If you have traveled in Italy or known Italians in America, you quickly realized that a Roman is different form a Florentine, a Neapolitan from a Milanese. These differences are even stronger in Italy than in most other countries, because each of its areas had both a long history and a developed culture before it became a part of the unified Italy of recent times. In customs and in language, there are dialects - and there are dialects in food as well.
All the Italian cookbooks I have seen in America are written from the point of view of some "dialect," which then extends outward to include food from the other regions. Recently, there have been books written from the viewpoints of Naples, Sicily, and Emilia-romagna. My book starts with a Tuscan, even a Florentine, point of view. But, just as one speaks dialect or vernacular in the home, with the family, so home cooking tends to exaggerate regional differences. And very rarely does one region restrict its cooking to those dishes which are "alla" that region. Cotoletta alla milanese is made all over Italy, as Pizza alla napoletana.
In examining many Italian cookbooks in English, particularly those that stress northern Italian, one finds an inordinate number of Tuscan recipes. Probably the most immediate reason for this is that the most influential cookbook of modern times in Italy was that of Pellegrino Artusi, a Florentine of the last century. He established Tuscan cooking as the standard of "buona, sana cucina," "Good, healthy cooking." There is a further reason, however, of which most people are still unaware. Just as in the midst of a peninsula of different dialects the genius of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch was able to establish Tuscan as the Italian language, so at the same time, in the fourteenth century, Florentine cooks began to codify the cooking of the emerging Renaissance. The Florentine manuscript of the early 1300s was copied twenty-five years later by the Bolognese, fifty years later by the Venetians. By 1450 this tradition had expanded to and developed in the north of Italy and even France, and probably other countries influences by the Italian Renaissance.
It is interesting to trace this tradition through the oldest extant manuscripts up to the early nineteenth century. They yielded much valuable material that confirms the antiquity of many classic Italian dishes and help in arriving at authentic versions.
It must now be obvious that my attempt here is something more ambitious than telling you about recipes I learned at my mother's knee. Aside from the fact that my mother hates to cook, I find that an inadequate approach for conveying the range and richness of Italian cooking.
If not in Mama's simple kitchen, where does one look for such cooking? Not in the trattorie. Essentially, trattorie are unpretentious places, generally of working-class origin, that produce dialect food, sometimes of very high quality but within a limited framework. In Florence and elsewhere in Italy, people of all walks of life enjoy the trattoria food for its honesty and simplicity, when it is genuine. The problem arises when trattorie attempt to become ristoranti, and they decide to add a touch of the "continental," or what they think is French cooking. Then they cease to be honest.
The fine cooking in Italy, that which indeed retains the old Italian gastronomy, takes place in the homes of certain old Florentine families, who have taken the trouble to preserve their traditions. One starts with these recipes. It is then very important to verify both the antiquity and the correctness of these recipes through ancient manuscripts and old printed books. By scrupulously comparing one's own experience with that of the old families, as well as with old manuscripts and early books, it is possible to arrive at generalizations about techniques, spicing, and so on, and to produce authentic recipes that remain gastronomically very valid indeed.
Dear reader, don't let me scare you off. This book is also a basic Italian cookbook, containing many recipes that are not too time consuming as well as some that are of more recent vintage. (I am not, for example, going to avoid dry pasta because it has formed a part of the Italian menu for only the last hundred and fifty years.) It is just that the book includes techniques, for sauces aspics, pastry, breads, and so on, that truly belong to Italian cooking.
With the aid of photographs, I have attempted to help the reader acquire the basic culinary techniques that are necessary for the finer Italian cucina, techniques that go beyond the procedure for a single recipe. These include boning poultry and fish; tying and larding meats; making stuffings, forcemeats and sausages, broth and aspics, pastries and breads; ways of chopping and cutting; something about presentation; and so on.
It was not possible to do everything in this book that one could in a more specialized one, but I hope at least to provide an introduction to the technical side of the art of Italian cooking.
I strongly feel that a northern Italian cookbook, from a Tuscan, even a Florentine point of view is very much needed in English. As I previously mentioned, in northern Italian cookbooks quite large percentage of the recipes are Tuscan. I hope my colleagues will forgive me if I say, as a native Tuscan and Florentine, that for the most part their Tuscan recipes are unrecognizable to me. It would be pointless, even ungracious, for me to give specific examples of some of the gaffes in these recipes, for they could easily enough be traced to specific books and authors, some current ones justly held in high esteem for those areas closer to home in which they are indeed expert. In sum, while I don't want to criticize anyone, one simply cannot allow these completely inauthentic versions of Tuscan dishes to circulate with authority.
In closing this preface, I would like to discuss two books of the last century, one in English and the other in Italian but available in English translation. These are Janet Ross's Leaves from my Tuscan Kitchen from the 1890s and Artusi's own The Art of Eating Well.
Artusi book, a classic and charming to read as well, is extremely valuable historically. It gave Italians in the last century the impetus to keep to their own cooking, and had a very positive influence. (We must remember that when he wrote a Hapsburg was still sitting on the Tuscan throne.) For example, much as we all love sour cream, it just isn't Italian, and Artusi has recipes using it. Another problem is that Artusi's book, like most cookbooks in Italian, does not always give specific quantities and is vague on procedure. It is a book for those who already know the dishes.
The purpose of Janet Ross's book was probably to stimulate her fellow English to use more vegetables in their diet. But, while she took her recipes from cooks in her Florentine villa, they must have been doing continental cuisine. Vegetables that are staple of the Tuscan repertory like rape and kale do not appear, while not really Italian vegetables such as Jerusalem artichokes and red cabbage do. And many of her recipes are overtly French. The book, then, is more an interesting historical document of what the international set who had Florentine villas late in the late nineteenth century.
So now, after all this, perhaps you can understand why I feel that an Italian cookbook, in English, from a Tuscan point of view is necessary.

Giuliano Bugialli, 1977