Pellegrino Artusi
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Pellegrino Artusi was born at Forlimpopoli in Romagna in 1820 and died in Florence in 1911. He was a silk merchant and banker, not a chef and not a professional writer, and he came to cookery as a well-off man with time and a serious appetite for method.
His family left Romagna after an armed band raided the town theatre in 1851, an episode that marked his sister badly. He settled in Florence and spent the rest of his life there with his cook Marietta Sabatini and his manservant Francesco Ruffilli, both of whom contributed to the book and both of whom he remembered in his will.
Why he wrote it
Italy had been a single country for only thirty years when he published, and it was not yet a single culture. Regional cooking was genuinely regional, written recipes were scarce, and the prestige language of the kitchen was French.
No publisher would take the book. He printed it himself in 1891 at his own expense in a thousand copies, and it sold slowly at first. He kept revising it across fourteen editions in his lifetime, incorporating recipes sent in by readers from all over the country, which is how a private project turned into a national one.
The book we publish, and why
We publish Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well because it taught a newly unified Italy to cook from one kitchen, and because it is a model of what a practical book should be.
The method is plain and the voice is conversational. He explains why a thing works, digresses into stories, argues with the reader, and refuses mystique entirely. He writes in Tuscan Italian for a general audience at a moment when most Italians did not share a standard language, which is part of why the book mattered beyond food.
The benefit is broader than cooking. It is the clearest demonstration in our catalog that the most useful thing a person leaves behind is the practical knowledge they took the trouble to write down.
How to read it
It is a reference book and a reading book at once, which is unusual. Cook from it, but also read the headnotes, which are where the man actually is.
Expect period measures and period assumptions: a wood fire, no refrigeration, a cook who already knows the basics. Quantities are often approximate by design, because he expected you to taste and judge rather than obey.
The numbered recipes are grouped by type, so the practical way in is to pick the thing you already cook often and read his version of it first. The broths and the soups are where he is most patient with a beginner.
Pair it with
- Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography. Two self-taught practical men, a century apart, who wrote down a working method because nobody else had bothered.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, for the unlikely but real similarity: both are books of accumulated practice, written by a man for use rather than for display.
His works
- Biographical Notes on Ugo Foscolo, 1878.
- Observations on Thirty Letters by Giuseppe Giusti, 1881.
- Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, first published 1891, revised through fourteen editions to 1911.
- Autobiography, written late in life and published long after his death.
General reference on Pellegrino Artusi. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Pellegrino Artusi
The Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, Hardcover