Viva Italia

The publishers, Mitchell Beazley seem to have a knack of getting things just right. Two of their most recent cookery titles, in a few pages, capture the mood of Italy and the wonderful, awe inspiring family food that Italians are so famous for.

Bringing Italy Home by Ursula Ferrigno is one of them. Although at first sight you would never guess, this book is a meat free zone but with Jason Lowe's outstanding photography and Ursula's dead easy recipes, how could you possibly resist? Bringing Italy Home is a book where, by the looks of it, equal importance has been given to the photography as to the recipes. Without wanting to be boring, the pictures are pure art.

However, Ursula need not be worried at being overshadowed by Jason. Her recipes are perfect and to make the book even more usable, it is divided by season, which really does make life easy. Dive for the season you are in and feast on Jason's images of chestnuts or luscious aubergines. But one of the best things about Bringing Italy Home is the way in which Ursula imparts little bits of information on her main ingredients. Did you know that the more you cut garlic, the stronger the flavour will be? She suggests seducing it gently. Also cut out the new green growth as it imparts a bitter flavour. Take green cicoria leaves, chicory. Ursula remembers ‘My grandmother used to sauté leaves with olive oil and garlic, one of my earliest taste memories'. Earliest taste memories could lead us on to a different level all together but it is an interesting thought. We might come back to that later. What we can deduce from her book is how lucky she was to grow up in an environment where food was such an important part of every day life.

For those who find vegetables just not enough, they can feast on some of her seafood recipes. Mixed seafood casserole is a hearty concoction of mussels and clams. Some of the GWG favourites are insalata di pecorino e noci, which is a simple salad of fennel, walnuts, rocket and mature Pecorino: all the ingredients being at the peak of perfection. Fichi farciti, stuffed figs, is just figs split open and stuffed with walnuts, honey, vermouth and mascarpone and drizzled with melted chocolate. For summer, although it is a bit late now, try pizza dolce, which is a pizza base spread with a creamy layer and topped with strawberries and raspberries. However, you can always use fruit in season and plums would be delicious.

For lovers of Italian food, you could not possibly go wrong with Bringing Italy Home. Ursula's passion shines through in every recipe and Jason's photography, need we say more?

Nikko Amandonico's La Pizza is in a similar vein. Outstanding photography and although the book is devoted solely to the pizza, it is worthy of a place on your bookshelf, providing, of course, that you enjoy eating this Italian fast food. La Pizza is primarily a coffee table book, celebrating the development of the Neapolitan pizza. With over 200 photographs which evoke the street atmosphere of Naples, from the burning wood stoves, to pretty girls and the boys on Vespas, this book looks set to become the authority on the history of pizza.

La Pizza features classic and authentic recipes as you would expect to find on a trip to Naples. You might not know this but there is just one authentic pizza, the tomato version but with two variations. These are the Marinara, with garlic, oregano and olive oil and the Margherita, with mozzarella and basil. They have been served in Pizzeria da Michele since 1847, a business that is run by the same family today. Little did the Condurro Family know when they set up their enterprise all those years ago that they were embarking on a project that would make pizza one of the most successful mass culture foods in the world. But to Neapolitans, it is just the simple Marinara and Margherita that count.

Pizza was principally a poor man's food, invented in Naples as a result of the intense population explosion in the 18th Century. The city was one of the most densely inhabited cities in Europe with many hungry stomachs to feed.

To the present day, where there are 500 pizzerias in Naples and a good pizza-maker turning out sixty pizzas an hour. Naturally, the Neapolitans believe that their city is the only place in the world to eat pizza and it is probably true, even if you do it just once. Fortunately, Nico has included a guide to authentic Neapolitan pizzerias if you ever get the chance. Neapolitan taxi drivers talk as much about their beloved pizzas as London cabbies talk about the weather.

To make an authentic pizza you should use the light bulb shaped San Marzano tomato, which is grown on the slopes of Vesuvius. The addition of tomato purée tends to blunt the flavours. You then need buffalo-milk mozzarella, which comes from one of the official recognised production areas in Italy, comprising of most of Campania and parts of Latium and Apulia. Make sure that ‘the white teardrop rolls down the blade as it is sliced'. Then to cook, you need a wood burning oven to complete the hat trick.

There are 28 recipes for pizza from the Margherita to Calzone, filled pizza, all based on Southern Italian ingredients. Pizza frutti di mare requires serious preparation but the end results are definitely worth it. Pizza con gamberi e rucola is with prawns, cherry tomatoes and rocket.

Once read, you will have a far greater understanding of this convenience food that we take for granted. A food that is served the world over from Haiti to Hanoi but you may now look on it in a different light thanks to Nikko Amandonico's excellent book.

Publication details:
Bringing Italy Home by Ursula Ferrigno.
224pp. Photography by Jason Lowe. £20
ISBN 1840003685
2001
Order directly from

La Pizza by Nikko Amandonico.
168 pp. Photography by Ewa-Marie Rundquist. £20
ISBN 1840004525
2001
Order directly from