Collection: Pellegrino Artusi

Pellegrino Artusi, 1820 to 1911, was a businessman and a silk merchant's son, not a chef. He could not find a publisher willing to take his cookbook, The Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, so in 1891 he printed it himself and sold it himself. It went on to teach a newly unified Italy to cook from a single kitchen.

There is no mystique in it anywhere. Plain method, exact quantities, dry asides, and recipes gathered from ordinary households across regions that had only just started thinking of themselves as one country. He explains why a thing works, which is why the book still functions a century on.

It is also the clearest argument we know for writing things down. Proof that the most useful thing a man leaves behind is the practical knowledge he took the trouble to record.