BOOKS

Using Pellegrino Artusi‘s famous book as a starting point, Donpasta wants to create a real new recipe book of Italian cuisine, updating Artusi’s method and reflections. This book is not a rereading or rewriting of Artusi. It is a dispassionate homage to a man who was one of the fathers of his homeland with his recipe book present in many Italian homes.

Food is a language, it is the instrument through which a history is handed down, familiar, country, collective. Starting from these assumptions, Donpasta, to write the Artusi Remix, has collected hundreds of recipes over a year, traveling around Italy to meet “grannies” or using new forms of communication (blog, facebook) to communicate with their grandchildren.

A census of domestic and family Italian cuisine of the present time, in which we try to understand what has changed in traditional cuisine and its geography.

The result is a cookbook of popular Italian cuisine built from the testimonies of the people, an intergenerational collage of how it is cooked today and what has been preserved of the cuisine of the past.

Donpasta starts from the personal affective relationship that people have today with homemade and family recipes and brings them back to this recipe book, accompanied by reflections and anecdotes of today.

A real remix of Pellegrino Artusi.

If you have a problem, add oil. That’s the recurring phrase in my family’s kitchen.

This is not a cookbook, but a book that revolves around it, as a social place, a meeting point of stories and people. I am a Mediterranean man, where for centuries the welcome was the basis of relationships between peoples. Writing I carry with me the importance of the door always open to receive guests and friends, of great tables laid for so many people, of the culture behind every culture.

I have used the ways of preparing a dish as a tool to engage in a more extended discourse on eating, understood as origin, territory, critical consumption of the goods of the earth. The combination of these ingredients takes place between lines that tell the story of my ten years as a DJ around Europe, between Salento, Rome, Barcelona and Paris.

This book is a dispassionate tribute to music and to those who made it.

The haste of modern times burns art too quickly and those who create it and then Donpasta often looks back to know and tell the lives of people who have revolutionized the history of contemporary music with courage and freedom.

As a listener and DJ, I learned from the Clash the pleasure of enjoying music in all its styles, sounds and cultures. The musical suggestions that flow in the book do not follow a logical thread, they do not show a predilection towards a particular genre, nor do they refer, in general, to recently released records. Generally, before buying them, I let time be the judge of their value.

Food Sound System does not want to educate about taste or listening, but rather to tell you about my way of enjoying the pleasures and art of eating, listening to music, travelling.

Then get some pots, pans, plates, records and forks. Have a good trip and, above all, enjoy your meal.

“Cooking is a political act. My grandmother’s parmigiana is, made only in August, the eggplant season…”

This is the opening of “Parmigiana and the Revolution.” Like John Belushi, Donpasta is on a mission for his grandmothers.

A DJ with a good fork and a very easy party, he wrote his Manifesto for a militant cuisine after discovering that Ilva, in addition to killing people, had poisoned the Taranto mussels, the best in the world, with dioxins, that the housewife could no longer sell her

home-boiled ricottas and that the sweets made by her mother for her children’s birthday could no longer be brought to schools.

After having travelled the world with her show, Donpasta returns to writing about food. Hers is a homage to popular, democratic, creative, healthy, environmentalist, festive, mestizo, tolerant, antithetical to the cuisine of VIP chefs and plastic TVs.

For this reason, Donpasta has come to the conclusion that at the table the fork should always be placed on the left side of the plate.

This book is not about wine. Or rather not only, it talks about wines, music, reflections, memories and atmospheres. It tells how drinking wine is to get in tune with the character of the winemaker, enjoy the sun and rain that make that land and enter into stories of love, freedom, utopias.

With a wine, a story and a song Donpasta guides the reader on a sophisticated and sincere journey. What did Bob Dylan drink while composing “Like a Rolling Stone”, with which wine to accompany a Tom Waits concert, how to celebrate Obama’s victory, if not listening to Nina Simone?

In dialogue with the voice of Candide, the cheerful “inexperienced” drinker, the sound of the vineyard, the melody of the wine, the breathing of the farmer who collects, beating and pressing. A journey for wines rich in legends, storytellers, holy drinkers, biodynamic farmers, men of fervent ecological practice. An invitation to play with wine and to understand those wines that often escape, confused in the fantasies of oenologists or caught between the memories of a bad evening, and a collection of stories about drinking, idleness and the taste of living.

Everything else, “blowin’ in the wine“, the wine will say.

Kitchen social club is a “cookery book”: 25 stories of food without exploitation and accessible to everyone, from oranges to saffron; 25 recipes of resistant cooks and popular kitchens, short chain taverns and meticulous trattorias; 25 stories of militant farmers and “genuine and clandestine” products.

Because on bread and pasta made with ancient grains there goes the tomato, but without corporals, maybe with a round of ‘ndrangheta free oil and the cheese of happy sheep.

Because eating and cooking well – but first of all cultivating well – is a set of gestures of daily commitment, of family and community care, of rebellion against the model of industrial production and distribution of food.

The Kitchen social club is then not just an inclusive and virtuous circle of cooks and non-aligned kitchens, but a manifesto dedicated to those who love food for what it should be: not just any old commodity but a common heritage.