Dec 29 2008
Urban Italian – Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food
Urban Italian Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food
The recipes that one of New York’s best young chefs cooks in his own kitchen: a cookbook full of soulful, sophisticated food and delicious stories
While waiting for construction to finish on his restaurant A Voce, Andrew Carmellini faced an unusual challenge. After a brilliant career in professional kitchens (including a six-year tour as chef de cuisine at Café Boulud), he was faced with the harsh reality of life as a civilian cook: no prep cooks, no saucier, no daily deliveries—just him and his wife in their tiny Manhattan-apartment kitchen.
Urban Italian is made up of the recipes that result when a great chef has to use the same resources as the rest of us. In these hundred recipes—covering four distinct courses, side dishes, and base recipes—Carmellini shows how to make stunning, soulful food with nothing more than the ingredients, techniques, and time available to the ordinary home cook. The food is sophisticated but also easy to make: lamb meatballs stuffed with goat cheese; veal, beef, and pork ravioli; roast pork with Italian plums and grappa; fennel with Sambuca and orange; and a honey-flavored pine nut cake.
The book opens with a narrative (written by Carmellini with his wife and coauthor, Gwen Hyman) that traces Carmellini’s culinary education—a series of outrageous tales that will delight anyone who loved Heat or Kitchen Confidential. Also scattered through the book are short pieces on places and ingredients, placed alongside recipes to shed light on the history and practice of simple, beautiful cooking. This is a book you’ll find yourself using all the time—to cook from for weeknights and for special occasions, or just to sit down with and read.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars An Italian love affair with food
This book is not in any way related to any other Italian cookbook you have on your shelves. This is a romance depicting Andrew Carmellini’s love affair with food. This is the type of book that you will want to sit down with a glass of wine and some cheese and olives and just savour from cover to cover. As Carmellini says in his opening paragraph, “…a good cook brings his or her life to the table, and sucks as much experience as possible from the world to do it.” The author takes you by the hand to tell you his story and is candid with both his successes and his failures. (Argh…the rack of lamb!)
Before you can dive into the recipe section, Carmellini advises:
~ Do not stress out
~ Don’t be afraid to taste, touch, smell, feel and make a mess
~ Measure but don’t be a slave
~ Don’t be afraid to adjust to taste…but don’t leave out the salt or the fat
~ Time things but be a time-tester
~ Work with what you’ve got …but when it comes to dessert, follow the rules
~ Plan ahead
See? Simple good cooking. Most of the recipes are beautifully illustrated with step by step instructions. From the Marinated Beets with Grapefruit, Pistachios, and Goatcheese salad to the (I admiit it…I skipped to the dessert section) Perfect Panna Cotta with Raspberry Compote.
I plan to give this book to my favorite cookbook aficionado and hope to be invited to dinner…often! So much for the New Year’s diet resolution! Oh, well.
~
4 Stars Engaging stories and scrumptious cuisine with “foreign” ingredients
What a cookbook!!!!! I have never read a recipe book in such detail. The stories the author tells are extremely amusing, very lively and enjoyable. The finished recipes titillate the palate with such wonderful flavors.
Although stated otherwise on the book jacket, I feel the recipes take quite a bit of preparation. They may be simple in the sense that they have few ingredients, but the preparation takes time. Also, some of the ingredients are so rare or hard to find that it was almost impossible to make them without some form of substitution and I live in a pretty urban area. My local supermarket that has both extensive international and organic aisles did not have some of the ingredients. In some cases, substitutes are suggested but in others they are not. For instance, I could not find farro anywhere locally; although Amazon does sell it.
This cookbook is definitely five stars but I had to lower my rating to four stars because an attempt is not made to explain some of the ingredients and finding them is so difficult. For the seasoned cook who lives in or near New York City or Los Angeles or the person who does not mind ordering ingredients online, then this will be an invaluable recipe book. Delizioso (delicious) …
5 Stars Something for everyone — novice cooks to gourmet chefs!
Andrew Carmellini serves the readers with an Italian cookbook that can help you gourmet meals in little time.
