What In Bocca to Buy? Here's all the recipes for each book.
I received an email from a fan named Ashley that was wondering if there was any list of all the recipes in each Italy In Bocca cookbook. As far as I could tell they had never been scanned (we’re working on that;) so, I took the morning to scan the Index of each book and transcribe it.
If you would like to download a PDF of the listing then here is the link.
If you would like to see the pages, then they are in this Flickr album.
The reason she wanted to see which recipes were in each book was to help her decide which might be a good one to buy. In recent years they have become collector items, with some books selling for nearly 1,000.00 USD … that is IF you can find them.
Lots of people write in asking which is the “best” or our favorite. Well, I have a few thoughts on that if you are looking to buy one of these amazing books for yourself or a loved one.
Usually people will want the book of the region of Italy they are from, which is a no brainer. What makes this series so very special is that these are truly regional and local recipes from each of the 20 regions of Italy. They are hand written, and most have never been recorded and unfortunately lost to time as Italy has homogenized over the years. For most these recipes are what your grand, or great grandmother would have prepared; the authentic regional taste that is impossible to get anywhere else. So choosing one that is personal to you is a great start for sure.
If you are just a fan of Italian cooking then the big three are usually the most popular: Tuscany, Rome, and Naples in that order. In my opinion Naples is lovely, but the recipes are relatively simple, reflecting the campagna culinary style of that region. Tuscany is a great addition with many classics that make up the backbone of Italian cooking today. Rome however is my favorite, as it has familiar and very obscure recipes that date back millennia. It is truly a cuisine all to itself.
Now there are some sleepers if you can find them. Bolzano is a wild one, bordering on hearty German food. Romagna is another one that gets overlooked, with some truly spectacular meat dishes that I’ve never even seen before in Italy. Perhaps most interesting is Abruzzo, a culinary cuisine that is all onto itself, and perhaps, doesn’t even exist in reality. There is a long standing joke with Italians that Molise isn’t a real place as no one has ever met anyone from there. Their regional cooking seems to be just as mysterious.
The bottom line really is that while each of these books may speak to you in a personal way, they are all one better then the next. No two are remotely the same, and you could really spend a lifetime going through them reading the poetry, gawking at the illustrations and of course drooling over the recipes.