Books : River Cafe Cookbook: Bk.2

Rating: - Authenic, regional receipes
To understand why the River Cafe books are as they are, one must first understand Italian cooking. It has more of a regional basis than any other european country, although France comes close. They use the best of the local produce.

What Ruth and Rosie provide are regional receipes that are authentic, although somewhat restaurant-ised. If a dish requires Chianti, then it will be Tuscan in origin, if it require Barolo then it will be Piedmontese. To be critical of this, is to fail to understand Italian cooking.

This is not a book that panders to the "what can I get in the supermarket" crowd. This is not "chicken italiano" with some tomatoes and a few herbs russled up in 5 minutes.

The receipes are superb, this (and the two other River Cafe books) are the first place I turn (and Marcella Hazan) when looking for Italian food.

Not as good as the other two books, so only 4 stars. But still great.

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Rating: - Yuppie snapshots of (Italian) cuisine de bonne femme,
The sort of book that you might find inside a Le Creuset pot you've been given as a wedding present (it's even the same colour), and the sort of book that people over supplied with such pots, along with armouries of Sabatier knives, might reach for if they ever decide to hold a dinner party.

Question is, do I really need a full page recipe to tell me that fresh buttered pasta tastes great when generously scattered with white truffle shavings? (Like most of the recipes here, this comes with a full-page picture, in this case the standard `white truffle being shaved over pasta' pic that gets printed along with every magazine article about truffles). Or six sides of variations on a basic crespu?

Some of the recipes are oddly overspecific (presumably to maintain the ideologically pure `italian' flavour): On grounds of personal taste I disagree with the noodle recipe (which is fine, but, with much work, will produce noodles pretty much indistinguishable from good noodles bought from a shop, in which case why make them yourself?), but nevertheless think it is unnecessary to specify the flour be typo-00 (I think, I forget the technical designation for canonical italian noodle flour) - different flours, different noodles (I usually use ordinary strong plain flour supplemented with a quarter semolina, and eggs and yolks as available), but they all taste good given experience. Similarly, they specify `Chianti' for red wine for cooking: I challenge anyone to be able to distinguish reliably a random 10DM Chianti from any other young tannic red wine, after it's been cooked and reduced. More problematically, they also specify ciabata as source of breadcrumbs, etc., of choice, but ciabata, at least most that I have ever seen, is positively inappropriate for kitchen purposes - the crumb structure is far too soft.

A few recipes look technically questionable. In their recipe for Girolles Provencal (they don't call it that, but that is what it is) with noodles, they don't tell you to disgorge the girolles first, which will result, I suspect, in either very rubbery, or *very* wet girolles.

Also this book is just a collection of disconnected recipes, but this sort of food is specifically not a collection of formal recipes, but an attitude of mind.

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Rating: - Good but not as tempting as this first one
Hmmm, very few recipies leap out of the page of this book for me - unlike the first book which is my favourite cook book. In fact haven't been tempted to cook anything out of it yet and I've had it a couple of months

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Rating: - Simply delicious
The River Cafe is one of the most sensational restaurants in London and this, the second book published on this trendy Italian eaterie, is just as good. There are recipes for everything--from poltenta to shellfish to frittatas--and every one is a winner. You'll never feel bored by this book. In 20 years time we'll look back at this one as a classic.