The book offers a rambling opening sprinkled with funny or horrific anecdotes, that all depend on your perspective of the situation. Carmellini shares one of the horror stories where he was faced with preparing 500 meals for models. Who wouldn’t like the traditional Italian dish of escargot with polenta — 495 members of the fashion industry who view it as fattening and disgusting, that’s who? The reader learns many lessons such as this most important lesson of knowing your guests before you prepare your meals in the book’s introduction.
For amateur cooks, the recipes are relatively simple, but a few do require specialized tools like a pastry bag that may not be found in all kitchens. Most recipes can be prepared in under an hour, but a few require overnight preparation. The ingredient lists also range from what can be found in the neighborhood grocery store to those that require visits to the gourmet store. In other words, novices and gourmets alike will find appetizers, entrees, and desserts to prepare and enjoy.
WARNING: As something you wouldn’t normally find in a cookbook, Carmellini’s introduction does contain profanity (specifically the f-bomb).
5 Stars Fastastic Itialian!
Fantastic Italian food recipes. I bought this for my wife. She loves cooking the food and I love eating it! The flavors are complex, original and worth the wait! Instructions are good. Sometimes the prep time is a little longer than stated although this may be a function of experience! If you are looking for a good xmas present, this is it. (Unless you don’t want to wait to try the food in which case you give it now which is what I did!)
5 Stars Restaurant flavors approachable enough for the home cook
I have a bit of a soft spot for cookbooks from restaurant chefs. I love the complexity of flavors when I eat out so I am constantly trying to recreate them when I cook for friends and family. The problem with many restaurant cookbooks is they aren’t always practical for the home cook. Often I find that one recipe makes me refer to 3-4 other recipes to make components for the dish. I don’t mind this if I am cooking on the weekend, but realize that in today’s day and time not everyone has time to make so many components. What’s great about this cookbook is that it finds middle ground between everyday cookbooks and restaurant cookbooks. You get big, bold restaurant-quality flavors without 200 steps. This isn’t to say this is a 30-minute meal kind of cookbook, that it is certainly not. (If you’re looking for great italian food that can be made quickly I highly recommend Every Night Italian: 120 Simple, Delicious Recipes You Can Make in 45 Minutes or Less as it’s perfect for weeknight cooking.) However, the preparation is certainly not more complex than in my favorite The Gourmet Cookbook: More than 1000 recipes or in the cookbooks put out by Food Network stars like Bobby Flay, Mario Batalli, and Ina Garten. If you find yourself comfortable cooking from those, this book will be at your skill level as well.
From a recipe standpoint, these recipes are the perfect marriage of Italian flavors with an urban twist, as the name suggests. Yes, there are things here that harken to more classic dishes. But with Carmellini’s twists you will find that there are so many recipes that stand out as different and compelling, even if you have classics by Marcella Hazan on your shelf. I know I am looking forward to making dishes like Squash Tortelloni, Lamb Ragu, and Meatballs Modo Mio with Cherries.
In addition to having truly mouthwatering sounding recipes, this book has incredible pictures. They serve the reader well both to give you guidance as to what the final product should look like as well as helpful visuals of the steps along the way. I found the visuals for making tortelloni to be especially instructive and helpful.
The biggest nit I could see with this cookbook, as a previous reviewer mentioned, is the kind of ingredients the recipes called for. There are some things I presume would be more difficult to find if you do not live in an urban area. However, I don’t think this is any different than similar restaurant cookbooks. Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes to Cook at Home, for example, calls for harder to find ingredients than this book. By that comparison, the ingredients in this book seem quite easy to find. Moreover I would estimate that at least half of the recipes call for easy to find ingredients so there are still quite a few recipes you could make even if you are not in a major metro area. However, I will say that after spending time with this book the majority, if not all, of the ingredients can be found in Boston, where I call home.
Overall, I would say this cookbook is perfect for someone who enjoys restaurant cookbooks and doesn’t mind spending more than 30 minutes in the kitchen, but who sometimes finds restaurant cookbooks to be unrealistic for use in the home kitchen. For cooks with these sensibilities (like me) this book is a true home run and probably the end of my fitting in skinny jeans.
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