Italian Food History and Gastronomy

by Clifford A. Wright
|
12 books
Gastronomy says the Encyclopedia Britannica is the art of selecting, preparing, serving, and enjoying fine food grounded in relationships between food, culture, and tradition. An Italian cookbook is not necessarily a book about Italian gastronomy. This list are the best books on Italian and southern European culinary history. These books will provide an understanding of Italy’s gastronomy and culinary patrimony.
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The Land of Hunger

Piero Camporesi, 1996
The Land of Hunger is a graphic and engaging journey into the folk culture of early modern Europe. In this highly original book, Camporesi explores the two worlds of feast and famine in early modern Europe and will open new perspectives on culture and food.

Bread of Dreams

Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe
Piero Camporesi, 2023
Camporesi is one of the most important historians writing about food and culture. This scholarly book looks at pre-modern Southern Europe, a world of ordinary people: peasants, city-dwellers, beggars and poor people of Italy. Camporesi argues for a novel and insightful theory that Europeans lived in states of "collective vertigo," hallucination and illness brought on by starvation or the eating of tainted foodstuffs, commonplace at that time.

The Magic Harvest

Food, Folkore and Society
Piero Camporesi, 1998
In this brilliant and thought-provoking book Camporesi’s essays explore the development of the Italian diet and the geography of food. Camporesi suggests that "the fearful threat of famine continued to hang over people's lives until the middle of the nineteenth century," and what is thought of today as the "Italian national diet" was in fact a late nineteenth- century invention.

Italian Cuisine

A Cultural History
Alberto Capatti, Massimo Montanari, 2003
The authors focus on culinary developments in the late medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras, aided by a wealth of cookbooks produced throughout the early modern period. They show how Italy's culinary identities emerged over the course of the centuries through an exchange of information and techniques among geographical regions and social classes. Its great variety of culinary practices reflects a history long dominated by regionalism and political division, and has led to the common conception of Italian food as a mosaic of regional customs rather than a single tradition. This book was important for the writing of my An Italian Feast, since I argued against the idea of a single tradition.

Italian Food

Elizabeth David, 1999
Elizabeth David's Italian Food was one of the first books in English to demonstrate the enormous range of Italy's regional cooking. Originally published in 1954, David introduced the English people to an exciting world of cuisine for a population that had just come out of its stifling World War II rationing. David introduced an expansive range of Italian foods beyond ravioli or minestrone to the complex traditions of Italy’s regions.

Gastronomy of Italy

Anna Del Conte, 2004
This simple A-Z format covers all elements of Italian gastronomy from abbacchio to zuppe inglese. Although not comprehensive (that might be impossible) it is a perfect companion to Italian gastronomy.

Da Vinci's Kitchen

A Secret History of Italian Cuisine
Dave DeWitt, 2017
This little book on the origins of Italian cuisine is perfect for an introduction to the famous Renaissance chefs who lived, wrote, and cooked in the time of Leonardo da Vinci’s world.

Pasta and Pizza

Franco La Cecla, 2007
Pasta and Pizza tells the story of how cuisine born in the south of Italy during the Arab conquest in the ninth century became a foundation for the creation of a new nation. As the anthropologist La Cecla shows, this process intensified as millions of Italians immigrated to the Americas: it was abroad that pasta and pizza became synonymous with being Italian.

The Art of Cooking

The First Modern Cookery Book
Maestro Martino of Como, 2005
Maestro Martino of Como, born in 1430, has been called the first celebrity chef, and his extraordinary treatise on Renaissance cookery, The Art of Cooking, is the first known culinary guide to specify ingredients, cooking times and techniques, utensils, and amounts. It’s a true historical document which provides insight into the development of Italian gastronomy.

The Culture of Food

Massimo Montanari, 1996
The Italian historian Montanari’s book is a history of food in Europe. In this wide-ranging exploration of its history the author examines classes, regions, and nations of Europe from late antiquity to modernity. The evolution of consumption, production and taste reveals the cultures and peoples of Europe in the past and what they suggest about the present.

Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb

In a Proverb
Massimo Montanari, 2010
In this intriguing and original work, Montanari takes an old Italian proverb, "Do not let the peasant know how good cheese is with pears" to discover what portent they might hold. Montanari unravels their origin and utility though archival cookbooks, agricultural and dietary treatises, literary works, and anthologies of beloved sayings, wherein he finds in the nobility's demanding palates and delicate stomachs a compelling recipe for social conduct.

A Mediterranean Feast

The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean, from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs, with More Than 500 Recipes
Clifford A. Wright, 1997
My book tells the sweeping story of the birth of the venerated and diverse cuisines of the Mediterranean. The evolution of these cuisines is not simply the story of farming, herding, and fishing; rather, the story encompasses wars and plagues, political intrigue and pirates, the Silk Road and the discovery of the New World, the rise of capitalism and the birth of city-states, the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, and the obsession with spices. It also contains 500 contemporary recipes that reflect this history,