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The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook: 350 Essential Recipes for Inspired Everyday...
by Jack Bishop and Ann Stratton
Available from Amazon
$24.75
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Features
Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin September 9, 1997
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1576300447
ISBN-13: 978-1576300442
Product Dimensions:
10.5 x 7.4 x 1.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
From Library Journal
Bishop, senior editor of Cook's Illustrated, is also the author of Pasta e Verdura (LJ 3/15/96), a nice collection of vegetarian sauces for pasta. Here are more vegetarian recipes for all courses of a meal, from cold and hot antipasti to dessert. The recipes are fine but nothing special, and some of them seem more like variations on a theme rather than separate entities (e.g., Focaccia with Rosemary, Focaccia with Sage, Parmesan Focaccia). For larger collections and others where vegetarian titles are particularly popular.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Review
"Jack Bishop has given us a celebration of vegetables, cooked simply the Italian way. The recipes are enticing, yet totally approachable and generally low in fat. Bishop even manages to demystify risotto and polenta. This book will enable the home cook to get delicious vegetarian dinners on the table every night of the week." -- Sara Moulton, Executive Chef, GOURMET
Reader Reviews
`The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook' by Jack Bishop is the third of Mr. Bishop's vegetable cookbooks I have reviewed and I have adopted the two earlier reviewed books as part of my regular `go to' cookbooks when I am looking for a recipe. This volume will join the others, as its recipes are excellent and its organization make it an excellent source for finding meatless dishes with an Italian accent. However, some of the expectations created for this book by its title and dust jacket blurbs are just a bit misleading. The term `vegetarian' in the title is probably being used in only its most liberal sense. While there is not a trace of chicken, ham, hare, or halibut in these recipes, the recipes positively drip with eggs and cheese. This is no more `vegetarian' than the collection of recipes taken from Marcella Hazan's works with all animal products removed. This also means that the gushy compliments from `Cooks Illustrated' colleague Christopher Kimball which describe the book as `a quantum leap forward in vegetarian cooking' is really going too far. Since something coming close to this book could have been produced by simply editing the works of a major writer on Italian food, this book does not give us a whole lot more than what we already have with our library full of works from Hazan, Bastianich, and Bugialli, not to mention the dozen volumes on specific Italian regional cuisines. It is also a mistake to assume that the calorie count for these recipes will be lower than normal. The recipes are really faithful to Italian cuisine in their heavy use of either olive oil or butter, so you may need to read the recipes carefully if you are looking for low fat recipes. Speaking of butter and olive oil, I did find a minor misstatement about these ingredients. In the recipe for a low fat bechamel, he states that substituting butter for olive oil will reduce the fat in a recipe. The error is that a tablespoon of olive oil is 100% fat while a tablespoon of American unsalted butter is about 80% fat by law. While olive oil may be a healthier, mono-unsaturated fat, gram for gram, it has more fat calories than butter. And, you may be loosing some emulsifying properties of butter if you substitute olive oil for butter. This has no reflection on the quality of Mr. Bishop's recipes. If you can afford the fat calories, go for whatever turns you on. But, there is a lot of value in this book. If you are a vegetarian who eats eggs and milk products, and you like Italian food, then you simply cannot find a better cookbook for your lifestyle. This is especially true since the Italian cuisines have done an especially good job of creating a really broad range of vegetable dishes. The `complete' in the title may be a stretch, as I simply refuse to believe that a complete cookbook is possible for any cooking subject as big as Italian cooking, even Italian cooking which excludes fish, fowl, meat, and game. But, this book gives the objective an honest treatment. One's first impression upon looking at the Table of Contents is that there are a lot of subjects which do not sound like vegetable dishes, such as pastas, breads, risottos, polenta, frittatas (Italian omelets), Crespelle (Italian crepes), and desserts. This is all part of the complete treatment to which Bishop strives. And, although I recommend you run to Hazan or Bastianich or Batalli if you want good instructions on making fresh pasta and to Reinhart or Beranbaum or Ortiz or Field if you want to make Italian bread, Bishop has a lot of sound ideas about making some classic Italian preparations such as polenta and risotto. The thing I liked best about this book aside were the large number of egg, gnocchi, risotto, and panini recipes plus the very nice collection of salads and vegetable side dishes. (One symptom of the mistaken `complete' in the title is that the book does not include a recipe for a Caprese salad (basil, mozzarella, and tomato)). While I have close to a hundred books loaded with recipes for fresh and dried pastas, there are few good collections which include Crespelle or as big a selection of frittatas. And, the selections of meatless sandwich recipes (Panini) are a real find. This may seem like a small thing, but I also give Mr. Bishop and his publisher high marks for the book's layout, with each recipe typically taking a single page. I am also very fond of his recipe for a vegetable stock, as it reduces the simmer time to a very convenient hour by chopping the vegetables rather than by simply halving them and simmering for three or more hours. The other pantry recipes are similarly first rate, although I think I would replace his quick sauce with my favorite basic sauce from Mario Batali that is sweetened with carrot and leaves out the parsley or basil. I have mixed feelings about the photographs in this book. They are well done, but for a 550 page book costing over $37, the number is a bit thin and the placement in a single rotogravure section is more typical of less expensive volumes. If you want meatless Italian recipes, this is the book for you. At the very least, it will save you from sorting through recipes in other books that may be heavy with pancetta, salami, Parma ham, and anchovies. Mr. Bishop gives us real Italian without giving us the feeling that something has been left out.
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The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook: 350 Essential Recipes for Inspired Everyday...
by Jack Bishop and Ann Stratton
Available from Amazon
$24.75
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|
