Liguria in Cucina: The Flavours of Liguria

Italian publisher Sime Books has done a wonderful thing with their …in Cucina series, offering regional cookbooks that present traditional and modern recipes unfiltered by considerations of what unadventurous Americans might eat.

Adding to the series’ charm are first-rate photography of both scenery and food, as well as the fact that the text is in both Italian and very well translated English.

Not surprisingly for a book about a region which is best known for its coastline, Liguria in Cucina features a great deal of seafood, from lemon-marinated fresh anchovies to an octopus and potato salad. Fragrant Ligurian olive olive appears in many of the dishes, often the most luxurious ingredient in what are clearly hearty peasant dishes, such as stuffed vegetables and fragrant broths.

Pasta, including a variety of ravioli and other stuffed forms, gets a strong chapter, as do breads.

Recipe headnotes briefly explore origin stories and speculation over name derivations. Mesciua, for instance, a dish of grains and pulses, is said to have been created by the wives of sailors and dock workers who collected what had “escaped” from the seams of sacks being off-loaded from ships in the port of La Spezia.

Charming in a way few US-published books achieve.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.