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Frank Stitt's Bottega Favorita

A Southern Chef's Love Affair with Italian Food

Contributors

By Frank Stitt

Photographs by Christopher Hirsheimer

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Price

$40.00

Price

$45.95 CAD

Format

Hardcover

Format:

Hardcover $40.00 $45.95 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around January 1, 2009. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

There are some places worth traveling to just for the food: Rome, Venice . . . and now, Birmingham, Italy.

In this companion to his first, best-selling cookbook, the beloved Southern chef Frank Stitt travels to Italy and brings the best of Mediterranean cuisine back home. To Stitt’s mind, the two regions—Italy and the American South—share commonalities. Both native cuisines have a tradition of turning humble ingredients—ground corn, bitter greens, cured pork, the daily catch—into poetry on the plate. And as the chef points out in his lively introduction to the book, this is elemental cooking based on the purity and simplicity of the freshest and finest ingredients.

Yet leave it to Stitt to make Italian cuisine his own. "There’s no Pompano in Venice, but ours, fresh from Apalachicola, fits into the cartoccio (Italian fish stew) perfectly; our Chilton County white peaches are squeezed by hand for a bellini; our wild Gulf shrimp, oysters, crab, and fish are easily a match for their Mediterranean equivalents," Stitt writes. This appealing new cookbook includes the best of the Southern-influenced Italian recipes he has served at his Birmingham, Alabama, restaurant Bottega Restaurant and Café, for the last two decades—the Tomato Chutney and Roasted Sweet Pepper Pizza, Lamb Shanks with Sweet Peas and Mint, and fabulous desserts including Zabaglione Meringue Cake. Accompanied by sweet recollections of his journeys to Italy, this inspiring and accessible cookbook proves once again why the novelist Pat Conroy calls Stitt "the best chef in America."

On Sale
Jan 1, 2009
Page Count
269 pages
Publisher
Artisan
ISBN-13
9781579653026

Frank Stitt

About the Author

Frank Stitt is the chef and owner of Highlands Bar and Grill—which won the 2018 James Beard Awards for Outstanding Restaurant and Outstanding Pastry Chef—Bottega Restaurant and Café, and Chez Fonfon, all located in Birmingham, Alabama. He has won the James Beard Award for the Best Chef of the Southeast and has been inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s “Who’s Who of Food and Beverage.” He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance for his elevation of Southern cuisine and his early advocacy of locally grown food. He is the author of Frank Stitt’s Southern Table and Frank Stitt’s Bottega Favorita.

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Christopher Hirsheimer

About the Photographer

Melissa Hamilton is a renowned food stylist and cofounder of Canal House. She previously worked at Saveur, which she joined in 1998, as the test kitchen director, and was its food editor for many years. Hamilton also worked in the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living and Cook’s Illustrated, and she was the cofounder and first executive chef of Hamiltons Grill Room in Lambertville, New Jersey. She has developed and tested recipes and styled food for both magazines and cookbooks, including those by acclaimed chefs John Besh, Michael Psilakis, Roberto Santibanez, and David Tanis. She works with Christopher Hirsheimer on Canal House Cooking, for which the two do all of the writing, recipes, photography, design, and production.

Christopher Hirsheimer is an award-winning photographer and cofounder of Canal House. Her experience includes establishing a publishing venture, running a culinary and design studio, and publishing an annual series of three seasonal cookbooks titled Canal House Cooking. Prior to starting Canal House in 2007, in Lambertville, New Jersey, Hirsheimer was the executive editor of Saveur, which she cofounded in 1994, and the food and design editor of Metropolitan Home. She cowrote the award-winning Saveur Cooks ;series and The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Market Cookbook. Her photographs have appeared in more than 50 cookbooks for such notables as Lidia Bastianich, Mario Batali, Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, and Alice Waters, and in numerous magazines, including Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, InStyle, and Town&Country. She works with Melissa Hamilton on Canal House Cooking, for which the two do all of the writing, recipes, photography, design, and production.

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