Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food
Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food
The recipes that one of New York’s best young chefs cooks in his own kitchen: a cookbook full of soulful, sophisticated food and delicious stories
While waiting for construction to finish on his restaurant A Voce, Andrew Carmellini faced an unusual challenge. After a brilliant career in professional kitchens (including a six-year tour as chef de cuisine at Café Boulud), he was faced with the harsh reality of life as a civilian cook: no prep cooks, no saucier, no daily deliveries—just him and his wife in their tiny Manhattan-apartment kitchen.
Urban Italian is made up of the recipes that result when a great chef has to use the same resources as the rest of us. In these hundred recipes—covering four distinct courses, side dishes, and base recipes—Carmellini shows how to make stunning, soulful food with nothing more than the ingredients, techniques, and time available to the ordinary home cook. The food is sophisticated but also easy to make: lamb meatballs stuffed with goat cheese; veal, beef, and pork ravioli; roast pork with Italian plums and grappa; fennel with Sambuca and orange; and a honey-flavored pine nut cake.
The book opens with a narrative (written by Carmellini with his wife and coauthor, Gwen Hyman) that traces Carmellini’s culinary education—a series of outrageous tales that will delight anyone who loved Heat or Kitchen Confidential. Also scattered through the book are short pieces on places and ingredients, placed alongside recipes to shed light on the history and practice of simple, beautiful cooking. This is a book you’ll find yourself using all the time—to cook from for weeknights and for special occasions, or just to sit down with and read.
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In one of the more creative yet accessible Italian cookbooks to come along, Carmellini (formerly chef of A Voce in New York City) presents spectacular recipes while opening a window onto his life with food, from his Italian-American boyhood and cooking school to revelations while traveling in Italy and being a top New York chef. An extensive personal introduction as well as ample side notes and recipe introductions offer extra insight into his approach to food. The recipes, which come from all over Italy and mix regional Italian and American influences, are arranged classically, from antipasti to dolci. Many seem typical Italian fare, yet Carmellini gives them an idiosyncratic touch that heightens flavors and makes them work for the modern cook, whether that means an intriguing beet and grapefruit salad or meatballs with cherries. Some recipes are simple but time-consuming, as he candidly admits, yet he walks through the steps so patiently that a determined cook at almost any skill level will manage. Carmellini shows why he is considered one of the country's best young chefs, and a natural teacher. (Oct.)
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Review
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year "Creative yet accessible. Carmellini presents spectacular recipes while opening a window onto his life with food, from his Italian-American boyhood and cooking school to revelations while traveling in Italy and being a top New York chef. Carmellini gives [the recipes] an idiosyncratic touch that heightens flavors and makes them work for the modern cook at any skill level. Carmellini shows why he is considered one of the country's best young chefs, and a natural teacher."—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Andrew Carmellini’s Urban Italian is that rare breed of cookbook: written by a skilled, top-tier professional, yet at all times accessible, unintimidating, and inspiring to the home cook. In short, it’s everything a cookbook should be. The conversational style provides both a thrilling introduction and the feeling, while cooking, that the chef is standing next to in the kitchen, forgiving your mistakes, urging you along, painlessly expanding your reservoir of knowledge. In a world awash with Italian cookbooks, this one's a must-have.”—Anthony Bourdain
“Andrew Carmellini is an enormously talented chef who brings a distinctive style and voice to his restaurant. Urban Italian captures that style and voice for the home cook with intriguing recipes—and also with great stories about the cook’s life, written with a candor and bravado not typically found in chefs’ cookbooks. A terrific book.”—Michael Ruhlman
"Andrew’s passion for Italy is contagious. Urban Italian is entertaining, informative, and witty." —Eric Ripert
“This would be a great book if it did nothing more than faithfully capture between covers the great food served at A Voce. But, marvel of marvels, the modest-but-confident chef I've admired for so long for his cooking can also write his ass off. Urban Italian is every bit as intimate, profane, soulful, and amusing as Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. To paraphrase Andrew himself on the subject of cooking, this book engages your senses, takes your mind off your day-to-day problems, and makes both the reader and (I'm pretty sure) the writer happy.” —Sara Moulton
“Like many Italian American chefs, myself included, Andrew had to go through France to get to Italy. Urban Italian takes the reader on that journey. Fabulous recipes, of course, but just as important are the stories that informed the heart and soul of this great chef.” —Tom Colicchio
About the Author
The 2004 winner of the James Beard Foundation's Best Chef: New York City award, Andrew Carmellini is a young veteran of some of the world's finest restaurant kitchens. After stints at Lespinasse and Café Boulud—and a year living and cooking in Italy—he opened A Voce, which has quickly become one of New York's best-loved and best-reviewed restaurants.
