About The Book

Italian cooking draws its inspiration from the roll call of seasonal ingredients that pass through its kitchens, and in this splendid volume Diane Darrow and Tom Maresca share the simple secrets of making the most of the best fresh, top-of-the-season foods from farm and woodland, lake and sea.

The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen presents two hundred recipes according to the four seasons and the traditional courses of the Italian meal: antipasto, primo, secondo, contorno, dolce. All are wed (as they always are in Italy) to the wines that best match them, and the recipes have been tested and adapted to seasonal ingredients readily available in the United States. Richly stocked with delightful anecdotes and culinary lore gathered from the authors’ long love affair with Italy, they invite both amateur and expert to experience the Italian genius for making the most of the moment.

To make 1 pound of fresh pasta, as called for in most of the recipes in this book:

2 cups all-purpose flour
3 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
1 teaspoon olive (omit if you’re a purist)
1 tablespoon or more water (depending on the dryness of your flour, the size of your eggs, and the humidity of the day)

In a large bowl, combine all of the ingredients and knead by hand 10 minutes, however long your machine’s instructions say, until you’ve achieved a fine, smooth, unsticky dough. Set aside, covered – we just bury ours in the flour bin – for 1/2 hour to relax the gluten and make the dough easier to roll. Then roll it out to the desired thinness and cut and shape it according to your needs and equipment.

Praise

“If you can read or even browse through this book without running straight into the kitchen, you’ve got more willpower than we do.” –The Wine Investor

“The wit of the authors and their extraordinary familiarity with Italian regionalism and seasonal feasts is evident on every page. . . . This may turn out to be the best Italian cookbook of the year.” –John Mariani for Prodigy

“With wit, humor, and enthusiasm, each dish is prefaced with a note about ingredients, comments on its name, and/or asides about just-in-time preparation. The essays interspersed among the recipes provide inspiration for the mind as well as for the kitchen.” –Booklist

“Italian cooks have always been instinctively in touch with the seasons’never calling particular attention to themselves for what comes naturally. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Diane Darrow and Tom Maresca for presenting so many authentic dishes to us in such a sensibly organized way. The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen is a welcome addition to my library of cookbooks, and I predict it will end up full of creases, folds, olive oil drops, tomato splotches, and delicious memories.” –Danny Meyer, owner of the Union Square Café