Who was Pellegrino Artusi, and why does his cookbook still matter?

Artusi was not a chef. He was born on 4 August 1820 in Forlimpopoli, near Forlì, made his living in business, and spent most of his long life in Florence, where he died on 30 March 1911 at the age of 90. Cooking was his passion rather than his trade, which turns out to be the secret of the book.

The book nobody wanted to publish

Artusi could not find a publisher for La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (roughly, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), so he paid for the first edition himself. It appeared in Florence in 1891 and sold slowly at first: about a thousand copies in four years. Then word of mouth did its work. By the time Artusi died, more than 200,000 copies had been sold, and the book has never really left Italian kitchens since. The Treccani encyclopaedia counts 790 recipes plus appendices and indexes.

Why it mattered then

Artusi did three things that set the book apart:

• He gathered regions together. He is regarded as the first to put recipes from all of Italy's regions into one cookbook, at a time when the country had only recently been unified politically and was still very much a patchwork at the table.
• He wrote for homes. The Treccani entry describes how his approach brought refined cooking, once a privilege of courts and the wealthy, into the reach of middle-class and ordinary households.
• He wrote like a person. His prose is light and conversational, full of anecdotes and asides, so the book reads like a knowledgeable friend talking you through dinner rather than a manual barking orders.

That combination is why he is so often credited with helping to establish a national Italian cuisine, and why a 2011 film marking the centenary of his death was subtitled, in effect, the unification of Italy in the kitchen.

Why it still matters now

Three reasons we keep coming back to him:

• It is the ancestor of the Italian home kitchen. It was written for middle-class families cooking at home rather than for professional chefs, and that is still the kitchen most of us cook in.
• It is a model of tone. Confident, funny, opinionated, never precious. Much of the best food writing since has the same voice.
• It is still a living book. Casa Artusi in Forlimpopoli, opened in 2007, runs a cookery school and celebrates his idea of home cooking, and the town has held a Festa Artusiana every June since 1997.

How to read it today

Don't expect the precision of a modern recipe book; it was written more than 130 years ago, for people who already cooked every day. Read it as history you can taste: dip in, enjoy the stories, and cook the simpler things using your own judgement. An English translation, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, was first published in 1997, so you do not need Italian, though a little helps with the jokes.