Italian recipes
Italian home cooking is regional before it is national: a Roman pasta and a Tuscan bread soup answer different questions with different pantries. The recipes here are the everyday end of that — dishes built on a few cheap ingredients and one technique that has to be right.
Six Italian recipes, written for a home kitchen, with a note on how to cook each one cheaply.
The recipes
Cacio e Pepe
Three ingredients, one pan of starchy water, and the most argued-about sauce in Rome.
Panzanella
Summer tomato and bread salad — no cooking, no waste.
Pasta alla Norma
Sicilian aubergine and tomato pasta finished with salty ricotta salata.
Pasta e Ceci
The Roman chickpea-and-pasta pot that costs about a euro a head.
Ribollita
Tuscan bread and bean soup built to be reheated — it improves overnight.
Tiramisu
The Veneto original: eggs, mascarpone, coffee, cocoa. No cream, no gelatine.
The Trattoria Trail
The free recipes teach you six dishes. The guide teaches you the menu, the labels and the vocabulary around them, so you can read an Italian table and an Italian shelf without guessing.
How Italian menus, labels and everyday eating actually work — with six recipes to cook at home.
- Six Italian recipes with metric and US measures
- How a trattoria menu is structured, course by course
- What DOP, IGP and STG labels actually guarantee
- Market and supermarket label intelligence
Travelling more widely? The Complete European Table holds all seven expanded guides — 495 pages across 7 guides, one-time purchase.
Get all 7 guides — $45