Sicily on a plate - History, Curiosities, and Recipes from the Island of the Sun #1003320

The Bel Paese collection was conceived by La Nuova Luce Edizioni as a series of regional portraits, each combining cultural history, practical cookery, and the small, telling details that guidebooks and standard cookbooks tend to leave out. Every volume in the series follows the same principle: a region's food cannot be separated from its history, its geography, or the rituals that structure its calendar, and a cookbook that ignores those things offers only half a picture.
Earlier volumes in the collection have explored Tuscany, Piedmont, and the cuisines of the Adriatic coast; this fourth volume turns to Sicily, an island whose food culture is, by the admission of nearly every food historian who has studied it, one of the most layered and historically complex in the entire Mediterranean.
Each Bel Paese volume is edited to be read in two ways at once: as a continuous cultural narrative, chapter by chapter, or as a practical reference to be opened at random whenever a specific dish, ingredient, or occasion calls for it. Recipes throughout have been tested and adapted for home kitchens outside the region itself, while preserving, wherever possible, the techniques and proportions that give each dish its authentic character.