The 2025 Italian Cookbook Book Guide
By Ian MacAllen on Friday, December 12th, 2025 at 4:01 pm | 530 views
Italian cuisine continues to be as popular as ever when it comes to recipe collections. The more unique recipe collections out this year are tightly focused through regionality or ingredients. There are new surveys too that bring together many different styles from across the nation, including a historic cookbook newly translated into English.
As was the case last year, there’s plenty of snack foods, small bites, and street treats, but expect to find these tucked inside larger volumes.
The most exciting of this year’s books are pushing the boundaries of design with fanciful colors, big bold pictures, and loud fonts. It’s a celebration of maximalism.
Vegetarians will be happy to know there are numerous cookbooks catering to the meatless dinner tables, featuring the best Italian dishes remade for vegans. The growing interest, and acceptance, of vegan Italian food speaks to another trend – reinvention. While there are plenty of traditional books this year, there are a lot more collections focused on the newest of the new, either in Italy or re-interrupted Italian American cuisine. This trend includes introducing non-traditional ingredients into tried and true recipes, and simply reimagining old recipes.
Finally, this year’s cookbooks also emphasize travel. The collections are tied together by the desire to visit a place, and build recipes lists around that inclination. These collections include travel recommendations and profiles of people, places, and events worth visiting. They are not travel guides in the traditional sense, but present food and cuisine through the lens of a traveler, including recommendations for the best restaurants.
Carbone
by Gabe Ulla
Carbone by Gabe Ulla is an oversized, super-luxe book is filled with beautiful photographs, and you might not want to keep it in the kitchen where it will find itself covered in sauce. But the collection includes recipes from the now iconic Italian American restaurant responsible for reigniting the new wave red sauce in America. There’s a combination of restaurant history and a few “secret” recipes, like the meatball recipe that uses Italian sausage. It’s not that secret because Vogue published it. Author Gabe Ulla is also responsible for The Four Horsemen cookbook.
Italian Cooking with Nonna
by Giuseppe Federici
Giuseppe Federici’s Italian Cooking with Nonna is a collection of plant-based Italian recipes. This British Italian Instagram influencer first started exploring plant-focused cooking after his father was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016, he told Numéro Netherlands. But he also draws inspiration from his Sicilian heritage and his grandmother’s cooking.
The Italian Kitchen
by Maxine Clark
A big, beautiful book offers a broad survey of Italian-ish recipes rather than a succinct collection focused on a region or type of food. There are more than 80 recipes divided into basic categories like antipasti, pasta, and pizza.
Mangia
Maria Pasquale
This colorful volume features 600 dishes from 20 geographic regions of Italy, and highlights 200 food festivals, many focused on a single ingredient. Passquale is an Australian Italian who has lived in Rome for the last fourteen years, and the book was first published in Australia. She’s spent her life traveling around Italy having visited every region of the country. She explained to Untold Italy that the actual book writing took about two years.
Super-Italian
By Giada de Laurentiis
Celebrity chef Giada de Laurentiis is back with a new collection of recipes. Part-memoir, part recipe collection, it’s also something of a reinvention of de Laurentiis. She told Fine Dining Lovers that she wanted to “reconnect with my roots” to focus on more Italianesque recipes.
Napoli on the Road
By Michele Pascarella
London restaurant owner Michele Pascarella shares his pizza recipes and step-by-step photo guides. He spoke to Cookery bt the Book with Suzy Chase, a podcast, about the book and his restaurant.
Mother Sauce
By Lucinda Scala Quinn
Lucinda Scala Quinn draws on family recipes going back generations, and shares history lessons as well as food stories. Check out the Cookbook Collective’s conversation with Scala Quinn.
The Scarr’s Pizza Cookbook
By Scarr Pimentel
Scarr’s Pizza is one of the most lauded new pizzerias in New York City so it’s no surprise there’s a new cookbook out to celebrate the restaurant. Though there are just 8 pizza recipes, there are four pages dedicated to dough making, and more than 100 pages before a single recipe appears. Library Journal says the book is “for serious pizza aficionados,” so unless you’re planning on opening a pizzeria, you might be best off waiting on line for a slice at the shop.
The Cooking of Emilia-Romagna, Illustrated Edition
by Giovanna Bellia La Marca
Giovanna Bellia La Marca dives into the recipes of Emilia-Romagna, home of prosciutto and Parmigiano-Reggiano. This is a new edition of an older book, now with illustrations.
Milk Street Backroads Italy
By Christopher Kimball and J. M. Hirsch
Focused on lesser known dishes of Italy, this recipe collection will provide a new way of thinking about Italian dishes, according to LifeHacker. The recipes are also connected to essays in the book.
