35 authentic recipes from Bologna, Modena, Parma and the Romagna coast · instant cookbook

The night you serve handmade tortellini, nobody talks about anything else.

Fresh pasta, slow ragù, Parmigiano and Lambrusco. The Emilian dinner your friends will still mention next year — with the story behind every dish, so you can tell it at the table.

35 recipes: tagliatelle al ragù, tortellini in brodo, lasagne verdi, piadina, zuppa inglese and more
The Basics: how to roll real egg pasta (la sfoglia) and make the broth Bologna is proud of
A story for every dish, plus substitutes for what you can't find abroad

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A peek inside

Flip through the pages

Every recipe opens with where the dish comes from and when Emilians eat it. Then come the ingredients, the substitutes for your local supermarket, and clear numbered steps. At the end, the tips Italian grandmothers pass on in the kitchen.

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Get The Taste of Emilia-Romagna — $29.99

You invite them over. They say it was lovely. Nobody mentions it again.

You cook. You clean the house. You buy the good wine.

The pasta comes out of a box, the sauce out of a jar, and the evening is pleasant. Then it is forgotten by Monday.

Maybe you tried "spaghetti bolognese" from a blog. In Bologna, nobody eats that.

Maybe you once had real tagliatelle al ragù on holiday, and every attempt since has tasted like something else.

It is not your cooking. It is the recipes.

What it actually costs to keep hosting this way

The evenings that don't count.

Good company, ordinary food, nothing anyone remembers.

The Italian restaurant you keep going back to.

Around $40 a head for fresh pasta you could make for a fraction of that, if you knew how.

The tenth "authentic" recipe.

Cream in the carbonara, chicken in the ragù, garlic everywhere. Every blog sure of itself. None of them from Emilia.

You're not a bad host. You've just never had the real recipes.

You want food that tastes like Italy, not like an Italian chain
You want one dinner a year that people talk about
You like knowing why a dish is made the way it is
You don't mind spending a Sunday afternoon on something worth it
You shop at a normal supermarket and need honest substitutes

The reason, in one line

In Emilia-Romagna the real recipes were never written for strangers. They were learned at the elbow of someone rolling pasta on a Sunday morning.

Gnocco fritto, the fried bread of Emilia

Emilia-Romagna is where Italy comes to eat. Here's why.

One road, a dozen food capitals.

Bologna, Modena, Parma, Reggio, Piacenza, Ferrara, Rimini: all strung along the Via Emilia, the Roman road laid in 187 BC. Every town gave the world something: Parmigiano Reggiano, Prosciutto di Parma, Mortadella, Aceto Balsamico, tortellini.

Recipes deposited like legal documents.

Bologna takes its food so seriously that the Accademia Italiana della Cucina deposited the reference recipe for ragù at the city's Chamber of Commerce in 1982. The book tells you what that recipe says, and what home cooks do anyway.

Made for a real table.

Butter, eggs, flour, good cheese and time. Almost everything is in an ordinary supermarket; where it isn't, the book tells you what to use instead.

Your next dinner party, three weeks from now

Guests at 7:30. By 8:15, nobody has touched their phone.

A board of Parmigiano, mortadella and warm gnocco fritto is already on the table. The Lambrusco is cold and fizzing.

Then the tagliatelle arrive, glossy with a ragù that has been murmuring on the stove since lunchtime.

Someone asks if you made the pasta yourself. You did.

At the end there is zuppa inglese, and a question you'll hear again: "Where did you learn to cook like this?"

The recipes, the stories, one region — everything you need to host an Emilian night.

The Taste of Emilia-Romagna35 Authentic Recipes, Stories & Traditions · $29.99

35 recipes in 5 chapters: antipasti and street food, fresh pasta and brodo, mains from land and sea, sides, desserts
The Basics: la sfoglia (egg pasta dough) and brodo di carne, step by step
The story of the region: the Via Emilia, Renaissance courts, Artusi, Parmigiano, the sfogline
"If you live outside Italy" notes in every recipe: where to buy, what to substitute
Grandma's advice: the small tips that make the difference
A photo for every recipe · 192 pages · printable · lifetime access

Favourites

swipe →

Tigellep. 16

the little Modena breads you split open and fill while they are still hot

Tagliatelle al Ragùp. 54

Bologna's real "bolognese", the one the city deposited as its official recipe

Lasagne Verdip. 59

green spinach pasta, ragù, béchamel, Parmigiano: the Sunday centrepiece

Tortellini in Brodop. 64

tiny filled pasta in golden broth, Bologna's Christmas

Cotoletta alla Bolognesep. 118

veal, prosciutto, Parmigiano, finished in broth

Zuppa Inglesep. 163

custard, chocolate and Alchermes: the dessert that ends the argument

Get the full collection — $29.99

Generations of Sunday mornings. Written down at last.

In Emilia-Romagna, Sunday lunch starts on Saturday night, with the ragù. On Sunday morning someone floured the big wooden board, cracked eggs into a well of flour and rolled a sheet of pasta so thin you could read through it. The women who did it were called sfogline, and they never used a recipe.

This book gathers those dishes from Bologna to Parma, from the Apennines to the Riviera, with the history that explains them, and with the substitutes you need if you cook in Toronto, Sydney, Auckland or Dublin.

Written for a specific kind of host. Maybe you.

This is for you if…

you want one dinner that people talk about for months
you like to tell the story of what you serve
you shop at ordinary supermarkets and need honest substitutes
you've been to Bologna, or you've always wanted to go

Probably not for you if…

you want 20-minute meals from a jar
you're looking for diet or "healthy swaps" recipes
you already have an Emilian grandmother (lucky you)

One dinner out costs more than this. This gives you every dinner party after it.

$29.99

one payment · USD · about $0.86 per recipe

35 recipes with their stories
The Basics: sfoglia and brodo
Region history and pantry guide
Substitutes for outside Italy
Photo for every recipe, printable pages
Lifetime access

Get The Taste of Emilia-Romagna — $29.99

	This book	The free option (a recipe blog)
Real regional recipes from Emilia-Romagna	✓	✗
Explains why each step matters	✓	✗
Substitutes for your country	✓	✗
Story of every dish to tell at the table	✓	✗
No ads, no pop-ups, printable	✓	✗

Three fair questions before you decide.

"I've never made fresh pasta."

The Basics chapter starts from zero: one egg per 100 g of flour, a board and a rolling pin (or a pasta machine). Start with tagliatelle; tortellini can wait for your third try.

"Can I even get the ingredients here?"

Every recipe has an "If you live outside Italy" note: what to buy in a normal supermarket and what to use when something isn't there.

"I could just search for this online."

You could. You'd find cream in the ragù and garlic in everything. This book gives you the version Emilia actually cooks, and tells you why.

Before you start cooking.

Is it a physical book?

No, it's a digital PDF. You get the download link by email right after purchase. It works on phone, tablet and computer, and you can print it.

Are these real Emilian recipes or "Italian-style"?

Real regional recipes, with notes where towns or families do it differently.

Are all the recipes long?

No. Some are weekend projects (tortellini, lasagne), many are simple: piadina, friggione, scaloppine all'aceto balsamico, torta tenerina.

Measurements?

Metric, with oven temperatures in °C and °F.

Anything else to pay?

No. At checkout you'll see an optional $9 guide, Host Like an Emilian.

Three weeks from now, you could be the person who made the tortellini. All it takes is the right book and one Sunday.

Get The Taste of Emilia-Romagna — $29.99

The Taste of Emilia-Romagna · $29.99Get the book