Even If You Have Enough Italian Cookbooks, Check Out This One
Backstreets Italy from Milk Street is my favorite cookbook of 2025 thus far
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I’ve traveled to Italy several times and I love learning new things about its traditions and cuisine. This week, I’m chatting with the co-author of my favorite cookbook of 2025 thus far.
Backstreets Italy, From The Mediterranean To The Mountains
I’m a regular reader of Milk Street magazine and frequent listener to the Milk Street Radio show. Over the past few years, the magazine has featured many articules about Italian food, both familiar dishes and some that were completely new to me.
Milk Street founder Christopher Kimball and Editorial Director J.M. Hirsch have turned those stories into a lively new cookbook that goes on sale Tuesday Backroads Italy: Finding Italy’s Forgotten Recipes travels the length of Italy and visits its islands to find dishes that may not be familiar to you.
I talked to J.M. about the philosophy behind the cookbook and what you will learn from it. You may know him from his series of cocktail books and his hilarious cocktail videos which air on Instagram and elsewhere. It was a delight to speak with him.
The inspiration for the book
“The heart of Milk Street is that we go around the world as students, to learn from the experts. Sometimes the experts are professionals, sometimes they are home cooks. Like so many Americans, we are just so drawn to Italy and Italian food. We found ourselves constantly going back. The stories we are telling are so informative but also so moving. There’s obviously such a romance of Italian culture and Italian food. We said to ourselves, there’s a book in this.”
Cooks’ willingness to share recipes
“I say this all the time: everybody was so welcoming and so happy to share their traditions and their families and their food. They were so happy to teach us. That was the heart of the book.”
A unique experience
“I was at a family’s home in Sicily - a tiny cottage on a mountain top. The hosts invited my photographer and me to join for Sunday dinner. They built a fire in the middle of the yard. They were roasting meats, and making pasta on the patio, and all of a sudden a guy comes up with a big jug of fresh milk and an old washing machine tub, dissected from some antique washing machine.
He was going to make ricotta on the spot. It was the best ricotta I’ve ever tasted. No fussing, nothing, well of course we’re going to make fresh ricotta. It’s a Sunday afternoon on the mountain top.”
How the book mirrors Italy’s geography
“It was not intentional (to organize geographically) but it ended up that way because we organized the book from lighter to heavier. You begin at the bottom of Italy, and go north. The further south, the lighter it is, and the further north, more meat, more cheeses, heavier pasta dishes. By design, it couldn’t have been written any other way.”
How they chose the recipes
“Our mission often times is to find the recipes most of us have never heard of. To be introduced to things we didn’t know were amazing. Let’s find something new to us, that’s exciting and different than what we expected. A great example is the pasta from Puglia … half of the pasta is fried in olive oil until crisp, like a fried wonton, so it’s tender.
One of our other missions is to blow up conventional wisdom about a dish. When we travel someplace, look for the dish our audience knows and loves, but when we go to the place of origin for the dish, there might be a completely different way to do that.
Fettuccini Alfredo in the U.S. so often is so bad. If Italians saw us adding heavy cream and chicken and mushrooms to a fettucini alfredo, they would gasp. It is the simplest of pastas. Something they feed a child when they have a bad tummy. It’s their chicken soup, just pasta butter and cheese.”
Here’s J.M. talking about one of my favorite recipes in the book, spaghetti with lemon pesto. (If you aren’t able to see the video, find it here.)
A New Leader In Fast Casual Dining
Illustrating Americans’ love for Italian food, Olive Garden has spent seven years atop the list of favorite fast casual dining chains. Well, it’s now been dethroned.
Texas Roadhouse was the 2024 leader among moderately priced restaurants. Its sales surged 14.7% last year, with revenue of $5.5 billion. Olive Garden managed a O.8% improvement in 2024, with $5.2 billion.
Ann Arbor has branches of both restaurants, but while I have been to Olive Garden, I’ve never been in a Texas Roadhouse. However, I’ll be glad to hear from anyone who is a fan (or not) or their food.
A Hiring Crisis On Cape Cod
Traditionally, the summer season in many resorts starts Memorial Day weekend. But owners often like to have staff on hand ahead of time, for training and to acclimate themselves to the area.
Cape Cod resort and business owners are running into hiring uncertainty. There are two issues involved. One is the perpetual shortage of affordable housing. This year, there are visa worries, according to Axios Boston.
The Cape's $1.2 billion tourism industry depends heavily on J-1 visa workers from Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Central Asia and other regions. Without them, owners may have to reduce hours or even close.
Officials say the Cape has around 2,100 J-1 workers, less than half of the 5,000 foreign students employed in 2018. But the travel restrictions proposed by the White House may affect several of the countries sending J-1 workers to Cape Cod, such as Russia, Belarus, Cape Verde, Haiti and other Caribbean nations.
A New Detroit Business From A Familiar Face
CulinaryWoman readers have met chef Max Sussman and his wife, Ireland tour guide Kate McCabe. He has excelled in restaurants (with his brother Eli) and pop ups for pizza and most recently bagels.
Now, his bagel business is going brick and mortar. Eater Detroit reports that Max plans to open Bev’s Bagels in Detroit, taking over a spot on Grand River Avenue previously occupied by the Detroit Institute of Bagels.
He’ll offer the same bagels that regularly sell out from his home business, along with the bagel sandwiches that regularly sell out when he visits Ann Arbor spots like Argus Farm Stop and Roos Roast coffee.
“Baking bagels at my house is fun, but not really a good long-term goal; you’ve gotta kind of grow from there,” he told Eater Detroit. “It started from a passion for bagels and for trying to make the bagel that I personally really want to eat. From there, I found that that’s what other people want too.”
Max is still planning to open his casual restaurant in Ann Arbor later this year. And I hope I can tap him and Kate for more taste testing duties.
Keeping Up With CulinaryWoman
Last Sunday, I had the unique experience of visiting a cemetery inside the grounds of a General Motors plant. Beth Olem cemetery was founded in Hamtramck, Mich., in the 1860s, before G.M. was founded and long before it built its sprawling Poletown assembly plant.
For security reasons, the cemetery only allows visitors twice a year. Read more in my report for The Autopian. Be sure to read the thoughtful Comments from readers.
The Lions, Towers & Shields classic film podcast reviewed Giant, the 1956 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. It’s a time capsule of Texas as it was taking its place in American popular culture.
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Tomorrow, on Red Beans & Advice for paid subscribers, I will be back with a look at the creativity that is an annual delight: Public Radio Cake Week. You are welcome to join in the fun.
Otherwise, have a good week, and hopefully a sunny one.