Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking: A James Beard Award Winner: 30th Anniversary Edition: A Cookbook

Why it's worth it

If Italian food is what you actually cook, buy this one. Marcella Hazan's recipes are short, her ingredient lists are shorter, and method matters more than shopping — a tomato sauce with three ingredients that beats sauces with twelve. It's the Italian reference other cookbooks quietly lean on.

Hazan's rule is restraint. A ragù gets milk and a couple of hours, not fourteen ingredients. A tomato sauce gets butter, onion and canned tomatoes and somehow tastes like more than that. If you've been cooking Italian food from internet recipes that pile on garlic and dried herbs, the first few dishes here will feel almost too plain on paper. Then you taste them and recalibrate.

The teaching hides in the instructions rather than in essays. Hazan tells you how to tell when the onions are ready, why pasta water needs that much salt, and what a finished sauce looks like when it clings to the noodle instead of pooling under it. It's dense, text-forward writing with little photography, so you read it properly rather than skim for the numbers.

From our review of 5 cookbooks for home chefs, by Genevieve Dubois, Home & Living Expert

What we like

• +Hazan's rule is restraint
• +The teaching hides in the instructions rather than in essays
• +This is the 30th Anniversary Edition, and the edition is worth caring about
• +It's also the best gift here for someone who already cooks

What to know

• –There's not much to look at
• –Ingredients are the other catch