Wild Sweets or We Called It Macaroni

Wild Sweets: Exotic Dessert and Wine Pairings

Author: Dominique Duby

New dessert delicacies, from wild and exotic ingredients.

Wild Sweets introduces a new way of thinking about desserts. The recipes in this book elevate sweets from the ordinary to the extraordinary and the sublime, and appeal to the senses in their taste, texture and shape.

No longer is dessert just one course. Like a complete fine meal, it begins with canapes and cocktails, and builds with sweet dishes made from fruit and berries, grains and seeds, or even sweet vegetables that may be augmented with chocolate or ice wine. Then it finishes with decadent cookies and chocolates. To accompany each dessert course, Dominique and Cindy Duby pair sweet wines and ice wines that draw out the flavors of the dishes and heighten the dining experience.

Wild Sweets will enchant the home cook with the newest and most exciting development in the world of desserts. There are over 250 recipes in all.

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Charlie Trotter

Introduction

The Art of Presentation: The Dessert

Cocktails and Canapés: The Prelude

Fruit and Berries: The Woods and the Orchard

Sweet and Icewines: The Dessert Matrimony

Sweet Vegetables: The Garden

Chocolate: The Leading Ingredient

Grains and Seeds: The Fields

Cookies and Chocolates: The Grand Finale

The Basics

Resource List

About DC DUBY Wild Sweets

Index

Look this: Living in the Raw Desserts or The Action Hero Body

We Called It Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking

Author: Nancy Verde Barr

These 250 superb Southern Italian recipes, some old, some rediscovered, are all liberally spiced with reflections on the author's own Italian background and with wonderful food memories of immigrants from Naples to Sicily who settled in the Northeast. Photographs.

Publishers Weekly

Newcomer Barr's contribution to the Knopf Cooks American series dishes up 250 bravura recipes but oversauces them in nostalgia. Refreshingly nondoctrinaire, Barr argues for the ``American'' identity of the cuisine developed by waves of immigrants from Southern Italy, whose novel relative prosperity allowed them to refurbish traditional recipes with previously luxurious ingredients (``Poor families in Sicily might see the butcher only twice a year,'' she reminds us). Her recipes, all standouts, all lucidly explained, include a Calabrian eggplant salad seasoned with fresh mint; a parsley pizza; ``eggs in purgatory'' (``not so bad, that is, so hot, as being `allastet diavolo' ''); and a paprika sauce for pasta that demonstrates the synthesis of New World flavors. There are also obligatory ragus, meat rolls, lasagnas. Her frequent and repetitious interpolations of ``food memories'' from a cast of Italo-Americans distract, nonetheless, from the excellence of Barr's work; they skirt history and settle, mostly, for sentiment. Illustrations not seen by PW. BOMC/HomeStyle alternate. (Nov.)

Library Journal

The fourth title in this series is from a food writer/teacher who grew up in Providence's Little Italy. Barr is eager to preserve the authentic recipes the Italian immigrants brought with them, as well as the variations they adopted in this country: Linguine with Onions, Chicken with Green Olives. Her recipe headnotes are informative, and there are sidebars on ingredients, cultural history, and techniques. Nostalgic ``memories'' from other Italian-Americans are interspersed throughout. For most collections. HomeStyle Books alternate.