I’ve written about my addiction to cookbooks before, and I’m not lying- if I spy a beautiful, hard-covered cookbook filled with glossy photos of beautiful food, it’s virtually impossible to turn away without buying it. Ditto if I see one online, especially if it’s won a James Beard Award or is highly recommended by a chef or food personality I admire. So you can imagine how quickly I grabbed Il Viaggio Di Vetri: A Culinary Journey as it sat alone on the top shelf of the cookbooks section at Borders. After all, it was written by Marc Vetri of Philadelphia's Vetri Ristorante, which Mario Batali called, “possibly one of the best Italian restaurants on the East Coast.” Suzanne Goin once said “I do pretty much whatever Marc [Vetri] tells me to do.” Yup, count me in.
I’ve never been fortunate enough to dine at one of Marc Vetri’s restaurants, but had heard he makes some of the best pasta in the United States. After inviting my parents over for a family dinner, I started flipping through the pages, looking to see which fresh pasta I would try and recreate from Vetri’s many recipes. However, one recipe in particular caught J’s eye, Pig’s Head Bolognese, and although it was one of the few pasta dishes in the book that called for dry, semolina pasta, I couldn’t deny the power of the pig and chose it being my journey into cooking a la Vetri.
