The 10 Best Italian Cookbooks

If you own one Italian cookbook, make it Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Marcella Hazan explains why each step matters, from browning onions slowly to salting pasta water, so you learn a way of cooking rather than a pile of recipes. The Guardian's Italian food writer calls it the book everyone names first. This 30th anniversary edition merges her first two books into one. It teaches with words and simple drawings, so cooks who want glossy photos may miss them.

Italian families have cooked from The Silver Spoon since it first appeared in Milan in 1950, and this English translation keeps its huge sweep of more than 2,000 recipes. It runs from antipasti and soups through pasta, fish, meat and desserts, with color photos scattered through. Recipes are short and assume you already know the basics. It is also a heavy brick of a book that lives on a shelf or counter, not in your lap.

To cook a dish the way one town makes it, reach for La Cucina. Members of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina, a society founded to protect Italy's food traditions, gathered home recipes across every region, and each one notes where it comes from. You can compare how neighboring provinces handle the same soup or sauce. There are no photos at all, and the brief steps suit cooks who can fill gaps themselves.

Home pasta the way Italian grandmothers make it fills Pasta Grannies, a book Vicky Bennison built from her video series of grandmothers rolling dough in village kitchens. Chapters move from herbs and vegetables to beans, gnocchi, fish, meat and stuffed shapes. Portraits and short stories of each cook make it a pleasant read too. It gives less step-by-step teaching than a technique manual, so some shapes take practice.

Philadelphia chef Marc Vetri wrote Mastering Pasta for cooks who want to know how flour and water turn into great noodles. He covers which flours to use, egg and eggless doughs, rolled and pressed-through shapes, and matching each shape to a sauce. Chapters on gnocchi and risotto round it out. Some recipes call for restaurant tools, such as a pasta extruder, and specialty flours that take some hunting down.

Brooklyn chef Missy Robbins, of the restaurants Lilia and Misi, wrote Pasta with Talia Baiocchi to share how she builds a plate of noodles. It splits its pages between fresh pasta made by hand and good dried pasta from the store, so weeknight cooks get plenty to use. The sauces are bright and modern. Many dishes are weekend projects, and a few ask for ingredients most grocery stores won't stock.

Rome-based food writer Katie Parla traveled the toe and heel of Italy for Food of the Italian South, collecting dishes from Campania, Puglia, Calabria and nearby regions, including some that are fading from home kitchens. Each recipe comes with a short note on where it comes from and why it matters. The cooking itself is mostly simple. It holds fewer recipes than the big references, and a few call for southern cheeses or peppers that can be hard to find.

For dinner on a Tuesday, Lidia's Commonsense Italian Cooking keeps things simple. Lidia Bastianich and her daughter, Tanya, chose about 150 recipes built on ingredients a regular supermarket carries, with salads, soups, pasta, meat and desserts that come together without much fuss. Her friendly voice makes it a gentle first step for nervous cooks. It leans toward Italian-American comfort food, so readers chasing regional depth will outgrow it.

First printed in Italy in 1929, The Talisman of Happiness by Ada Boni became a fixture in Italian homes for generations. This new English edition gathers well over a thousand of her recipes, from humble soups to holiday cakes, and shows how differently each region cooks. Many recipes read like notes from an older kitchen, with loose amounts and few steps, so beginners may want a teaching book alongside it.

Pizza fans should go straight to The Pizza Bible by Tony Gemignani, a champion pizza maker who teaches a long list of styles, from Neapolitan and New York to Chicago deep-dish, Sicilian and Detroit. He explains starters, slow rising and how to get a crisp crust from a home oven. The doughs often need a day or more of planning, and a pizza stone or steel helps a lot.