Eating Italy

Starred review from September 30, 2013
Philadelphia restaurateur Michaud here showcases the intense flavors of Northern Italian cuisine, enhanced through an autobiographical narrative. His path to a happy marriage spills out cinematically: Boy meets girl in Italy. Boy eats roasted rabbit with polenta and truffles with girl. Boy brings girl to Philly and opens three successful eateries. While their romance is all sweetness and light, the foodstuffs are mostly dark meat and cornmeal. Over the course of three years, his life-changing travels abroad take him through 12 towns, including Paladina, Venice, and Florence, where he encounters numerous entrees of desire. From Leffe, there is pheasant lasagna with a béchamel sauce. In Bergamo, beer-braised wild boar is served over polenta. and in Alba it's roasted rabbit porchetta with peperonata wherein a whole rabbit is deboned, rolled, and fit to be tied. The fine food photographer Kelly Campbell is responsible for the luscious images, notably a stunning two-page spread of a roasted pig's head dressed in a beer and orange juice glaze.

October 15, 2013
From his first job in a New Hampshire pizzeria at age 13, Michaud became infatuated with Italian food. After culinary school and a Philadelphia apprenticeship, he realized that if he wanted to transcend the commonplace, he would have to spend time in the cuisine's native land. So he went off to Italy for a few years and worked in all sorts of venues, beginning with a little butcher shop near Lake Como. Traversing the country, he not only learned the cuisine but also met the young woman he was to marry. Recipes from each locale vary little from their origins and may call for anything from pig's head to veal tongue, items rarely encountered in American supermarkets. A simpler rabbit and porcini pasta sauce offers fewer barriers. Nevertheless, adept cooks with a commitment to genuine regional Italian cooking may find themselves charmed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)