Tomato-Olive Focaccia excerpted from MILK STREET BACKROADS ITALY by Christopher Kimball and J.M. Hirsch. Copyright © 2025 by CPK Media, LLC. Photograph by Connie Miller.
Discover the real techniques, ingredients, and stories behind the Italian dishes you know and love—and the ones you’ve yet to try—with more than 145 delicious recipes that bring simplicity back to Italian cooking, from the James Beard Award-winning team at Milk Street.
Forget everything you thought you knew about Italian food. In Italy, cooks throw away their garlic, they don’t stir their polenta, and they never labour over pans of risotto. But they do make enormous meatballs that are tender and light, and they occasionally break all the rules when making pasta.
The editors at Milk Street have spent years scouring small eateries, local markets, farms and home kitchens from Lombardy to Calabria and from Sardinia to Sicily in search of fresh takes on classic recipes as well as little-known regional favourites that never crossed the Atlantic.
On our travels we found new ways with pasta, from foolproof cacio e pepe in Rome to Puglia’s olive oil—crisped fettuccine with chickpeas and a lemony pesto from Amalfi, where the pasta itself is enriched with citrus. Plus some surprising tomato sauces, including spaghetti all’assassina from Bari—spicy, charred, and made in one skillet. (more…)
