An A-Z of Pasta: Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes

(Hardback)

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Description

A wide-ranging, inspiring and generous guide to pasta, by the award-winning food writer and Guardian columnist Rachel Roddy This is a story of pasta. In it, Guardian columnist and award-winning food writer Rachel Roddy condenses everything she has learned about Italy's favourite food in a practical, easy-to-use and mouth-watering collection of over 120 essential pasta and sauce recipes. Short essays weave together the history, culture and the everyday life of pasta shapes from the tip to the toe of Italy. There is pasta made with water, and pasta with egg; shapes made by hand and those rolled by machine; the long and the short; the rolled and the stretched; the twisted and the stuffed; the fresh and the dried. An A-Z of Pasta suggests how to match pasta shapes with sauces, and how to serve them. The recipes range from the familiar - pesto, rag and carbonara - to the unfamiliar (but thrilling)- ziti with onion and beef, scialatielli with sea bass and lemon; capelli d'angelo with leeks and saffron. This is a mouthwatering guide to pasta from one of the best food writers of our time.

Reviews

Pleasure provoking ... [Rachel's] recipes seem to beam her readers into the kitchen with her as she cooks, helping us to absorb the tastes, textures, sounds and smells of everything along the way. * Nigella Lawson *
I love this book. Every story is a little gem - a beautiful hymn to each curl, twist and ribbon of pasta. * Nigel Slater *
Rachel Roddy describing how to boil potatoes would inspire me. I want to live under her kitchen table. There are very, very few who possess such a supremely uncluttered culinary voice as hers, just now * Simon Hopkinson *
When I describe this, [Rachel's] third book, as a journey into the world of pasta, I am short-selling what a soaring and glorious read it is...The intensely curious Roddy is an earthily sensual writer unencumbered by an excess of ego * Nicola Miller *
Rachel Roddy's writing is as absorbing as any novel * Russell Norman *
Oh I wish I could write like Rachel. She is a natural: recipes that instantly make you want to cook and then eat. I love this book. * Angela Hartnett *
Roddy is a gifted storyteller, and a masterful hand with simple ingredients * Guardian Cook *
Unpretentious, unusual and delicious * Country Life on Five Quarters *
An A-Z of Pasta is not only immensely user-friendly and practical, it is also a labour of love...Open the book on any page, get into the kitchen, and you are guaranteed a delicious meal * Madeleine Morrow for London Unattached *

Author Bio

Rachel Roddy moved to Rome in 2005 where she began writing, mostly about food, on her blog Racheleats. Her first book, Five Quarters, was published in 2015 and won both the Andre Simon Food Book Award and the Guild of Food Writers First Book Award. Her second book, Two Kitchens, was published in 2017. She has written for the Financial Times, the Telegraph, Conde Nast Travel, Vanity Fair, Delicious Magazine and has an award-winning weekly column in the Guardian called A Kitchen in Rome. She lives in Rome with her Sicilian partner and son Luca.