URBAN ITALIAN: Simple Recipes and True Stories From a Life in Food

If such dishes strike you as suspiciously silken, then Andrew Carmellini may be for you. Carmellini is the chef who opened A Voce, in Gramercy Park (he’s since left), and his URBAN ITALIAN: Simple Recipes and True Stories From a Life in Food (Bloomsbury, $35), written with his wife, Gwen Hyman, is full of two-fisted recipes. You get a taste of his culinary philosophy in a question that one of his desserts prompts him to pose: “What could be more fun, at the end of a long, boozy meal, than fluffy doughnuts filled with pastry cream and dipped in chocolate?” (I don’t know. A Zantac?) His Rigatoni Pugliese is goopier, I suspect, than anything you’re likely to sample in southern Italy, with three cups of tomato sauce dousing one unsuspecting pound of pasta — plus a pound of hot sausage, a bunch of broccoli rabe, half a can of chickpeas (he genially excuses you from boiling up dried ones — “no one but the pickiest Pugliese grandmother will be able to tell”) mashed into the sauce and the other half stirred in whole: all in all, the kind of dish you would make Michael Phelps for breakfast. Carmellini’s fennel braised in orange juice and Sambuca (with golden raisins, yet) all but shouts its flavors at you. A rack of pork, beautifully tenderized in brine, gets slathered with a paste of fennel seed, thyme, rosemary, sage and (way too much) salt, roasted and then topped with a sweet sauce of plums and grappa. If that doesn’t wake up your palate, it’s deceased.