If you searched for the soup chapter in "the Italian cook book" and landed on our site, here is the direct answer: the soup content you want is in Pellegrino Artusi's 1891 La Scienza in Cucina e l'Arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), not in the book we sell under the similar title, The Italian Cook Book by Maria Gentile. Artusi wrote a full home cooking manual with a real minestre (soup) chapter in it. The Gentile edition on our shelf is a reprint of the dessert portion of her 1919 book: pastries, sweets, frozen desserts, and syrups. No soup recipes in it. Buy accordingly, and here is why the two get confused.
Two Books, One Confusing Title
Both books carry nearly the same English title, which is exactly why a search for "the Italian cook book" and "soup" in the same breath pulls up the wrong page half the time. They are not the same project.
Pellegrino Artusi's Italian Cook Book on our shelf is the Olga Ragusa English translation, first done in 1945, of Artusi's original 1891 text. It runs 186 pages and carries close to 400 recipes, weighted toward Northern Italian cooking, particularly Romagna and Tuscany, where Artusi did most of his own eating and testing. He was not a professional cook. He was a retired silk merchant who collected, tested, and organized recipes as a personal project, and the book he self-published in 1891 (after publishers turned it down) went on to become the closest thing Italy has to a founding text of home cooking, written in the decades after unification when the country did not yet share one cuisine.
The Italian Cook Book, the paperback we carry under Maria Gentile's name, is a different animal. Gentile's full 1919 original was itself built on Artusi, an Americanized adaptation of his recipes for U.S. home kitchens using standard cup measures instead of Italian weights. But the specific 144 page reprint on our shelf is not that full book. It is the dessert section on its own: pastries, sweets, frozen desserts, and syrups. If you are after her soup recipes, this edition does not carry them.
What Is Actually In Artusi's Minestre Chapter
Artusi's soup chapter runs through broth based soups and thickened vegetable soups, and it is where his real project shows most clearly: building one shared home repertoire out of a patchwork of regional Italian cooking. Two recipes worth knowing before you open the book: minestrone, a vegetable and bean soup he builds for real depth from the vegetables and beans themselves rather than leaning on a meat shortcut, and minestra di carne passata, a pureed meat and vegetable soup made by working cooked meat and vegetables through a sieve, the pre blender way to get a silky, thickened texture without a machine.
If minestrone is what brought you here, we also keep our own soup recipes written out in full, alongside the wider Italian recipe collection this book pairs with.
Why an 1891 Soup Recipe Reads Strange to a Modern Cook
This is the part a straight reprint will not tell you. Artusi was writing before a home cook had any of the three things a modern kitchen takes for granted: a thermostat that tells you the oven's actual temperature, refrigeration to hold stock or leftovers safely, and a standardized set of measuring cups shared across kitchens. Home bakers before the twentieth century judged heat by holding a hand in the oven and counting how long they could stand it, a method North Dakota State University Extension's food history has documented directly from Civil War era sources. A patent for an actual oven thermometer was not filed until 1889, two years before Artusi published, and it took decades after that to reach ordinary kitchens.
Translate that into how you cook from this book: trust the visual and textural cues Artusi gives (a broth reduced by half, a soup that coats a spoon) over an implied cook time, taste and adjust seasoning as you go rather than trusting a fixed quantity, and treat his measures as a starting range, not a lab spec, especially where the 1945 translation is carrying his original Italian weights across into English kitchen habits.
What Maria Gentile's Book Is Actually Good For
Not soup, but it earns its shelf space on its own terms. The edition we carry is 144 pages of the dessert side of Italian American home cooking from the same general era as Artusi: pastries, sweets, frozen desserts, and fruit syrups, re typeset and reformatted for a modern reader while keeping the original recipes intact. If Artusi's book is the savory backbone, this one is the dessert course from the same period, not a substitute for it.
Which One To Buy
If you are here for soup, minestrone, or the broader question of how Italian home cooking held together before it was standardized: Pellegrino Artusi's Italian Cook Book, $26.56, in stock. If you are after pastries, frozen sweets, and syrups from the same period: The Italian Cook Book by Maria Gentile, $26.39, in stock. Both belong on the same shelf, they just answer different questions, and now you know which one answers yours.
For more on why an old cookbook is worth keeping around a modern kitchen at all, we cover that ground more broadly in Cook Books: A Lost Ark of Recipes.
Thank you for reading, and for trusting us to point you to the right book instead of just the one that showed up first. From all of us at Wine Drop Cookery.
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