Review of English cookbooks on Apulian cuisine

For my Wikipedia article on Apulian cuisine I consulted quite a few English cookbooks about this cuisine. I will review them briefly so that other who are interested in Apulian cuisine can benefit from my experience. The books I read are:

  • Arno, Anna Maria Chirone (2011). Salento Flavors: The Taste of Tradition.
  • Lorusso, Luca; Polak, Vivienne (2015). Sharing Puglia.
  • Russo, William dello (2016). Puglia in Cucina: The Flavours of Apulia.
  • Sbisà, Nicola (2009). Savour Apulia: Traditional Recipes.
  • Todorovska, Viktorija (2011) The Puglian Cookbook.

“Salento Flavors: The Taste of Tradition” turned out to be the most disappointing cookbook. It’s a very thin and flimsy paperback with a small number of recipes and unappealing food photography. The layout is strange, with all its solid color rectangles. It’s mostly a collection of recipes and doesn’t give much context to understand the history of the cuisine and its dishes. While this one is supposed to focus on the Salento, the ‘heel’ of Apulia, I haven’t encountered much or any recipes which aren’t covered in the other books. Don’t buy this one.

“Sharing Puglia” is a sturdy hardcover with a lot of recipes and good food photography. The authors of this book understood that if you use photos, you have to do it well or not do it at all. Photos have to seduce you to prepare the dishes, if they look bad they will turn you off instead. This book gives the most detailed explanation of making fresh pasta compared to the other cookbooks reviewed here, even though it could have been more elaborate. It also gives us plenty of context to understand the cuisine and its dishes, instead of it being just a collection of recipes. I highly recommend this one.

“Puglia in Cucina: The Flavours of Apulia” is also a hardcover and shares the amount of recipes and good photo quality with the previous book. It’s written both in English and Italian and is part of a series about all the regional cuisines of Italy. It falls short on providing context though and it doesn’t explain how to make fresh pasta at all. Still, I could still give this a reasonable recommendation.

“Savour Apulia: Traditional Recipes” was most useful as a source of the Wikipedia article, together with “Sharing Puglia”. It’s a cheap and thin paperback, but still contains a lot of recipes and quite some history on the cuisine and its dishes. Despite the length, it still manages to briefly explain how to make fresh pasta. It doesn’t have photos at all, but I don’t mind as long as the rest is good. Highly recommended.

“The Puglian Cookbook” suffers from some bad food photography, think badly lit and blurred close-ups of food. Definitely very unattractive. This book is also short on context. It gives a recipe for making fresh cavatelli, but advises using equal amounts of semolina and all-purpose flour. It’s frustrating that it doesn’t explain why, because it’s suspicious. “Savour Apulia” gives a recipe which uses only semolina and “Sharing Puglia” advises a large amount of semolina with a small amount 00 flour. But the most grave sin is that it only mentions English names for the dishes. How are you supposed to identify the dishes you ate in Apulia then? If a cookbook on French cuisine with a recipe for coq au vin would only describe it as “rooster with wine” it would probably be considered unacceptable; this case is no different. I can’t recommend this one.

There also is “Puglia” by the Silver Spoon from 2015, but I haven’t read it because it’s expensive.

It’s a pity that only “Salento Flavors” briefly mentions the puccia and that “Puglia in Cucina” is the only one which describes savoury taralli in a few sentences. Both are common dishes in Apulia, so I had expected recipes for these in my two highly recommended cookbooks. Unfortunately, those two cookbooks still don’t explain sufficiently how fresh pasta is made either. I would have expected an elaborate instruction with a lot of photos so that novice cooks can learn it with confidence. None of the cookbooks have a recipe for the traditional sourdough durum wheat breads. Even though “Sharing Puglia” mentions that cauliflower and broccoli are also eaten, I haven’t seen any recipes with those vegetables. While black chickpeas and grass peas are much rarer, it would have been nice if they had been mentioned too, even if they are hard to get outside Apulia. I look forward to someone writing a huge cookbook which covers the complete Apulian cuisine.

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