5 things to know about Vegetables, the Italian way

How this book will change the way you cook Italian food, plus a special thank-you for early readers.

We’re still deep into winter. We keep heating the house with the extra help of our log burner, which from the living room radiates a dry, bone-warming heat into every room and has become the centre of our days. I still crave warm soups every other day. Lately, a chicken stock and fennel velouté with a generous handful of fresh dill has been my favourite (more on this soup next week).

But spring is just around the corner. I can see it in the bulbs finally piercing the soil, pushing their pointed leaves into the light, and in the wild greens I can forage again, adding them to salads, frittata, and savoury pies. And I can feel it in the busy work happening behind the scenes —the long email exchanges, the videos and photographs of the book (which you can preview in this newsletter), the ongoing conversations — all leading to publication day, now less than two months away.

Before Vegetables the Italian Way comes out, before it lands on your kitchen counter alongside a bunch of slender asparagus and a bottle of olive oil, or finds its place among your cookbooks, there are a few things I would love you to know.

Today, we won’t talk about the number of recipes, how many pages it has, the vegetables it includes, or the Italian regions it covers. Instead, I’d like to tell how it will change your approach to Italian cooking.

There are five things that define Vegetables, the Italian Way.

1. It’s not a vegetarian book, but an Italian one.

There’s a relatively new term that describes a sustainable way of cooking and eating: vegetable-forward.

It doesn’t mean vegetarian or vegan. It doesn’t mean avoiding meat and fish altogether, but using them in smaller quantities as an accent, a condiment, rather than the star of the plate (and this reminds me so much of Dan Barber’s The Third Plate). It means putting vegetables at the centre of the meal, treating them as seriously as meat: roasting them, braising them, grilling them, drawing out their seasonality, texture, and natural flavour.

This is profoundly Italian.

As food historian Massimo Montanari writes in his book Amaro. Un gusto italiano (more on this book later), the unexpected and persistent presence of vegetables is one of the deepest and most distinctive features of Italian cuisine, a legacy shaped by peasant traditions that even high cuisine could not ignore.

There’s more than pasta, pizza, and tiramisu, more than Florentine steak and cannoli in Italian cooking: there are vegetables that hold our meals together. They may not dominate restaurant menus, but they are at the centre of cucina casalinga, our home cooking.

Italian regional cuisine is rich with vegetable dishes that often represent the soul of a region. Eating seasonally and locally has always been one of the cornerstones of the Italian cucina povera, a necessity long before it became a trend. This, paired with a creative approach with vegetables that see the seasonal produce as the hero of a dish, has created some of the most memorable dishes of Italian cuisine.

Think of a plate of pasta tossed with broccoli cooked until it almost becomes a sauce, of eggplant slowly melting into caponata, of green beans stewed with tomatoes and olive oil for so long that they surrender into softness.

2. It is a grammar of Italian cuisine, told through vegetables.

When I call it a grammar, I don’t mean a set of rigid rules, as Italian cooking has never been about strict formulas—and you have undoubtedly seen it from my approach to cooking. Italian cooking is instead fluid, regional, and shaped by geography, history, climate, and rituals.

Like any language, it has patterns and habits that translate into ways of building flavour, exalting texture, softening tough fibres, or turning a simple ingredient into something nourishing and satisfying.

In this book, vegetables become the lens through which you can see those structures that permeate Italian cuisine more clearly.

You will learn why we often cook greens twice — first to soften them, then to deepen their flavour in olive oil and garlic —, why we let cauliflower cook longer and slower than you might expect, until it surrenders and develops an irresistible sweetness and nuttiness, why bitterness is balanced with fat and acidity, and why a handful of herbs at the end can change everything.

Grammar gives you freedom. Once you know it, you can improvise. This is my ultimate goal when I write a cookbook: to give you the tools to play by ear, inspired by general principles, guided by seasonality. You’ll be able to swap puntarelle for asparagus, eggplants for butternut squash or zucchini, following the seasons and your own preferences, and still achieve beautiful results.

The same grammar is applied to sweet things as well, as there’s a whole chapter on desserts that includes some of my favourite recipes of the book, such as a radicchio and white chocolate cake and a Swiss shard crostata.

3. It celebrates overcooked vegetables, unapologetically.

In the past decades, we’ve been taught to fear overcooking. We’ve been told that vegetables should stay vibrant, crisp, barely cooked, that colour equals freshness. And it is true, but in Italian home cooking something different often happens.

During my cooking classes, students marvel at how long it takes to stew green beans until they become juicy and silky. They anxiously check their watches when I boil cavolo nero, only to cook it again in olive oil and garlic before laying it over a slice of bruschetta with a spoonful of cannellini beans.

