Meetings
Wednesday May 16th 2012: "Tickle your Tastebuds – Modern & Historical Italian Recipes” ,
with illustrations, by Gillian Riley.
Wednesday May 16th 2012: "Tickle your Tastebuds – Modern & Historical Italian Recipes” ,
with illustrations, by Gillian Riley.
Gillian Riley is the author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food
John Dickie, writing a review in The Guardian:
"The variety of Italian food is giddying. No other national cuisine incorporates dishes as diverse as the canederli (dumplings) of the mountainous Trentino region and the couscous of western Sicily, or the wine-infused brasato (pot roast) of Piedmont and the balsamic vinegar of Modena, or the piadina (flatbread) of Romagna and the pane carasau (something like a poppadom) of Sardinia. And despite all the talk of how traditional Italian food is, the great gastronomic mosaic that is Italy continues to shift as it has throughout history; novelties continue to appear: ciabatta was invented by a baking entrepreneur from near Rovigo in the early 1980s.
As if comprehending this cornucopia were not already a daunting enough challenge for the food lover, Italians have made the task even tougher by disseminating endless myths and misconceptions. Everywhere one goes, the people in one small town will swear blind that their salami, their cheese, their nougat is a distinct and altogether more delicious creation than the identical version available across the valley. Then of course there is the peninsula's babel of dialects. There are few uniform terms for even the simplest things. A "World Directory of Pasta Shapes and Names" recently compiled by Italian manufacturers lists 142 different labels for types of pasta - and that's just the ones beginning with C.
For all of these reasons, anyone setting out to write an encyclopedic guide to the thousand cuisines of Italy needs to be brave, brilliant, learned and almost certainly a little unhinged. To judge by her marvellous Oxford Companion to Italian Food, Gillian Riley is all of these things. "
