REVIEW – Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way Cookbook

We'd love it if you shared it!

The product(s) featured in this post was provided free of cost to me. Please note that any personal opinions reflected in this post are my own and have not been influenced by the sponsor in any way.

Some of the posts on this site, such as this one, contain an affiliate link. This means I MAY get paid a VERY SMALL commission if you purchase the product or service.

Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 14, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393082431
• ISBN-13: 978-0393082432
• Cover price $35.00

Pasta is so universally popular in the United States that it can justifiably be called an American food. SAUCES AND SHAPES: PASTA THE ITALIAN WAY by 2014 IACP award-winning authors Maureen B. Fant and Oretta Zanini De Vita (Norton, Pub Date, $35, illustrated hardcover) make the case for keeping it Italian with mouthwatering recipes for sauces and soups as cooked in Italian homes today. Anyone who cooks or eats pasta needs this book.

There are authentic versions of Italian timeless culinary classics such as pasta carbonara, Bolognese, marinara, and Alfredo. Better yet, there are plenty of unusual but no less traditional sauces based on roasts, ribs, rabbit, clams, shrimp, eggplant, arugula, and mushrooms, to name but a few.

The straightforward recipes are easy enough for the novice cook yet even professional chefs will grasp the elegance of their simplicity.

SAUCES & SHAPES: PASTA THE ITALIAN WAY offers advice on cooking, serving and eating pasta; how to stock a panty and choose ingredients; recipes for traditional soups; how to make pasta from scratch and generally approaching pasta as much like an Italian as anyone outside Italy can. The authors have includes a bibliography, a glossary of pasta shapes and advice for online shopping for ingredients.

As Amanda Hesser, cofounder off Food52 and author of The Essential New York Times Cookbook succinctly puts it, “Sauces & Shapes is the perfect, curated Italian cookbook. Oretta Zanini De Vita and Maureen B. Fant do the hardest thing of all: they take a seemingly small world—pasta and sauce—and show off its many wonders and surprises…If you like Italian cooking, Sauces & Shapes will become a timeless, cherished companion.”

Buon appetito!

About the Authors

Oretta Zanini De Vita was born in Bologna, where she learned the art of pasta -making as a child in a local convent school. A respected Italian culinary historian, she has written more than forty books on Italian food and its traditions, including the James Beard Award–winning Encyclopedia of Pasta (2010) and Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio (2013), both translated by Maureen Fant. She lives in Rome.

Maureen B. Fant, a native of New York, is a writer and translator who came to live in Rome in 1979 believing that her future lay in classical archaeology. She now writes mostly about Italian food. She is coauthor of Women’s Life in Greece and Rome and Dictionary of Italian Cuisine, among others. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet, and other periodicals, and she lectures on the food of Rome and ancient Rome.

The chapters included are:

• Welcome to the world of Italian Pasta
• Sauces
• Soups
• Pasta

This cookbook is chock full of information. The opening chapter contains lots of history about pasta, as well as information on ingredients, equipment and cooking methods. Then come the recipes.

Each chapter has an index of the recipes it contains. The recipes are in pieces, sort of. For example, you’ll read a recipe for sauce and the notes there will give suggestions on which pastas (and the pages they’re located on) will work well with that sauce. The reverse is true as well. Read a recipe for pasta and sauce recipes will be suggested. The recipes are easy to understand. While color photos in this cookbook are extremely limited in number, there are many drawings and sketches of pasta shapes, also tutorials on how to make certain things. The recipes also contain wine suggestions and notes for making the dish ahead of time.

Something missing that I’d love to see in a future publishing is prep and cooking time. They are so helpful for me to have when I’m deciding what recipe I’m going to try making at that time. Because you have to look in two places (one for the sauce and one for the pasta) you have to read through two recipes just to figure out how long they’ll take to make, which is a bit of a chore.

There are lots of recipes in here that I’d like to try including (I’m providing their common name and not the Italian one) Ricotta sauce, Alfredo sauce, Neopolitan sauce, Pasta and Potatoes soup and Meat-filled ravioli. There’s tons of pastas as well, but since they pair with the sauce I’ll be starting with sauces and then taking things from there.

This cookbook would be great for anyone that enjoys pasta, wants to learn more about it, or wants to add to their recipe repertoire.

What’s your favorite pasta dish to eat? Please leave a comment, I’d really like to know!