I remind them to trust the process, to forget their watches, and to look for the transformation happening in the pan. They will be rewarded when they finally sit at the table and feast on vegetables that are, unapologetically, overcooked.

Overcooking, in this context, is not a mistake.

It is the moment when fibers soften, when bitterness mellows, when sweetness deepens, when olive oil and time (and sometimes a little anchovy, a pinch of chili pepper, a few cubes of pancetta, or a handful of briny olives) turn something humble into something generous and heartwarming.

4. It teaches you how to love bitterness.

Bitterness is often the flavour we resist the most. As children, we push away radicchio, as we tend to prefer sweetness over complexity. We dilute coffee with milk, we reach for sugar.

According to Massimo Montanari, who has written an entire book on the Italian appreciation of bitterness, this cultural inclination stems from Italy’s long historical reliance on vegetables. Bitter greens, whether cultivated or foraged, have always been central to the peasant diet.

Bitterness is a cultivated taste we learn to appreciate over the years with a certain pride. It lives in chicories and puntarelle, in cavolo nero and artichokes, in brined olives as a snacking aperitivo, and a tiny glass of chilled amaro sipped after a meal.

Reading and cooking from this book, you’ll learn that bitterness pairs especially well with umami and fat, and that extra virgin olive oil, with its naturally peppery, slightly bitter undertones, is often the fat of choice in Italian cooking.

You’ll learn to work with bitterness, to balance the clean sharpness of thinly sliced raw artichokes with shaved Parmigiano Reggiano, or soften the assertiveness of radicchio with a spoonful of gorgonzola to make a creamy, purple-hued risotto.

5. It was born in a cooking school.

In this book, you will find recipes inspired by iconic Italian dishes, recipes that capture the character of a region or a city. Along with the classics, there are also dishes born from listening to old nonnas queueing at the market, speaking with the farmers, teaching during our cooking classes, or following a sudden inspiration after a generous market haul.

Most of these recipes have been cooked in front of real people, in a kitchen filled with questions, hesitation, curiosity, and laughter (and if you were among those people, thank you for being my Guinea pig).

I have watched students worry about overcooking broccoli, and I have seen their relief when a carrot sauce finally comes together, when a bitter green tastes balanced, when a simple vegetable dish becomes something they are proud to serve.

So many times they have said: “If this is how you cook vegetables, now I understand why they’re your favourite part of the meal. I’d be happy to eat like this every day.”

These recipes have been adjusted, clarified, and sometimes simplified because someone needed a little more explanation and asked, “Why do we do this twice?”, “Are you sure we have to cook this for so long?”, or “How do I know when it’s ready?”

They were tested for understanding, cooked, explained, tasted multiple times, and shared, again and again. They were eaten around a table and appreciated by my family, friends and students alike. All these recipes carry the warmth of that kitchen within their pages.

If this resonates with you, I would love for you to be part of this new season from the very beginning.

---

And now I’m curious. What are you hoping to find in this book? Is there a vegetable you’ve always struggled with, or one you can’t wait to cook differently? I’ll read every reply with joy!

In less than two months, on April 14th, Vegetables the Italian Way will finally be out in the world. And it’s now AVAILABLE for PREORDER.

Preordering a book is an act of trust. It means choosing to welcome it into your home before it even arrives, placing it on your future kitchen counter alongside asparagus, artichokes, and a bottle of good olive oil.

Book preorders, especially on Amazon, are paramount for the success of a book: they signal to our publisher that there’s interest in the book, encourage larger orders from big retailers and create a buzz about Vegetables the Italian Way. That’s why we are asking you to preorder now and share the news with friends, family, and passers-by. This will give us the chance to keep doing what we love the most: writing cookbooks and sharing delicious, seriously tested recipes with you.

Here on the blog, you can find all the links to more online and local bookstores where you can preorder Vegetables the Italian Way, too.

To say thank you for that trust, I’ve prepared something special for those who preorder:

• An exclusive invitation to a live virtual cooking class + Q&A in May. I’ll cook a few of my favorite recipes from the book and answer your questions.

• Instant access to an early spring recipe from the book — something you can start cooking right away.

• A one-month paid subscription to Letters from Tuscany, so we can continue this conversation beyond the pages.

You’ll find all the details on how to redeem your bonus recipe and enroll in the masterclass here: https://bit.ly/vegetables-italian

If you’d like to cook this way — slowly, seasonally, generously — I would be honoured to have you there from the start. Spring is almost here, I can’t wait to cook these recipes with you.