Customers say
Customers find this cookbook to be a magnificent tour of Italian cooking, beautifully photographed, and easy to make. They appreciate the content quality, with one customer particularly enjoying the stories that accompany the recipes. The quality of the recipes receives mixed feedback.
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A quick rundown of this product’s key features:
Discover the real techniques, ingredients, and stories behind the Italian dishes you know and love—and the ones you’ve yet to try—with more than 145 delicious recipes that bring simplicity back to Italian cooking, from the James Beard Award-winning team at Milk Street.
Forget everything you thought you knew about Italian food. In Italy, cooks throw away their garlic, they don’t stir their polenta, and they never labor over pans of risotto. But they do make enormous meatballs that are tender and light, and they occasionally break all the rules when making pasta.
The editors at Milk Street have spent years scouring small eateries, local markets, farms and home kitchens from Lombardy to Calabria and from Sardinia to Sicily in search of fresh takes on classic recipes as well as little-known regional favorites that never crossed the Atlantic.
On our travels we found new ways with pasta, from foolproof cacio e pepe in Rome to Puglia’s olive oil—crisped fettuccine with chickpeas and a lemony pesto from Amalfi, where the pasta itself is enriched with citrus. Plus some surprising tomato sauces, including spaghetti all’assassina from Bari—spicy, charred, and made in one skillet.
We visited a Neapolitan trattoria where five sisters serenade diners with opera and serve an eggplant Parmesan that’s rich, but never fried. In Northern Italy, we made meatball-like bread dumplings simmered in chicken broth. And in Sardinia, a hearty herb soup studded with pancetta, beans, and tiny nuggets of pasta.
Milk Street Backroads Italy give you a seat at the table with Italian cooks sharing the food they love, handed down from generation to generation.
Our Top Reviews
Reviewer: ceebee
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Recipes are authentic and reasonable. Nothing over the top in complexity.
Review: This is a great collection of authentic regional recipes. When we lived in Tuscany and traveled through Italy, we actually enjoyed many of the dishes, though we had no clue as to how to accurately prepare. I’ve been a serious hobby cook for some 50+ years, and now I have a great resource to prepare some of the dishes we enjoyed in Italy
Reviewer: Kindle Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great for all courses of a meal!
Review: great book up to Milk Street high standards.What I liked is the ” equal-time” for salads and sides. I love salads but how to get beyond the green salad boredom?Read this book!
Reviewer: J. Peterson
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Milk Street does it again
Review: This is a beautifully produced cookbook/picture book/ storybook. As only Milk Street can do, this book guides you through each recipe to perfection. A little of this, but not too much or the dish isn’t as tasty. That’s why I love Milk Street cookbooks and recipes, you are being taught how to make it perfectly.On the other hand, if you are a seasoned cook who cooks your way and no other, this book might not be your cup of tea (unless the stories of the origins of Italian cooking and the wonderful photography are enough). I love experimenting and often a dish isn’t the same twice, so their detailed instructions intrigue me.This book would make a wonderful gift for that friend who loves to cook and especially loves Italy, its people and “la dolce vita”.
Reviewer: BillyBob
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: book with lots of pasta recipes but flawed directions on cooking it.
Review: i own over 100 italian cookbooks. it’s an obsession. this one is good and it is great if you want to cook pasta. the problem i have with it is the repetitive recipes: there are three different variants of broccoli rabe and sausage. there are also four different meatball recipes. ln the seafood section, 6 of the 9 recipes include some form of pasta. in the carne section, 5 of the 9 recipes are also some form of pasta recipe. while that’s fine, italian cuisine goes so much further than pasta, this is just way too unbalanced. Last, and this is something I truly hate, milk street insists on telling people to drain their pasta. never, never never drain your pasta. cook your condiment or sauce in a separate pan and use tongs or a strainer to remove the pasta from its water and put it into the sauce pan. take it out several minutes before it’s supposed to be done and finish cooking it in the sauce pan. using a spoon or ladle, take the pasta water and use it in the sauce. the starch and salt in the water creates an incredibly creamy sauce (with no cream used). There’s an italian process called “la mantecatura,” the critical finishing step in which a pasta, its sauce, and some of the starchy pasta water are mounted with fat in the form of butter, oil, and/or cheese and emulsified to form a silky, glossy glaze. (I copied that from daniel gritzer serious eats). you can’t do this if you drain your pasta. while milk street has some good ideas and this book, notwithstanding how flimsy it is, uncovers some good, old recipes, they lose credibility entirely for their huge miss in directions for cooking pasta. shame on you, milk street, especially in a book so heavily overweighted to pasta recipes. but, don’t get me wrong, the book is worthwhile for many of the recipes, as long as you disregard their directions for cooking the pasta.
Reviewer: Kerri
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Must have..
Review: Stunning… the quality of this book is amazing… the recipes look wonderful ( made 1 so far) didn’t disappoint.. it reads like a book… not just a stack of recipes.. can spend hours looking thru.. enjoy.
Reviewer: Ann
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Best Italian cookbook ever.
Review: Milk Street has outdone itself. I am Italian and have hundreds of cookbooks and a vast Italian cookbook collection. I have no coffee table book. This will be the one. I can’t wait to start cooking these recipes. (The book just arrived an hr ago, first day of publication). It is authentic. Love the pictures. Love the stories of the people, places, ingredients and foods. I see my grandmother from Bari making orichette by hand, then laying them out on a sheet on a bed to dry til dinner (the big Italian Sunday dinner that goes on for hours), and all us cousins sneaking in and eating them raw lol. She must’ve made extra because there was always plenty for everyone at the table. Thank you, Milk Street for such a wonderful book.
Reviewer: Cheryl Pellegrino
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Wonderful Cookbook
Review: What a beautiful cookbook, it’s a lot larger (and heavy) than I thought it would be. Every recipe has a picture and love the step by step directions. Covers all areas of Italian cooking including desserts.
Reviewer: Wyoming Bas Bleu
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Yummy
Review: Great recipes. Easy to make and understand and they are yummy. Working my way through them.
Reviewer: Marla
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Great book. Wonderful pictures and enchanting stories behind Italy ,customs and products. Not just a cookbook.
Reviewer: Terese A Tyce
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Great book!
Price effective as of Jun 23, 2025 13:13:15 UTC
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