La Grotta: Ice Creams and Sorbets

Here we have a sophisticated cookbook with a huge number of recipes for ice creams and sorbets. La Grotta is not for the average home cook; the recipes are rather involved and many ingredients will be hard to find (buffalo or Guernsey milk, carrot seeds, candied green walnuts, angelica, and so on). Kitty Travers’s recipe instructions are very good, easy to follow. But the book has several faults, the most obvious is the odd title font. It’s cute, whimsical but not readily obvious, reader-unfriendly and confusing. This reviewer had to page through the book for a minute to figure out what the book title was, and that’s true for recipe titles. Another problem is the measurements. It’s British but conversions are also given in US measurements, however, they are not accurate. They are rounded up or down to the nearest whole but often seriously off making the final recipe result differently. The lengthy introduction is Travers’s bio and there are many full-page sidebars continuing on her life experience around the world. Illustrations are beautiful but the recipe layout is poor with instructions spilling to overleaf pages. This book is more for professionals than for average home cooks.