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Product Description
Just east of Tuscany, Umbria is lush with rolling hills and rustic small towns - and delicious, healthful, traditional Italian cooking. In her most intimate and personal cookbook to date, popular cooking-show host Mary Ann Esposito, beloved for her long-running series "Ciao Italia," takes us through this delightful, unspoiled region - cooking, eating, and making friends along the way.
With 60 authentic recipes along with anecdotes, profiles, and cooking tips, this companion to "Ciao Italia" is a "traveling cookbook" that transports us to the unforgettable foods of Umbria and the people who prepare them. You'll visit bustling food markets, glorious street festivals, aroma-filled home kitchens, family-run vineyards, top-secret truffle fields, and a heavenly chocolate museum. You'll also find information on mail-order sources, web sites, and Umbrian restaurants.
Everyone who loves Italy will savor the bounty of Umbrian specialties on these pages, including hearty gnocchi, sizzling vegetables and pork sausages alla griglia (on the grill), delectable black truffles, simple ragus, healthful lentils and farro, hearty country breads, and Perugian chocolate desserts.
So pull up a chair, pour a glass of Sangiovese, and come along to Umbria - and bring your appetite!
Amazon.com Review
Cookbooks about Tuscan cuisine abound, but the food of its easterly neighbor, Umbria, remains mostly unexplored. Mary Ann Esposito's Ciao Italia in Umbria meets this dearth handily. A "traveling cookbook," it showcases the region's healthy, rustic food while providing a first-person look at its restaurants, home cooks, and singular occupations, like truffle hunting. The core of the book--an offshoot of Esposito's PBS series Ciao Italia--is its 60 easy-to-do recipes, which feature the area's most notable and delicious products, including olive oil, black truffles, farro, and wine. If the relatively few formulas provided leave readers hungry for more, those offered, such as Carp with Rosemary and Fennel and Fava Beans with Olive Oil and Pecorino Cheese, couldn't be more inviting.
The recipes grow from Esposito's narratives. For example, her truffle hunt chapter yields the traditional Penne with Truffles and Cream as well as the more singular Veal with Black Truffle and Strawberry Sauce. Similarly, a section on local female chefs leads to two unusual gnocchi recipes--prune- and zucchini-filled--while one on Umbrian flatbreads offers formulas for oil-fried brustengo, spinach-filled torta sul testo, and a luscious prosciutto pie. Seafood is well represented, as are recipes for the pork delicacies of Norcia, including the delicious Sweet Pork Sausages with Grapes. Readers will also enjoy making sweets like Chocolate Spumone, exemplary strufoli (honey balls), and addictive mezzalune, almond crescent cookies. With an "address book" of outstanding Umbrian restaurants, the book provides a compelling culinary tour of a region too often neglected by cookbooks but, happily, celebrated here. --Arthur Boehm
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