annieb123's Review of The Complete Book of Pasta Sauces

by Allan Bay

Turn pasta night from drab to exciting, tired to fresh, with 175 recipes for the best and yummiest pasta sauces imaginable.

Everybody loves pasta—but not if it’s made the same way night after night. Families with kids, especially, eat loads of pasta, but it’s awfully easy to get stuck in a “red-sauce rut,” eating one version or another of marinara sauce over and over again. Enter author Allan Bay, an expat who lives in Rome who has written some of Italy’s best-selling cookbooks. Bay opens up in these pages a big, bold new world of pasta sauces, some from the classic Italian repertoire, other brilliant new creations of his own. They have all sorts of main ingredients, from beef and chicken to shrimp and clams to glorious veggies from artichokes to zucchini. All of the sauces are easy to prepare and every one cooks up fast.

The Complete Book of Pasta Sauces includes:

Asparagus and Pine Nut Sauce
Meatball Ragout
Cioppino
Pesto Sauce, plus six different pesto variations
Chicken Ragout
Nantua Sauce with Shrimp
Lamb Ragout with Porcinis
Roman Cauliflower Sauce

There are bowls and bowls of kid-friendly sauces and plenty of grownup sauces, too. Each recipe comes with one to three “Best On” recommendations, along with additional “Also Good On” ideas that range from different shapes of standard wheat pasta to egg noodles, polenta, rice, and more. There are suggestions, too, for serving the various sauces directly on meats, poultry, or fish—something that is very common in Italy but less familiar elsewhere.

This deliciously creative book makes pasta and pasta sauces more exciting than they’ve ever been before.

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

The Complete Book of Pasta Sauces is a theme-specific collection of recipes for a wide variety of sauces written and developed by Allan Bay. Due out 18th Oct 2022 from Quarto on their Harvard Common Press imprint, it's 256 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

This is an unusual collection. The recipes included are _only_ for the sauces/wet components of the meals and not complete dishes. There are suggestions for each recipe such as accompaniments (best on ____, goes well with ____) but no complementary info, no menu information, no background, and not many alternative presentations.

Recipes are arranged thematically: vegetable sauces, pesto, tomato sauces, cheese & egg sauces, ragu, fish & seafood sauces, hearty meat sauces, and the basics. Ingredients are written with a title, very little introductory/background info, ingredients in a bullet list sidebar, and followed by *very* short cooking directions. Ingredient measurements are given in imperial (American) measurements, followed by metric in parentheses (yay!).

About 20% of the recipes are accompanied by one or more stock photos of relevant foodstuffs (nuts, fish, vegetables, etc). The recipes collected here are not accompanied by finished/serving photos of the dishes. The author has included a cross referenced index which includes recipes listed by main ingredient, which I found very helpful.

This would be a good choice for cookbook reference collectors, since it is a fairly comprehensive collection of sauces. It would be a less optimal choice for beginning cooks, as there are no photos and prep/full meal instructions are scanty at best. That being said, this is a solid kitchen reference and cooks who love to experiment with presentations and menus will find a lot to love here.

Three and a half stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

The Complete Book of Pasta Sauces

by Allan Bay

Reviewed by annieb123 on Oct 13, 2022

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