Gwen Hyman has written about food for Gastronomica and The Robb Report, among other publications. She has taught food writing at NYU and is now an associate professor at the Cooper Union in New York City. Her book Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the English Nineteenth-Century Novel is forthcoming from Ohio University Press.
Customer Reviews
great book - great recipes - great food
This cookbook is entertaining and easy to read - so is a great buy even if you never try to cook a single recipe. The recipes however, are simple and straightforward with helpful hints on every page. I've made several and they are all yummy and turned out perfectly. Like I said - great book - great recipes - great food. What else could you ask for?!?
Disappointed, but not discouraged
Could the six recipes I picked to try be the only six mediocre recipes in this book? It's possible. The pasta with bacon, mushrooms and radicchio, as reviewed by 007 J Foo and the Short Ribs Braciole recommended by G Bertolini sound worth trying - and thanks to you two for actually telling us what you made.
What did I make? First, the Winter Insalata of Radicchio, Pears and Hazelnuts (p.86). It was good, but the hazelnut dressing was texturally off-putting, perhaps an individual quirk, but my guest agreed. Next was the Grilled Radicchio with Thyme and Pecorino, (p. 220) also good - but - the radicchio did not lose its bitterness at all, but then I have the "taste gene" (yes, it's found in about a third of humans) that is very sensitive to bitterness. And yes, bitterness is tolerable, but I have a salad dressing, specifically aimed at us unfortunates, that makes radicchio quite tolerable.
I followed the veggies with Marinated Chicken ala Griglia (p.177). I wrote "Not Impressed" in my cookbook. It was okay, but I'll never make it again.
Next, I bought about five pounds of lamb and cut it and ground part of it to make the next three recipes. The marinated lamb (p.178) was good - not fabulous, but good. I have several recipes for lamb that blow your mind, but you won't hear that "groan of pleasure" when you taste this one.
Lamb ragu (p.100) is the one I'm eating as I write this review. I didn't make Carmellini's gnocchi, but served it over Alessi's (an Italian import - excellent) potato gnocchi. Very good, but I will not make it again.
And lastly, we have the lamb meatballs (p.59). Okay, but I won't repeat the recipe. I believe we can detect a pattern here.
Most of the recipes are time-intensive - something to have fun with when you have - duh -- the time.
As far as the introductory bio - please, please, enough of the A. Bourdain look-alikes. BOR-R-R-R-ing!
I'm such a fan of the Gourmet magazine Book-of-the-Month recommendations. I have to say I'm quite disappointed in this selection.
Delicious Recipes Found Between these Pages
I'm one of those persons who has a bazillion cookbooks, zillions of recipes on my computer and loads of cooking and related sites bookmarked in my browser. I love cookbooks, love cooking, fancy myself as sort of a gourmet. I've written a cooking column in a magazine and I've got Amazon So You'd Like Too Guides where I talk about my favorite recipes. So as you can see I'm always on the lookout for a new and exciting cookbook and this one is certainly exciting.
If it's good Italian dishes you're interested in making, look no further. Mr. Carmellini's excellent dishes can be made from just the ingredients found in your average kitchen. You don't have to make a special trip to the store to cook up "My Grandmother's Ravioli" for example. Well, maybe you do, you have to buy the meat and maybe some of the veggies if you don't have them, but you don't have to go to a speciality store. Shopping for the recipes in this book couldn't be easier and that Ravioli, if my grandmother would have been Italian instead of Spanish, this could have been her recipe. Just delicious and there's a lot more where that came from between the pages of this book.
Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne
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