This isn't just another Italian cookbook. There are no pictures, no frills, no dramatic or artistic culinary statements requiring professional expertise. This is a book of over 240 recipes codified from the oral traditions of immigrant Italians who came to America in the great wave of the early 20th century with one cooking credo, waste nothing, use everything and make it all taste good. Unlike cookbooks that make a similar claim, the recipes in this book aren't taken from someone's memory of what Grandma used to make, nor are they products of variations on or "healthy" perversions of the original cuisine, they are the original cuisine as compiled by a man with the keenest foresight. While a student at Ithaca College in the 1930s, the author's father, Michael C. Fusco would often return home to Binghamton, New York to work in his father's restaurant. With itinerant cooks and myriad chefs coming and going all the time, he realized the necessity of keeping their recipes in-house for the sake of consistency as well as popularity. The "pinch of this" and "a little of that" way most cooks of the day prepared their dishes guaranteed the opposite outcome, so he began the tedious process of shadowing the "professionals," including his mother, father and other relatives as well as the cooks and chefs, measuring the ingredients they used, observing their techniques and writing everything down in a notebook he kept until the day he passed away in 1992. Thus the recipes in "My Father's Book Of Southern Italian Peasant Food" are true and accurate renditions of those prepared in the early part of the 20th century with some additions of Peter Fusco's which he believes reflect the spirit of the book and also the realities of a changing world when it comes to ingredients. If you are a serious foodie, someone who wants to taste Italian food the way it was originally intended, this cookbook will become your treasured kitchen companion. After cooking with it you will agree, the great beauty of Southern Italian peasant food rests in the fact that a king would not know that it is.