With a handful of feta here and a tub of yogurt there, The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook doesn't read much like a dieter's guide. If you're looking for a quick (and probably unpleasant) way to drop a dress size, this isn't it. Veteran food authority Nancy Harmon Jenkins is concerned with your lifelong health, not your upcoming highschool reunion. Since ancient times, the Greeks and southern Italians have been consuming a largely plant-based diet, with small amounts of meat, fish, and dairy, and with olive oil as the principal fat. They've been known to pour themselves glass of wine now and again, too. And if you've read your classics, you'll know that the average Greek or Roman, providing he wasn't... More

Although Tuscany and other regions of northern Italy have become the fashionable food areas that food writers have explored in recent years, southern Italy has been mostly ignored (with the exception of Arthur Schwartz's seminal Naples at Table). Until now. Cucina del Sole ("food of the sun") is writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins's effort to rectify that—an exhaustively researched, mouthwateringly detailed journey into the land and the sea and the heart and soul of southern Italian eating and cooking. For modern American cooks and diners, la cucina del sole is the kind of food we want to eat right now—the bold simplicity of easy, straightforward techniques and natural ingredients smartly combined. Thanks to the good folks at William Morrow, we are... More