Milk Street Italy Makes Italian Food New Again
Welcome to Cookbook of the Week . In this series, I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While searching for a specific recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has its own magic.
Another Italian cookbook – I know. But trust me, you’ll want to be here for it. Milk Street Backroads Italy is a cookbook that may make you question some of your “rules” for cooking Italian food. Do you constantly stir your polenta? Adding mozzarella chunks to your eggplant parm? Loading up on Italian wedding meatball soup? While I’ll probably continue adding mini meatballs to everything , the latest volume from Milk Street did something unexpected—it made Italian food new to me again.
A little about the book
This absolutely intense cookbook by Christopher Kimball and J.M. Hirsch was just published April 15, and it’s fresh in more ways than one. The name Backroads Italy hints that you’re about to see a different side of the country’s cuisine. Many have tried to do this, and why not? Italian food is usually easy to prepare, tasty, and relatively reliable for duplication across different regions. What makes this cookbook different is that it gives you a lot of dishes you probably aren’t familiar with (I wasn’t) and really helpful tips every step of the way.
For the dishes you thought you knew well, Milk Street Backroads Italy will show you a new way to prepare them. A new way that won’t make you irritated by the change, but instead will intrigue you with the possibility of an alternative favorite.
It’s important to note that these “new” methods aren’t actually new —they’ve been around for generations. But they are finally coming to us from different regions of Italy—from the Italian chefs Kimball and Hirsch cooked with and learned from—sometimes tweaked in favor of science or adjusted for technique for the sake of convenience in the American kitchen.
An excellent cookbook that allows you to take a fresh look at Italian cuisine.
I’ll admit, I’m usually a little bored by too many stories in cookbooks—I love figuring out recipes—but the stories in this cookbook caught my attention almost every time. Instead of rambling anecdotes (which I usually turn around), these passages are descriptive with a clear intent. They provide important information about what you’ll see on the next page and why it will be different from what you’re used to.
I especially enjoyed reading about Neapolitan eggplant Parmigiana without roasting (Parmigiana di Melanzane), classic polenta, and the Milanese technique for instant risotto. Each dish traditionally has an annoying but supposedly written in stone step that must be done. For example, eggplants need to be breaded in egg and breadcrumbs. As for polenta, you need to stir it constantly and add plenty of cheese and butter. For risotto, same slow and steady stirring while slowly adding chicken stock. Well, Milk Street Sideways in Italy showed me that not only can you eliminate those annoying steps, but the food can be better as a result.
While Italian cuisine is often known for hearty tomato-sauced pastas and, of course, pizza, the writers here have fun digging up little-known recipes from Italy—and the enthusiasm is contagious.
I love the idea of making a soup filled with herbs instead of meat, replacing spaghetti with chickpeas on a vongola, or giving the tomatoes a break and dousing the rigatoni with bright green broccoli sauce. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of familiar pasta, risotto, focaccia, and pizza dishes in this book. Just be open to the twists and turns on these roads. You’ll be glad you did.
The dish I cooked this week
I spent days looking at the dishes in this cookbook and often stopped to look at the gorgeous picture here or look at the list of ingredients there. But I kept going back to page 179, “Rigatoni with Salsa di Broccoli.” Something about the creamy green sauce with the big pasta tubes and even bigger broccoli florets was irresistible. Additionally, the ingredient list was 10 ingredients of a reasonable length, and none of them were difficult to find.
Essentially, the sauce is made from the often-discarded broccoli stalk, with the addition of some key flavor ingredients. It’s all tossed into a fiercely jade sauce and tossed with cooked rigatoni and blanched broccoli florets. This is a simple recipe that becomes even less labor intensive if you use one pan of boiling water to do the whole job. I liked that I didn’t have to use multiple pots and pans at once (and didn’t have to wash them all later).
When I smelled the sauce coming out of the blender, I knew there was no hope for leftovers. I took one bite and was stunned. This dish is amazingly delicious. The broccoli flavor is what you’d expect—that’s the main thing—but the sauce actually has multiple layers of flavor. Small but mighty ingredients—especially capers, garlic, and lemon zest—are blended in the perfect ratio to lift each other without overwhelming the eater. This recipe is a problem. My area is about to run out of broccoli.
Where to buy the book
You can get a 36% discount if you buy the Milk Street Backroads Italy hardcover book from the Milk Street online store compared to the hardcover book from other online retailers. But consider a thinner e-reader at an even lower price. Extra imaginary points from me if you also contact your local real bookstore.