For the Love of Lemons
By Letitia Clark
This singularly focused recipe collection celebrates the lemon. Letitia Clark told The Independent she had been planning on doing a topical book on lemons since moving to Italy, and would like to do volumes on anchovies and spaghetti. As many as five trees’ worth of lemons were used in the making of this book.
Dolci Italiani
By Ursula Ferrigno
Easy-to-make cakes, gelato, pastries, and chocolate fill this book of sweet recipes. The collection appears “old-fashioned,” according to Nigella, but in a good way.
The Italian Summer Kitchen
By Cathy Whims
The recipe collection is a Kathy Whim’s “love letter to Italy’s warmest and most beautiful season,” according to Appetito Magazine. The rustic dishes and seasonal ingredients highlight the best of Italy’s summer season. One Table, One World praises the collection making accessible recipes, and says its ideal for making vibrant summer dishes.
The Italian Way
by DK Travel
This is a big, bold cultural and history book filled with recipes and produced by a travel company. There are pretty pictures and I’m sure perfectly fine information, but it’s the kind of book you read in Miami because it’s on the table in your boutique hotel. Don’t get me wrong; I’d buy a copy of this for the library in my estate, if I had one, but I much prefer Katie Parla’s Rome for the content.
Italopunk
by Vanja van der Leeden
This wild volume has some stunning visuals to accompany the recipes with 400 photographs highlighting a rapidly changing Italy. The 145 recipes are focused on the newest, new recipes, so don’t expect to find traditional Italian or Italian American dishes here. The volume includes profiles of 12 contemporary chefs, restaurant recommendations and more. Appetito Magazine called it “a blasphemous cookbook”.
Italianish
by Danny Freeman
Improving tried and true classics is tough to do, but Danny Freeman is trying to do just that. The Cookbook Test is skeptical of the collection since its from a video influencer, but ultimately seems to have been won over by the recipes.
Parm to Table
By Christian Petroni and Lesley Porcelli
A modern new take on Italian-American classics, Parm to Table is a playful collection. Pattie Olla Podrida also appreciates Petroni’s personality on the written page. There are standbys like marinara sauce and meatballs, but everything’s presented in clean and easy to read recipes.
Vegana Italiana
By Tara Punzone with Gene Stone
Tara Punzone runs Pura Vita, a vegan Italian restaurant based in Los Angeles. The new collection of 100 vegan recipes, the first from Punzone, features classic Italian dishes, but without animal-based ingredients. There’s even a substitute for Parmigiano Reggiano. She told Fine Dining Lovers her goal was to make vegan cooking accessible for her readers, a response to cookbooks she felt were too complicated for many home cooks to participate in.
Lidia’s The Art of Pasta
by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, Tanya Bastianich-Manuali
Restaurant and television host Lidia Bastianich is no stranger to cookbooks. She writes this collection with her daughter, which could be seen as passing the torch or at least, creating a new nepo baby. Library Journal calls it “reassuring.”
Breaking the Rules
By Joe Sasto with Thea Baumann
Former Top Chef contestant Joe Sasto takes his knowledge from working in Michelin restaurants and adapts his family red sauce recipes into updated versions of these traditional dishes. He also adds new flavors and ingredients not seen in historic red sauce pantries.
Library Journal calls it “innovative yet accessible.”
The Talisman of Happiness
By Ada Boni
Ada Boni brought the first modern Italian cookbook to Italy when it was first published in 1929. As a journalist, Boni collected recipes from across a united Italy, and the Talisman remains a classic still passed on to new generations. However, no decent English translation was ever published (and middling version that included Italian American recipes was published in the late 1950s and 1960s). However, the new translation includes some 1,700 recipes, a forward by Katie Parla (who is a big fan of Boni), and Lidia Bastianich.
Rome
By Katie Parla
Katie Parla has been a tour guide and culinary expert based out of Rome for more than two decades. She’s written more than 11 books, with her most recent previous book, Food of the Italian Islands, focusing on the nation’s coastal cuisines. The new collection returns to Rome where Parla has more than recipes. This book includes a history lesson to contextualize how and why Roman food has evolved over time, and travelers will find the restaurant guide in the back well worth the time. While it won’t fit in your pocket, it’s worth reading before your trip. There are plenty of recipes worth making too.
If you didn’t get a chance to read it yet, check out our interview with Katie Parla. The book is hard to find. If you’re in New York City, pick it up from Archestsratus or order a copy directly from Katie Parla
