Exquisitely designed, beautifully written and featuring mouth-watering photography, this gorgeous tome from Guardian columnist and award-winning food writer Rachel Roddy makes the perfect gift for the pasta lover in your life! Guardian columnist and award-winning food writer Rachel Roddy condenses everything she has learned about Italy's favourite food in a practical, easy-to-use and mouth-watering collection of 100 essential pasta and pasta sauce recipes. Along with the recipes are short essays that weave together the history, culture and the everyday life of pasta shapes from the tip to the toe of Italy. There is pasta made with water, and pasta with egg; shapes made by hand and those rolled a by machine; the long and the short; the rolled and the stretched; the twisted and the stuffed; the fresh and the dried. The A-Z of Pasta tells you how to match pasta shapes with sauces, and how to serve them. The recipes range from the familiar - pesto, ragu and carbonara - to the unfamiliar (but thrilling). This is glorious celebration of pasta from one of the best food writers of our time. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ANDRE SIMONS FOOD & DRINK BOOK AWARDS ________________________ 'I love this book. Every story is a little gem - a beautiful hymn to each curl, twist and ribbon of pasta.' Nigel Slater 'Rachel Roddy describing how to boil potatoes would inspire me. There are very, very few who possess such a supremely uncluttered culinary voice as hers, just now' Simon Hopkinson 'Rachel Roddy's writing is as absorbing as any novel' Russell Norman, author of Polpo 'Roddy is a gifted storyteller, and a masterful hand with simple ingredients' Guardian Cook

Rachel Roddy's Five Quarters won the Guild of Food Writers' First Book award and the Andre Simon Food Book award 2015. 'Five Quarters stands out as particularly considered and evocative...Impeccably researched and transportive, it's a proper read, rather than a quick flick.' AA Gill, Sunday Times best cookbooks 2015 'Of course I thought Rome was glorious, but I didn't want to stay. A month, three at most, then I'd take a train back to Sicily to finish the clockwise journey I'd interrupted, before moving even further southwards...' Instead, captivated by the exhilarating life of Testaccio, the wedge-shaped quarter of Rome that centres round the old slaughterhouse and the bustling food market, Rachel decided to rent a flat and live there. Thus began an Italian adventure that's turned into a brand new life. Five Quarters charts a year in Rachel's small kitchen, shopping, cooking, eating and writing, capturing a uniquely domestic picture of life in this vibrant, charismatic city. Combining Rachel's love of Italian food and cooking with a strong nostalgia for home and memories of growing up in England, this is a cookbook to read in bed as well as to use in the kitchen. Chapters: Antipasti Soup & Pasta Meat & Fish Vegetables Dolci

From the award-winning weekly Guardian Cook columnist and winner of the Andre Simon and Guild of Food Writers' Awards comes an Italian food book of sumptuous recipes, flavours and stories from Sicily and Rome. For the last twelve years, food-writer, cook and photographer Rachel Roddy has immersed herself in the culture of Roman cooking, but it was the flavours of the south that she and her Sicilian partner, Vincenzo, often craved. Eventually the chance arose to spend more time at his old family house in south-east Sicily, where Rachel embraced the country's traditional recipes and the stories behind them. In Two Kitchens Rachel celebrates the food and flavours of Rome and Sicily and shares over 120 of these simple, everyday dishes from her two distant but connected kitchens. From tomato and salted ricotta salad, caponata and baked Sicilian pasta to lemon crumble, honeyed peaches and almond and chocolate cake, they are the authentic Italian recipes that you will want to cook again and again until you've made them your own. 'This is a recipe book that reflects the way I cook and eat: uncomplicated, direct and adaptable Italian family food that reflects the season. The two kitchens of the title are my kitchens in Rome and Sicily. In a sense, though, we could have called the book "many kitchens" as I invite you to make these recipes your own.' Rachel Roddy Two Kitchens chapters: Vegetables and Herbs - Tomatoes; Aubergines; Peas; Broad Beans; Cauliflower; Potatoes; Onions; Herbs Fruit and Nuts - Lemons; Peaches; Oranges; Grapes and Figs; Almonds Meat, Fish and Dairy - Beef and pork; Chicken; White fish; Fresh anchovies and sardines; Eggs; Ricotta Storecupboard - Chickpeas; Lentils; Preserved anchovies; Flour; Bread Rachel's first book, Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, won the Andre Simon Food Book Award and the Guild of Food Writers' First Book Award in 2015.