Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy's Greatest Food

Food trends come and go, but pasta holds strong year after year. Despite its humble ingredients—made of merely flour and water or flour and eggs—the magic, rituals, and art of pasta making span over five centuries. Two ingredients are turned into hundreds of stuffed, rolled, extruded, dried, stamped, and hand-cut shapes, each with its own unique provenance and enrobed in a favored sauce.

New York City chef Missy Robbins fell in love with Italian food and pasta twenty-five years ago. She has been cooking, researching, and studying her way across Italy ever since, which led her to open two of America’s most renowned pasta restaurants, Lilia and Misi. With illustrated step-by-step recipes for handmaking forty of the most versatile pasta shapes and one hundred recipes for Italian American, regional Italian, and Robbins’s own best pasta dishes, plus two dozen vegetable sides, this is the hard-working manual for home cooks who aspire to master the art of pasta cooking.

Whether making pasta sheets for lasagna or stamping out pasta “coins” for Corzetti with Goat Cheese and Asparagus—or even buying handmade pasta to make Tagliatelle with Porcini, Rosemary, and Garlic—Robbins provides all the inspiration, instruction, and encouragement required to make pasta exceptionally well. Evocatively photographed with nearly 100 full-color mouthwatering photos of pasta dishes and twenty images from Italy, this is a richly illustrated ode to the ingredients, recipes, and craft that have made pasta the most popular fare of a beloved cuisine.