speaks to the friendly, genuine, and improvisational spirit that characterizes Tuscan life. Cooking and eating are both natural pleasures in Tuscany. Frances and her husband, Ed, share recipes that they have enjoyed as honorary Tuscans over the years in their first cookbook: dishes prepared in a simple, traditional kitchen with robust, honest ingredients.

The Tuscan Sun Cookbook, a toast to the experiences they've had over two decades at Bramasole, their home in Cortona, Italy, evokes days spent roaming the countryside for chestnuts, green almonds, blackberries, and porcini; dinner parties that last until the wee hours of the morning; and garden baskets tumbling over with bright red tomatoes. As Frances's lyrical introductions and headnotes place you by her side in the kitchen and raising a glass at the table, lose yourself in the transporting photography of the food, the people, and the place. This cookbook is organized like a traditional Italian dinner, from Antipasti (starters) to Dolci (desserts).

View Details: amazon.com/dp/0307885283

Lidia's passion has always been teaching, and in this magnificent book, she gives us the full benefit of that passion as well as her deep, comprehensive understanding of what it takes to create delicious Italian meals. Readers will learn all of the techniques required to master Italian cooking from this book, which she co-authored with her daughter Tanya.

Lidia explains how to buy, store, clean, and cook with a wide variety of common ingredients, including meats and fish, vegetables and fruits, grains, spices, and condiments. The 400 recipes range from classics such as risotto alla milanese and Tagliatelle with Mushroom Sauce to Lidia's always-satisfying originals such as Bread and Prune Gnocchi and Beet Ravioli in Poppy Seed Sauce. She provides a comprehensive list of the tools that every kitchen should have in order to produce the best results. She's even included a glossary of culinary terms and phrases that will come in handy when cooking, traveling, and dining in Italy.

View Details: amazon.com/dp/0385349467