The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well

Based on a few precepts accessible to most people, Pellegrino Artusi, with Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, revolutionized the idea of "gastronomy" in his time.

First self-published in 1891, the book went through fifteen editions during Artusi's lifetime, the last of which, posthumous, compiled 790 recipes.

For what is arguably the first "interactive" cookbook was progressively enriched with recipes suggested to the author by correspondents – especially female correspondents – from all over Italy, even if Artusi's preferred regions, linked to his biography, remained Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany. Recipes that he would then systematically test at home before adopting them and integrating them into his book.

Accompanied by hygienist reflections, interspersed with savory anecdotes, allusions to current events of the time, and sometimes mischievous literary references ranging from quotation to pastiche, his work is also characterized by its desire for linguistic unification in a country whose political unity was very recent.

It thus constitutes not only a canonical text, which established the codes of Italian bourgeois cuisine (to the point that it was often given, until recently, to young brides), but also a work that allows for multiple interpretations.

Constantly revisited, imitated, commented on, and even pirated, it remains a model in this field: that of market-based cooking, achievable and full of common sense, demanding on the quality of ingredients but adaptable to individual tastes and possibilities, open to novelty but rejecting snobbery.

This translation, the first in France, prefaced and supervised by Alberto Capatti, a renowned Artusi specialist, is rigorously faithful to the historical 1911 edition.