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Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa
RRP: £8.99
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Easily the best of its kindReview date: 2010-01-03 Rating: 10 out of 10Matthew Fort has assembled a kind of culinary Ark of Italian country cuisine in this book; it is an important book because, like Elizabeth David, he detects the tendrils of homogenisation creeping into Italin food and society, and that they will, leach away these simple guiding principles of Italian cookery.
Thios is definitely not a book of recipes - there are plenty of recipes but it is a book about the philosophy of Italian peasant cooking. It is utterly delightful but, for you to make his efforts wothwhile, make a few of the recipes and reaffirm his words
ReviewsFoodie and travel fiends read this book!Review date: 2009-09-03 Rating: 10 out of 10This is a delight - incredibly erudite, funny and informative and a complete sense of place. I lived in Italy for a number of years and this is one of those rare books that tells it like it is. Everyone who owns an Italian cookbook should own this - and everyone who loves Italy should too!Food for FortReview date: 2009-05-16 Rating: 10 out of 10I'm not in the least a 'foodie' and, much as I appreciate Matthew Fort et al.'s Guardian newspaper, its food & drink pages usually go unread. In fact, had a friend not been presented with the hardback, I would never have read Eating Up Italy. It was so good though, I had to buy my own copy.
What makes this book so appealing is that it is about so much more than food. Part social history, part travelogue, part meditation, and with vivid prose and insights aplenty, it succeeds in its aim: to understand the country through the medium of food. Although self-indulgent and self-confessedly sybaritic, Fort writes about his subject with lucid understanding, wit and enthusiasm. He is quite right, I think, to talk of 'the essential plainness, and grace, of Italian food', with high-quality, primal flavours characterising the nation's cuisine.
Another triumph is that as Fort travels through the regions on his Vespa (again, nothing flashy, and slow enough to allow for an unhurried digestion of food and ideas) the individuality and culinary variety of the country is sharply and entertainingly observed. Fort has the gift of meeting the right people and quoting the right words. About to fly home at the end of his gastonomic odyssey, his taxi driver explains that Italians 'speak in dialect and they eat in dialect.' By this time, though, Fort has given us an ample taste of such dialects.
My only reservation concerns the production standards of the paperback which, with unusual hyphenations (ubi-quitous, gastro-nomic) omissions and wordsruntogether, suggest poor proof-reading and undue haste.
As well as being sensuous and gourmandising, Fort is also level-headed. Early on, for instance, he questions his infatuation with Italy, and wonders if his own love-affair, like that of so many other Englishmen, isn't based on 'the distorting glass of sentimentality and self-delusion.' But there is a healthy scepticism and objectivity mingling with the purple prose. A hugely enjoyable, if not vital, read for anyone interested in Italian cuisine or culture.
Delightful and DeliciousReview date: 2004-10-15 Rating: 10 out of 10Matthew Fort's epic scooter ride up the thigh-boot of Italy is a truly delicious read. Every aspect of the fascinating and varied Italian life he encountered is amusingly reflected upon in his lightly erudite prose. I thought his acknowledgement of feeling homesick (unlike Thesiger et al) was particularly endearing and the description of his amateurish Vespa riding in Naples most entertaining.Mr Fort was the restaurant critic for The Guardian, a foodie professional, but the gusto with which he describes the various meals he was presented with en route shows a boyish enthusiast peeping through the culinary afficionado. The recipes, which are added to each chapter-ending, are splendidly simple but totally mouthwatering.What Mr Fort has managed to do is deftly mix an amusing travel diary, rich with incident & character, with a gourmet's guide to the regional idiosyncrasies of Italian cooking. YUMMY!food from fortReview date: 2004-08-10 Rating: 8 out of 10Are you, like me, tired of all these remorselessly microscopic, one-theme books? You know, three times as much as you ever wanted to know about socks, and their previously unregarded, unrevealed and crucial impact on world civilisation and culture, that sort of thing? Do you ever pine for a bit of grand discursion, an anecdote here, a fascinating fact there; for an amiable companion rather than some zealot of minutiae or lazy hack padding out the best they came up with at lunch with their publisher? I must say I didn't hold out much hope about Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Another foodie boring on about fancy sausages, I thought. And on a Vespa: a miserly, fit sort of foodie to boot, I thought. And he writes for The Guardian. What a splendid surprise, then, to come across Matthew Fort, fat and flabby and over-50 by his own account, and a mesmerisingly entertaining man to travel with the length of Italy. A man, true, obsessed by food far too much than is good for him or his poor Vespa; but a man, too, who can convey that passion, make the sex life of the snail a thing of fascination, and, yes, even make fancy sausages interesting: read his encounter with the five sausage butchers of Salmona if you don't believe me. Add to this some memorable facts - did you know that Goethe was a foodie, or what excess carried off Cavour? - and accounts, particularly of scootering in Naples, accomplished with wit and not a little confided wisdom. Fort even tells us why the Italians talk so much, a condition he clearly shares and relishes. There are well laid-out recipes for the stuff he so lovingly describes, although I felt "sauce of castrated lamb" also lost something in the translation. Va voom bene!
Product Details/SpecificationsAuthors:
Matthew Fort
Recording label: Harper Perennial Manufacturer: Harper PerennialEAN: 9780007214815Binding: PaperbackDewey decimal number: 641.300945ISBN: 0007214812Number of pages: 304Publication date: 2005-06-20Language: English (Unknown)
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: English (Published)
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