Just got my pre-order copy of Friuli: Food & Wine by BobbyStuckey/Lachlan Mackinnon-Petterson/MeredithErickson
"Frasca Cooking from Northern Italy's Mountains/Vineyards/Seaside"
Friuli: Food & Wine
I don't buy much in the way of new cookbooks anymore. Mostly, I like cookbooks that are not a collection of recipes, but have a lot of story to tell.
Bobby & Lachlan are the owners of Frasca Restaurant in Boulder, a restaurant that focuses on the cusine of Friuli. I have, of course, followed it from the very start. It is, certifiably (by me), one of the great Italian restaurants in the USofA, and would be right up there w/ LaSubida in Friuli.
Being it's BobbyStuckey's restaurant, its wine list is extraordinary, focused on Friuli, but plenty from other wine areas as well.
I've just completed Bobby's "Wine" section of the book. It describes the various Friuli growing regions, the various grapes used, and highlights some of the great producers. Although not encyclopaedic in character, it's one of the best Friuli wine writeups I can recall. He's been going there for almost 20 yrs w/ his staff and knows the wines & area very well. One of the things I like about the wine section is that he does not lump all skin-contact whites together as a "orange" wines, but refers to them as "Vini Macerati", a distinction I've long pushed for but never had the right term. All skin-contact whites are not "orange" wines, even if they have that color. "Vini Macerati" is the exact term to use for them.
One of the things I particularly like is that he sprinkles throughout the names of various wineries, ristorantes, osterias, trattorias, even dairies and Proscuitto producers that he likes. The only thing I would fault of the Wine section is that it stops at the Friuli/Slovene border. There are a lot of people/wineries just across the border of Slovenia that are worth including.
I also spent over an hour browsing thru the recipe sections, broken down into "Land/Sea/Mountain" sections. I kept stopping at certain recipes that caught my attention and would think "I want to try this recipe". The recipes, like Friulian food, are fairly simple and not really fussy or require exitic ingredients.
Meredith's photography is also first rate.
Anyway, if you buy only one cookbook thise year, this is the one you want.
Tom