“If you follow your appetite, it will lead you to interesting places,” says Elizabeth Minchilli, cookbook author and Italian food and travel expert. For her, those places have been all over Italy. On April 30, Left Bank Books will host Minchilli, a St. Louis native, and celebrate her new book with Rizzoli, The Italian Table: Creating Festive Meals for Family and Friends, available now. Minchilli will be joined by her cousin, who will moderate the discussion prior to the book signing at the Central West End bookstore.
In her new book, Minchilli guides readers on how to bring the memorable Italian meals she experienced to life. In the book’s introduction, she describes it as “a greatest-hits list of some of my favorite meals.” With chapters like “Lunch in a Renaissance Garden,” and “A Table by the Sea in Positano,” Minchilli outlines a menu, table setting, and other details to turn the chapter’s theme into a party and transport your guests to special Italian moments. She even breaks down a timeline of what to prepare the day before and hours leading up to the guests arrival. Minchilli, whose Instagram account any foodie or Italian enthusiast should follow, also took all of the photographs featured in the book.
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Planning a trip to Italy? “It pays for you to do a little planning before you get here,” says Minchilli. “If you end up just running into a restaurant near the major monuments when you are hungry, you are likely to be disappointed.” You can benefit from Minchilli’s years of living and traveling through Italy by downloading her app, Eat Italy. She has done all the leg work for you and created a trustworthy list of her top picks of places to eat, drink, stay, and shop. You can also have Minchilli show you the ropes herself by taking one of her food tours.
When asked if she had any favorite Italian food, Minchilli answered “things that are seasonal, so wherever I am, I try to get the vegetables that are extremely local and fresh and see what they do with them. Broccoli in Rome is different from broccoli in Puglia. It really makes you understand the local cuisine and, through that, the local culture.”
One piece of culinary advice from Minchilli: “It always pays to go to a good source when you are making something that requires a skill and a tactile touch like pizza or pasta. When you are standing next to, say, a nonna (Italian grandmother), and she is making the pasta faster than you can even see it, and you make her slow down and she takes your hand and you feel the dough and you understand the exact consistency it is supposed to be, it takes away a lot of the trial and error if you were working on your own.”
