Liguria – Living and eating between olive trees and the sea

Regional cookbooks about Italy are of interest to me anyway, so also Liguria – Living and eating between olive trees and the sea by Marlies de Waal. The food is quite different whether you eat in Venice, Milan, Bologna, Rome, Naples, Bari or Palermo. A nice cookbook has been published recently about Roman food, about eating from Sicily and about eating out Puglia. Here you will see dishes that are really typical of the region, with characteristic ingredients and traditional recipes.

The writer

Marlies de Waal is a Dutch person who has been coming to that region for some time for the Dutch company Italiacasa for which she sells and rents Italian houses to Dutch people. She probably got to know Ligurian cuisine better and better along the way, to the point where she thought: I'm pooling my knowledge! She now also gives cooking workshops in the Breda region.

Handy

In the book there are icons for each recipe for the number of people, the preparation time, whether it is extra healthy and whether it is something for children. The recipes are well written and not difficult.

The first recipe I looked up was for pesto. Italians are very strict when it comes to the original recipe, so I was curious if she had adhered to that. Of course everyone can have their own variant, but in this recipe we read about the specifics of this world-famous herb sauce and what it actually is. You will also read which type of pasta goes with the pesto, because Italians are also exactly into that. Bow tie pasta (butterflies) with pesto you will not encounter in Italy. The pasta all'amatriciana of page 23 and the ragout of page 21 and the Bagna cauda come from a different region, but are established throughout Italy.

Seasonal dishes

The book is organized according to the four seasons. That's fine, because a light and fresh summer dish is indeed different from a warming minestrone in the winter. Well-chosen layout. Also the layout and the photos are clear and attractive. Incidentally, that classification has more to do with the type of dish: is it heavy or easy to digest? It has nothing to do with seasonal vegetables or seasonal fish for the people who like to eat according to the availability of local vegetables or fish by season.

Fish

Very typical of the region is the octopus (something the Dutch often have to get used to). I like that there are different recipes with octopus and squid and that it also contains recipes with sea bass, cod and mackerel. Incidentally, octopus a laborious ingredient, which in my experience tastes different in Italy than in the Netherlands. Perhaps because I live in a terraced house in Schoonhoven and not in a Palazzo on the Ligurian coast. Red mullet and mullet are also regularly eaten in Italy, but they are also more difficult to obtain in the Netherlands and therefore probably not in Liguria.

And finally

There are also nice Ligurian recipes with chickpea flour and artichoke. Some recipes excel in simplicity and are actually more of an invitation to try a new ingredient. Try putting a fig or pear in your salad, for example. Fruit is not allowed on the pizza, it is allowed in the salad again. I think it's a nice cookbook, although it's not all typical Ligurian.

Liguria – Living and eating between olive trees and the sea
by: Marlies de Waal, illustrations by Marlees van Es
260 pages
€ 24,95
ABC Publisher, November 2015
ISBN 9789090293134