Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library)

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I totally appreciated the explanation of the frog's entire life cycle in the recipe for Frog soup. Very insightful, as long as do not over think this!

This book is not your average book filled with recipes. This book is about life, it explains every aspect of living in illustrious terms. It is mesmerizing! Ragù, even if famous, was still considered a meat dish with sauce, and this is how Puccini remembers it in his Bohème. Once in Livorno, Artusi went to a restaurant to have dinner. After eating minestrone, he decided to rent a room in the building belonging to a man called Domenici. As Artusi would later recount, he spent the whole night suffering from horrible stomach pains, which he blamed on the minestrone he had eaten. The next day, returning to Florence, he got the news that Livorno had been hit by cholera and that Domenici had been a victim. It was only then that he realized what had happened: it had not been the minestrone that made him ill, but the early symptoms of the disease. The event inspired Artusi to write an excellent recipe for minestrone.

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However, in the meantime, the recipe had become part of the Italian cuisine and it spread throughout the national territory with new variations and new ingredients such as the use of tomato, which appears for the first time in 1790 in the “Maccheorni alla Napolitana” recipe, contained within the cookbook “The modern Apicius” by Francesco Leonardi.

This is not a sit down and read start to finish type book. So I read out of it every morning to inspire and give colour to my day - I presume like some people read the Bible. One hundred years after his death, both his birthplace of Forlimpopoli, as well as other Italian cities are celebrating this figure with various publications and events.This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Between the years 1835 and 1850, Artusi spent a great deal of time in student circles in Bologna (in one of his works he claims to have been enrolled at the University). In the bar Tre Re he met the patriot Felice Orsini, from Meldola another town near Forlì. The cookbook has a charming introduction entitled, “The story of a book that is a bit like the story of Cinderella.” And, indeed, the story behind his cookbook, a labor of love, is inspiring. The seventy-one-year-old Artusi, a businessman with an enormous passion for cooking, could not find anyone to publish his book. He decided to self-publish it, initially printing only 1000 copies. But before long, it was one of the books that every Italian household had a copy of, up there with Italian classics like I Promessi Sposi and Pinocchio.

Bills should be short and tagliatelle long, since long bills terrify husbands and short tagliatelle looks like left overs"! Have you ever come across such a lovely sentence, have you ever received better advice?Artusi's book stands with Manzoni's great novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), and the music of Verdi as works that not only are great unto themselves but represented a sense of identity and self-worth to a nascent country with no nationalistic feeling ... Artusi chose to give Italians their definition by telling them how they ate ... Anyone who seeks to know Italian food avoids Artusi at his or her peril. He is the fountainhead of modern Italian cookery.' La Scienza in Cucina is more than just a cookbook. Pellegrino Artusi read widely, corresponded with the intellectuals of his day, and had something to say about just about everything. Almost half the recipes contain anecdotes or snippets of advice on subjects as varied as regional dialects and public health, and while cooks may open the book to find out how to make minestrone or a German cake, they northern Italy in the 1840s were like. While today his comments are merely interesting, at the turn of the century they undoubtedly provided the first glimpses of the outside world to many of his readers who lived in small towns and had neither the means nor the opportunity to travel. But it's his apricot jam that I will continue to make for the rest of my life. He himself says that it's the best one of them all. I like it so much that there's nothing I would do to change it. Some like to add lemon juice to their apricot jam, some add vanilla. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall even throws in some butter. But if you have delicious, sweet, ripe apricots to begin with (Artusi points out in this recipe that jam should be made with good fruit and that it is erroneous to think you can get the same results with second-rate fruit), then these are unnecessary.