Naples, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, is a vibrant, passionate city with food to match. "Cucina Napoletana" includes an extensive selection of the best of the region's classic and innovative recipes, with additional features on key ingredients, the part they play in Naples cuisine, and how they are produced.

Naples, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, is a vibrant, passionate city with food to match. It is famed as the birthplace of the original wood-fired pizza. Its food traditions also embrace a wealth of seafood recipes, countless vegetable and pasta dishes, as well as sinful desserts. The Napoletana cuisine makes maximum use of fruit and vegetables grown on the rich volcanic soil, mono-cultivar olive oils, and creamy buffalo mozzarella. Cucina Napoletana includes an extensive selection of the best of the region’s classic and innovative recipes, with additional features on key ingredients, the part they play in Naples cuisine, and how they are produced. Local chef Arturo Iengo presents the best of Campanian cuisine: uncomplicated recipes that are as perfect for everyday meals as they are for entertaining. And with its stunning photographs taken in and around the city, Cucina Napoletana is as visually appetizing as the cuisine of this captivating city.

Precious Cargo tells the fascinating story of how western hemisphere foods conquered the globe and saved it from not only mass starvation, but culinary as well. Focusing heavily American foods—specifically the lowly crops that became commodities, plus one gobbling protein source, the turkey—Dewitt describes how these foreign and often suspect temptations were transported around the world, transforming cuisines and the very fabric of life on the planet. Organized thematically by foodstuff, Precious Cargo delves into the botany, zoology and anthropology connected to new world foods, often uncovering those surprising individuals who were responsible for their spread and influence, including same traders, brutish conquerors, a Scottish millionaire obsessed with a single fruit and a British lord and colonial governor with a passion for peppers, to name a few. Precious Cargo is a must read for foodies and historians alike.

Ranging from the imperial palaces of ancient China and the bakeries of fourteenth-century Genoa and Naples all the way to the restaurant kitchens of today, Pasta tells a story that will forever change the way you look at your next plate of vermicelli. Pasta has become a ubiquitous food, present in regional diets around the world and available in a host of shapes, sizes, textures, and tastes. Yet, although it has become a mass-produced commodity, it remains uniquely adaptable to innumerable recipes and individual creativity. Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food shows that this enormously popular food has resulted from of a lengthy process of cultural construction and widely diverse knowledge, skills, and techniques. Many myths are intertwined with the history of pasta, particularly the idea that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China and introduced it to Europe. That story, concocted in the early twentieth century by the trade magazine Macaroni Journal, is just one of many fictions umasked here. The true homelands of pasta have been China and Italy. Each gave rise to different but complementary culinary traditions that have spread throughout the world. From China has come pasta made with soft wheat flour, often served in broth with fresh vegetables, finely sliced meat, or chunks of fish or shellfish. Pastasciutta, the Italian style of pasta, is generally made with durum wheat semolina and presented in thick, tomato-based sauces. The history of these traditions, told here in fascinating detail, is interwoven with the legacies of expanding and contracting empires, the growth of mercantilist guilds and mass industrialization, and the rise of food as an art form. Whether you are interested in the origins of lasagna, the strange genesis of the Chinese pasta bing or the mystique of the most magnificent pasta of all, the timballo, this is the book for you. So dig in!