The food is in essence Italian, but accented with exotic Mediterranean touches: pesto punched up with capers, gelato made with pistachios, pasta laced with saffron, and a penchant for sweet-and-sour preparations like caponata and strong flavors like wild fennel and oregano. Sicily tells the wonderful histories behind the classic dishes but also shows how contemporary chefs and home cooks are reinvigorating recipes in modern ways. The product of years of careful research, Sicily gives a tour of the land’s culinary treasures, from the couscous of Lo Capo and the vines of Mt. Etna to the sea salt of Trapani and the black pigs of Mirto.
The book gives foolproof instructions for all the cardinal dishes such as Arancini, Pasta with Sardines, and Swordfish Involtini, but there are also plenty of delicious contemporary recipes, such as Eggplant Parmigiana in a Glass, Butternut Squash Caponata, and Cannoli Millefoglie. Complete with travel notes and addresses to plan a trip, Sicily is sure to enchant readers everywhere.
“Melissa shares her lifelong passion for Sicilian food, through firsthand narrative loaded with recipes and beautiful photographs, giving us an insider’s view of this magical island.”
—Mike Colameco, host of Mike Colameco’s Real Food
“Melissa’s book is like poetry to me. Her attachment and sense of belonging to her land and its heritage is palpable in every paragraph, captured in each picture, and summed up in a beautiful and delicious story. We share that bittersweet melancholy for our Italian land that is at the origin of our passionate work: being able to tell these stories is a privilege and an honor, and Melissa has done an impeccable job at it.”
—Gabriele Corcos, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Extra Virgin: Recipes and Love from Our Tuscan Kitchen
“Just about everything I’ve come to know and love about Sicilian food, wine, history, and culture is thanks to Melissa Muller. Now, with this captivating book, Melissa can share her ardor and wisdom about Sicily with the wider world of readers, cooks, and diners. Sicily: The Cookbook is a definitive work of culinary brilliance, family lore, and narrative writing. It announces the arrival of a new generation’s M.F.K. Fisher or Alice Waters.”
—Samuel G. Freedman, author of Letters to a Young Journalist and professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism
"Sicily is a center of fusion cuisine — spicing traditional Italian recipes with flair from elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Here Melissa Muller funnels summers spent visiting her grandparents on the island into recipes for antipasti, fish, meat and dessert in language even novice cooks can understand. It feels like learning family recipes in her grandparents’ kitchen. Her text also offers tips on finding great produce and attending festivals if you plan to visit."
—Metrosource NY
SICILY: The Cookbook is Melissa Muller's very beautiful new cookbook that makes you want to cook this food, eat this food, visit Sicily, cook in Sicily. It will enrich your understanding of, and improve your skill in Italian cuisine and it will seduce you with its genuine enthusiasm, inspiring recipes, and amazing flavors. It's also acutely personal, but not in the way that so many cookbooks are now, full of anecdotal and irrelevant blather. Instead Muller reveals a compelling narrative, based on real life and real people. As she wrote, "Every recipe contains the imprint of the family." The book is exquisitely written with a rare sense of belonging and a long-lens yet intimate perspective through which Muller both observes herself and brings us with her as she explores her Sicilian legacy.
- Kate McDonough, The City Cook, Inc."A great dilemma faced by any cookbook author when writing about a foreign cuisine is how deeply to connect the recipes with the gastronomy of the place written about. Not everyone understands that cooking is rooted in culture, a culture that breathes life into the cooking as surely as it breathes it into the language and art of a place. It’s more than just a recipe. But the great majority of cookbook buyers so often only want a recipe and either don’t care or don’t believe it’s important to understand the culture. Melissa Muller does an admirable job of straddling this dilemma in her fine book on Sicilian cuisine."
- Clifford Wright, New York Journal of Books
