AMMAZZA! by Hillary Sterling Review | A Cookbook That Teaches More Than Recipes
Cookbook Review
AMMAZZA!
A beautiful, ambitious celebration of appetite, heritage, seasonal cooking and the stories we carry to the table.
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AMMAZZA! is not a collection of quick Tuesday-night dinners or five-ingredient shortcuts. It is a cookbook built around appetite. Around slowing down long enough to notice the seasons, gathering people around a table and treating food as something worthy of our full attention.
Chef Hillary Sterling brings together her Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn, her years spent in some of New York’s most celebrated kitchens and her deep love of Italian cooking. The result is something that feels surprisingly intimate: part cookbook, part culinary memoir and part invitation to become a more curious cook.
This is a cookbook built around appetite, memory and the pleasure of making something worth lingering over.
A Life Told Through Food
What makes this book especially compelling is the way Sterling’s personal history appears throughout the recipes. She writes about growing up in a close-knit Jewish family in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where her grandmother kept kosher downstairs while the rest of the family was a little more flexible upstairs.
Those family traditions sit alongside the lessons she gathered while working in restaurant kitchens and falling in love with Italian food. Instead of feeling like a disconnected collection of impressive dishes, the book becomes the story of a chef finding her voice through ingredients, technique, travel and memory.
There are Italian influences, naturally, but they are not treated as rigid rules. Sterling allows them to mingle with the flavors of New York, her Jewish heritage and the other culinary traditions she has encountered throughout her career.
Cooking With the Seasons
One of my favorite aspects of AMMAZZA! is its seasonal organization. The recipes move through the year rather than treating every ingredient as though it should be available at every moment.
There is something deeply satisfying about a cookbook that encourages you to work with the season instead of fighting against it. It makes the recipes feel intentional and helps transform the book into something you can return to throughout the year.
It also makes the cookbook wonderfully suited to the kind of person who wanders a farmers’ market without a strict plan, sees what looks beautiful and begins building a meal from there.
Beautiful, Ambitious Recipes
The recipes lean toward the ambitious side. This is not necessarily the book you will reach for when it is 6:30 p.m., you are exhausted and everyone wants dinner immediately.
Some dishes call for specialty ingredients, seasonal produce or techniques that assume a certain level of confidence in the kitchen. Depending on where you live, ingredients such as ramps, bottarga, lamb belly or goat butter may require a farmers’ market, specialty shop or a little creative substitution.
But that ambition feels intentional rather than exclusionary. AMMAZZA! wants you to stretch. It invites you to spend an afternoon cooking, to learn a new technique or to plan an entire dinner around one particularly irresistible dish.
Sterling also includes practical guidance throughout, covering everything from cleaning artichokes to making pasta and frying food at home without fear. These details help bridge the distance between admiring a restaurant-level recipe and actually making it yourself.
A Cookbook Made for Lingering
Visually, the book is beautiful. The photography captures the warmth, texture and abundance of the food without making it feel too polished to eat.
I did find myself wishing there were more photographs of the finished dishes, particularly for some of the more technical recipes. When a recipe asks a little more of the home cook, having a visual destination can be reassuring.
Still, the photographs that are included are gorgeous, and the book has the kind of tactile, transportive quality that makes it enjoyable even when you are not actively planning a meal.
Who Is This Cookbook For?
This is a cookbook for curious, confident home cooks. It is for people who enjoy wandering farmers’ markets, making pasta on a Sunday afternoon or inviting friends over simply because they found a recipe too delicious to keep to themselves.
- Intermediate and experienced home cooks
- Readers who love Italian food and seasonal ingredients
- Cookbook collectors who value culinary storytelling
- People who enjoy planning dinner parties and full menus
- Anyone looking to become more adventurous in the kitchen
Final Thoughts
More than anything, AMMAZZA! succeeds because it captures something many chef-driven cookbooks miss: generosity.
It does not simply showcase Hillary Sterling’s talent. It invites readers into her process, her memories and the deliciously tangled collection of influences that shaped her cooking.
This may not be the most beginner-friendly cookbook on the shelf, and it may ask you to hunt for an ingredient or devote more time to a recipe than usual. But it also gives more in return: inspiration, confidence, culinary knowledge and the desire to gather people around the table.
It asks a little more from its readers, but it rewards that effort with food that feels alive.
Ready to Cook With the Seasons?
Discover more than 100 recipes filled with Italian influence, Brooklyn history, restaurant technique and plenty of appetite.
Shop AMMAZZA! on AmazonThank you to NetGalley and Scribner for providing an advance digital copy of this cookbook in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.