With comfort food on the mind and practical family recipes in demand, the hunt for vintage Italian cookbooks can be an intriguing way to make cooking more fun. New cookbooks stir our appetites, but older cookbooks on everyday Italian cooking offer a different kind of food for thought.
So, what regional Italian recipes were trendy in the 1990s? What flour was recommended for baking taralli in Boston’s North End? What pantry items did Italian cooks swear by a few generations ago?
There’s no need to go anywhere to find answers to these questions. Thanks to the Internet Archive, a non-profit that started archiving itself after the birth of the World Wide Web, over 10,000 cookbooks from UCLA, the Prelinger Library and UC Berkeley are available for browsing. And the best part of all, they can be viewed for free.
Searching for “Italian” returns 200+ Italian cookbooks, from Renaissance manuscripts resembling royal treatises to sepia-toned covers of America’s first Italian-cooking TV personalities, like the Romagnoli family and Chef Biba Caggiano.
But the 1990’s celebrity chef classics are the most fun. Finally, no more table of contents starting with “soups." Instead, we get catchy sections and cute family recipes, like “30-minute pastas,” with a daring puttanesca recipe from young Rachael Ray’s “30-Minute Meals." Another treasure, Chef Rocco DiSpirito's earliest award-winning cookbook, “Flavor,” and the Italian American cookbook he wrote with his mother Nicolina.
Moving past the memoir by Marcella Hazan, the variety of books on Italian cooking continues to expand. One translated book divulges the secrets of papal cuisine (with Pope John Paul’s favorite wine), while another promotes Gambino leader Joseph Iannuzzi’s “mafia” recipes.
But if this recipe collection doesn’t wet the appetite, there’s always La Cucina Italiana!