Can cheese talk? Can food really make you invisible? In Italy, where the simplest home meal is restaurant quality, what do Michelin stars mean?

Brook’s next book is still in the oven, but while you’re waiting, here’s an appetizer:

Povero figlio, dovrà mangiare pane comprato.

–Ignacio Silone, I contadini e la neve

(Poor boy, he’ll have to eat store-bought bread.)

“The Italian kitchen delivers far more than sensual bowls of pasta in leafy green, fiery red or deep seafood black. Healing, taboos, history; sacred, secular and pagan celebrations; dietary prescriptions for children and animals: it’s a vault of culinary riches, and the cook holds the key to it all.

Food is powerful stuff. Italian cooks are masters of kitchen sorcery, using food to awe, flatter and seduce. Michelin chefs take their traditions to the stars, but whether the cook is mamma or Michelangelo, they draw from their culinary palette to paint an edible portrait of their identity every day.”