If you've ever wondered what Italy tastes like when it's surrounded by sea, Katie Parla's Food of the Italian Islands is the most generous answer in print.
Parla is one of those writers who manages to be both a serious researcher and a delighted eater — a Rome-based food journalist who has spent two decades tracing the dishes, hands, and histories that actually make up Italy's regional cuisines, beyond what tourists tend to flatten into "Italian food." Her latest cookbook is exactly that kind of project: a sprawling, sun-soaked study of the islands' kitchens, gathered with care and written with affection.
What's inside
The book moves island by island — Sicily, Sardinia, Elba, Capri, Ischia, the Aeolians, Pantelleria, and yes, Ponza — without flattening them into a single "island Italy." Each one gets its own treatment, with recipes that range from the iconic like the lightest, fluffiest eggplant parm you'll ever try to the genuinely obscure: dishes you'd find on a pranzo della domenica table, things passed between fishermen and their neighbours, sweets that have stopped showing up at most pasticcerie.
Ponza's gets several special mentions.
Why it matters
Italian cookbooks are everywhere. What makes this one different is that Parla treats the islands as a coherent culinary culture in their own right, rather than as footnotes to mainland Italy. The geography is the story. The recipes follow.
If you've ever spent a day on Ponza and wished you could take that boat-lunch home with you, this book is the closest thing. It's also the kind of cookbook you can read from the couch — every chapter is half-history, half-instructions, all reverence.
Worth a buy
Yes. Worth a buy, worth a slow read, worth cooking through. We can't recommend it enough — and not just because Ponza gets its moment.
