Phaidon Press | Tuscany | Cesare Casella

I have quibbles with the recipe - I found the instructions to be occasionally vague - but there is only one real problem with Hazan's actual gnocchi: There aren't enough of them. While Hazan claims that they serve four as a main course, Paolo and I polish them off by ourselves. An hour later, I hear a noise in the kitchen and find Paolo in front of the stove, preparing a most un-Italian snack: popcorn.

"Sorry," he shrugs. "Still hungry."

The Silver Spoon
(Phaidon Press, $40)
"That's Italy's best-selling cookbook," I ­inform Paolo when I catch him leafing through this mammoth tome, which has more than 2,000 recipes for everything from penne arrabbiata to chopped mutton with prunes.

"When have you seen an Italian cook from a recipe?" he scoffs.

As I begin working on the potato gnocchi (one of 18 varieties), I think that if The ­Silver Spoon is a typical cookbook, I know why Italians don't rely on them.

Each recipe is about a paragraph in length and full of mind-bending advice like instructions for how to press the gnocchi against "the underside of a grater." I am surprised to see an egg in the recipe - ­something Paolo dismisses as "cheating." Egg makes the dough easier to handle, but the end result is heavy, which these gnocchi are.

True Tuscan: Flavors and Memories from the Countryside of Tuscany by Cesare Casella
(Morrow Cookbooks, $25)