'Carmine's Family-Style Cookbook: More Than 100 Classic Italian Dishes to Make at Home'
Recipes by Michael Ronis with Mary Goodbody
Photographs by Alex Martinez
St. Martin's Press -- 2008
Buy it on Amazon

In the increasingly refined and innovative world of New York Italian restaurants, Carmine's remains proudly devoted to its red-sauce roots. It's a loud place with large portions and a complete lack of pretension: you'd just as soon find a foam or amuse bouche on its menu as you would a loaf of Irish soda bread or bowl of borscht. The focus is on Southern Italian food like grandma used to make -- think meatballs the size of a baby's head, shrimp scampi and garlic bread, not bruschetta.

It follows that the restaurant's laid-back, welcoming style would translate to its companion cookbook: "We hope," the introduction states, that the book's pages "will soon be stained with red sauce, dribbles of olive oil and sticky fingerprints, all happy accidents as you discover our recipes."

This is a cookbook meant for weeknight family dinners and large gatherings, or any event, really, that calls for large helpings of comfort food. Flipping through it is a bit like visiting the Italian American Culinary Hall of Fame: Look, it's Meatball Heroes! And over there, Penne Alla Vodka! Long time, no see, Shrimp Fra Diavolo! They're all here, and they're all eager to please.

See what we tested and whether the book's worth buying after the jump.


Quality of pictures: Like the food, larger than life. Almost everything is shot in extreme close-up, with varying results. Some dishes, like a colorful Lobster Fra Diavolo, bursts with appetizing vitality. The grayish cloak of melted cheese shrouding a square of eggplant parmigiana, on the other hand, doesn't take well to such amplification.

Takeaway Tips: Just like Carmine's the restaurant, Carmine's the cookbook is a straightforward, user-friendly affair. Each recipe comes with an introduction that relates the dish to its restaurant counterpart: The reader learns that Linguine with White and Red Shrimp Sauce, for example, "is one of the jewels of the Carmine's crown," thanks in large part to shrimp imported from Mexico.

We tested: Pasta with White Calamari Sauce.
Billed as "another top seller at Carmine's," this dish promised a superior white clam sauce and tender calamari. Though the hefty amount of chopped garlic added welcome depth and body, the clam sauce was more of a thin broth. The recipe called for adding fresh parsley, oregano and basil to the sauce's base, which was a good idea in theory. In practice, adding the herbs at an early stage robbed them of much of their flavor. Similarly, the recipe called for boiling and simmering the calamari for almost 10 minutes, which all but guaranteed rubbery seafood. The sauce didn't so much coat the pasta as give it a quick bath before settling at the bottom of the bowl, and could have benefited from a thickener -- and fresh herbs added just before serving.

Worth the investment: If you've been to the restaurant (in addition to the two Carmine's in New York, there are locations in Atlantic City and the Bahamas) and loved the food and atmosphere, then this will allow you to replicate that experience at home. If you have a love of traditional, old-school Italian American food and are looking for a cookbook that emphasizes fresh ingredients and simple technique, then this is an obvious choice. If you're looking for something that reflects the nuance and innovation popularized by chefs like Mario Batali and Lidia Bastianich, then you may want to invest your dollars elsewhere.