Italian Cooking (St. Michael Cookery Library)

A hardcover in very good condition, issued without a dust jacket, as typical of this retail imprint. Boards are clean and unmarked, with no wear to the corners or spine. Pages are clean and unmarked throughout, with richly reproduced color photography and no fading noted. Published under the St Michael imprint, the house imprint of Marks & Spencer, 1983; the text was originally published in paperback by Octopus Books in 1982, with this hardback edition following the same year. Italian Cooking, by Anne Ager, offers a comprehensive course through Italian regional cooking, from soups and starters through pasta, rice, and polenta, to fish, meat, vegetables, and desserts. Richly illustrated throughout with atmospheric color photography in the style typical of Octopus's cookbook line of the period. As a Marks & Spencer retail-imprint edition rather than the standard trade edition, this is a scarcer variant of interest to collectors of vintage cookbook imprints.