Everything you need to read, watch and listen to this month
Read
For the home cook
My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci
Italian-American actor and director Stanley Tucci has had a late-career renaissance, if not a reinvention, as everyone’s favourite cookbook writer and food show presenter. He and his wife Felicity Blunt have published two volumes of their own home recipes, and his travel series Searching for Italy drew a huge audience to watch him tasting dishes of the motherland. More recently, this engrossing memoir details the way that food, and especially Italian cuisine, has given shape and meaning to his creative life on stage and screen.
For the traditionalist
Pasta Grannies by Vicky Bennison
The popular YouTube series of the same name tends to prove the widely-held belief that Italian grandmothers, or nonnas, are the true custodians of proper Italian home cooking. This beautifully photographed book documents presenter/writer Bennison’s cooking sessions with some of the country’s greatest pasta-making grannies, detailing their preferred ingredients and time-honoured techniques for mastering simple pastas like pici (hand-rolled spaghetti) and trickier propositions such as lumachelle della duchessa (fine-ridged tubes seasoned with cinnamon).
For the romantic
Lizzie & Dante by Mary Bly
The very definition of a summer beach read, this sunny novel is the written equivalent of an aspirational rom-com about a Shakespeare scholar who falls for an Italian chef while holidaying on the island of Elba. Amid the yacht excursions and secret coves and movie-star acquaintances, Bly goes into considerable detail about the tasting menu of a particularly grumpy masterchef. The overall texture of the language and settings convey an almost voluptuous feel for the experiential pleasures of the Med – the cuisine in particular.
Watch
Ciao House
Given the visual appeal of both Italian cooking and Italian locations, it was only a matter of time before someone developed a reality show around the kitchen of a Tuscan villa. Presenters Alex Guarnaschelli and Tuscan-born chef Gabriele Bertacchini lead 10 skilled amateurs through a tense yet lovely-to-look at cookery competition, which sees them take lessons from Italian masters and undergo various related challenges in sumptuous backdrops like cheese caves and wine cellars.
Listen
Gola – Italian food, history, culture and society
This is one of the better podcasts on drinking and dining in Italy, in large part because it puts every antipasti, wheel of cheese, or herbal aperitif in deep, rich cultural and historical context. To this end, Rome-based journalist Katie Parla, and Dartmouth College assistant professor in the department of French and Italian, Danielle Callegari, dig pretty deep into the recent and ancient past, and a conversation about a particular bread or dessert may teach the listener something about Roman emperors or medieval witches.
