Missy Robbins Pasta Cookbook Review

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

In this week's cookbook review, we will explore the exciting world of pasta through the pages of Missy Robbins Pasta Cookbook.‍‍

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.

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A Guide to The Art of Fresh Pasta

Part cookbook, part memoir, Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy's Greatest Food, with Recipe, traces star chef Missy Robbins's journey into the heart of the Italian art form. Over the pages of this book, Missy presents a soulful guide to the art and craft of making pasta. “Italy is not one country but twenty,” she writes, “and pasta is best enjoyed as a way... to partake in that complexity.”

Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy's Greatest Food, with Recipe it's not just a regular cookbook about pasta. Throughout its pages, Missy will teach you the art of making great pasta at home. You might think of fresh pasta as a special treat in a top Italian restaurant - and if you ate at Robbins's restaurants, Lilia and Misi, in Brooklyn, you'd be right. But she believes it's so much more.

In her new book, the Connecticut native invites you into her world, where the staple is comforting and familiar, yet also complex. Bringing that sentiment to the page with Talia Baiocchi, editor-in-chief of Punch magazine, Missy explores various types of dough and instructs on creating 45 different shapes, such as Fettuccine, hand-shaped Orecchiette, or Bucatini pulled through a pasta maker.

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Pasta For Everyone

As we mentioned Missy's book is more than a regular cookbook about pasta. Besides the different types of dough and shapes that you'll learn how to make, you'll have plenty more information in this book. You'll learn about different flours, types of equipment, how to perfectly cook pasta and more.

Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy's Greatest Food, with Recipe has plenty of recipes starting with a section of Italian-American recipes featuring good old Spaghetti and Meatballs, as well as a grown-up Penne alla Vodka or Lobster Fra Diavolo with Linguine. Having once driven across all Italy, Missy recalls the diversity of the area’s recipes in a wide-ranging chapter of “regional classics” that includes recipes from north, central, and south of Italy. Pasta with Abruzzese Meatballs and Lamb Ragù, and a Sicilian Pasta with Tomato and Almond Pesto are just some of the recipes you'll find in this chapter. Elsewhere, surprising ingredients and combinations, such as Ricotta and Tuscan Kale–filled Cappelletti with Fennel Pollen turn up in a section of “modern classics” that successfully riff on traditional entrées.

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 - Missy 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.

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Final Thoughts

Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy's Greatest Food, with Recipe is a stylish, transporting pasta master class from New York City’s premier pasta chef, with recipes for handmade pasta shapes and Italian American, regional Italian, and modern dishes. Named one of the ten best cookbooks of the year by San Francisco Chronicle Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy's Greatest Food, with Recipe became our new go-to Italian cookbook.