The Best Pasta Sauces: Favorite Regional Italian Recipes: A Cookbook

by Micol Negrin

Overview

The first cookbook to explore the best, most authentic Italian pasta sauce recipes from a regional perspective, by food writer, cooking teacher, and Milan native Micol Negrin.
 
The culinary odyssey begins in northern Italy, where rich sauces are prepared with fresh cream or local cheese: Creamy Fontina Sauce with Crushed Walnuts and White Truffle Oil; Parmigiano Sauce with Fresh Nutmeg; Pine Nut and Marjoram Pesto.
 
Central Italy is known for sauces made with cured meats, sheep’s milk cheeses, and extra-virgin olive oil: Spicy Tomato, Onion, and Guanciale Sauce; Smashed Potato Sauce with Cracked Black Pepper and Olive Oil; Caramelized Fennel and Crumbled Sausage Sauce.
 
In southern Italy, simple, frugal ingredients meld into satisfying and delicious flavors: Sweet Pepper and Lamb Ragù with Rosemary; Fresh Ricotta Sauce with Diced Prosciutto; Spicy Cannellini Bean Sauce with Pancetta and Arugula.
 
The islands of Sicily and Sardinia take advantage of the bountiful seafood from the Mediterranean and game from the mountainous terrain: Pork Ragù with a Hint of Dark Chocolate and Cinnamon; Red Mullet Roe with Garlicky Bread Crumbs; Rich Lobster Sauce.
 
Negrin also provides a primer on saucing the Italian way, the basics for handmade pastas, the key to cooking pasta al dente, vital ingredients for every Italian kitchen, perfect wine pairings, and the best food shopping sources around the United States. Complete with mouthwatering color photographs and detailed maps of the various regions, The Best Pasta Sauces lets you travel to Italy without ever leaving your kitchen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345547149
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/28/2014
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	668,738
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Micol Negrin is the owner of Rustico Cooking, an Italian cooking school in Manhattan. She is the author of the James Beard–nominated Rustico: Regional Italian Country Cooking and The Italian Grill. For six years, she was the editor of The Magazine of La Cucina Italiana. She has written for major publications, including Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, and Bon Appétit. Micol Negrin lives on a small lake in New Jersey with her husband, Dino De Angelis.

Read an Excerpt

Today, if you travel across Italy, you can still find echoes of the medieval and Renaissance sweet sauces, especially at Christmas, when nuts, sugar, and cinnamon frequently lend festive flavor to pastas. You’ll also find echoes of the spice trade that fueled much of the Italian economy in centuries past in pasta sauces that call for nutmeg, cinnamon, poppy seeds, caraway seeds, and other spices. But what you’ll find most of all is a tremendous variety of sauces that draw on the bounty of land and sea, on the ingenuity of the home cook, and on the imperative of letting the pasta itself be the star of the plate. No sauce is so intense as to mask the pasta it is served with. No sauce is so plentiful as to drown the pasta it is tossed with. The sauce is merely a vehicle for enjoying the pasta, and it is a vehicle that changes marvelously from region to region, depending on what local cooks can find in their gardens and on what has informed their cooking over the centuries.

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Excerpted from "The Best Pasta Sauces"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Micol Negrin.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

11/17/2014
Negrin (Rustico), founder of Manhattan-based Rustico Cooking, explores the wide array of pasta preparation, journeying across Italy's 20 regions to showcase the best each has to offer. With innumerable varieties of sizes and shapes, pasta's a staple that can be served as a side dish or as a main course, and while it may seem like a simple task, Negrin shares ten rules to truly cook it right. She also provides a tutorial on cooking equipment, saucing, wine pairing suggestions, matching pasta shapes with their ideal sauces, and ten must-have ingredients. She groups recipes by region, providing a brief description to the area's approach and specialties along with several recipes for tempting sauces. Negrin highlights key local ingredients from Val D'Aosta's fontina to Ligurian pesto to Calabrese pork. Piedmont's potato, onion, and fontina sauce with pancetta, the Marches' sausage and cabbage sauces, and Abruzzo's sweet pepper and lamb ragu with rosemary show the diversity and appeal of these dishes. Sidebars on salt, cooking with wine, and using canned tuna provide insight into the way Italians incorporate prized ingredients into their cooking. Negrin's recipes will transport back to Italy those lucky enough to have spent time there, and for those who haven't, she offers the opportunity to enjoy authentic Italian pasta and sauce in their own homes. Agent: Judith Riven, Judith Riven Literary Agency (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly