The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste, Containing over Two Hundred Recipes for Italian Dishes

In 1901, the Marchesa di Sant'Andrea receives a flurry of letters informing her that nine aristocratic friends have all had their dinner parties canceled simultaneously their cooks have quit in revolt. What follows is a charming comedy of culinary manners, as the Marchesa convenes her flustered friends and proposes a radical solution: she will teach them to cook for themselves. Thus begins The Cook's Decameron, a book that begins as witty social fiction before transforming into something far more ambitious: a passionate argument for Italian cuisine against the French hegemony that dominated English tables. Waters writes with warmth and wit about food, society, and the Pretensions of the English upper classes, whose elaborate dinner parties collapse the moment a professional cook walks out the door. The recipes that follow over two hundred of them are refreshingly practical: built on accessible ingredients, simple techniques, and the belief that good Italian cooking needn't require expensive meats or elaborate preparation. This is food for the everyday table, not the aristocratic banquet. The book endures as a delightful time capsule of Edwardian domestic life, but also as a quietly radical text that asked early 20th-century readers to look beyond French gastronomy for their culinary inspiration.