The Bottom Line
Pros
- Simple recipes, food just like Tuscans make
- Ingredients you can find everywhere
- A very attractive cookbook
Cons
- Not available everywhere (but she'll send you one!)
Description
- Nearly 200 mouth-watering pages of traditional Tuscan recipes
- This cookbook would make an excellent gift for that Italophile adverse to spending hours in the kitchen.
- Learn how to eat like a Tuscan and set up a Tuscan pantry.
Guide Review - Secrets From My Tuscan Kitchen Cookbook Review
Secrets From My Tuscan Kitchen is a compilation of the favorite recipes Judy Witts Francini has been showing off for 20 years in her Tuscan cooking classes. Like Tuscan cooking itself, it's a homey sort of cookbook; Judy had a font developed from her own writing and uses it throughout. It's big enough so even I don't have to squint to see it. Each recipe has a facing ruled page where you can make notes. That's nice, because the red sauce that spatters on an open page will only spatter on the recipe you're using at the time, so you can catalog your work by color or maybe even smell--or am I the only one who mistreats my cookbooks this way?
In any case, the recipes in Secrets from my Tuscan Kitchen have been carefully thought out for the American or British kitchen. There are those precise measurements you folks like so much (non of that "add a glass of wine" stuff that Tuscans are so used to working from). The ingredients are easily procured almost everywhere there's food (although it goes without saying that you should be buying all your ingredients at an open air market in Tuscany).
Many of the recipes include those ever so slight variations that can make a big difference in a cuisine based on simplicity.
My recommendations? Get this book and amaze your friends with all those dishes you had in Tuscan restaurants and couldn't quite replicate. It's pretty easy. You can get an autographed copy online or, better yet, you can go to Florence and get it at the Uffizi Gallery Bookshop or other compelling places on Divina's Secrets from My Tuscan Kitchen page.
Now, get cooking!
