Giuliano Bugialli, who evangelized for traditional Italian cuisine with authoritative cookbooks and culinary schools that taught future chefs and the occasional celebrity how to prepare its classic dishes, died on April 26 in Viareggio, Italy. He was 88.
His family announced his death in a statement. No cause was given.
Mr. Bugialli spurred a new interest in the food of Italy with his cooking schools and, in 1977, with his book “The Fine Art of Italian Cooking,” which has been reissued several times and is regarded as a standard in the field.
French cuisine was being celebrated in the 1970s, but Mr. Bugialli made the argument that Italian cooking also deserved to be taken seriously, beginning with the understanding that it varies by region — his book, he acknowledged, “starts with a Tuscan, even a Florentine, point of view,” reflecting his birthplace — and that it is not what many Americans assume.
“Tomatoes and garlic!” he told The Washington Post in 1978. “We don’t make every meal with them. In Florence we don’t even use tomatoes and garlic very much.”
Mr. Bugialli wasn’t interested in some Italian version of nouvelle cuisine; in fact, he mocked the idea of it.
“It makes me laugh,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1985. “There is really nothing new. Besides, we cannot forget our own roots.”
Mr. Bugialli’s books won three James Beard Foundation awards, and in 1986 the foundation named him to its prestigious Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America list, a sort of culinary hall of fame.
“Giuliano Bugialli was a pioneer of gastro-tourism, showing us how rewarding it can be to discover a culture through its food,” Mitchell Davis, the foundation’s chief strategy officer, said by email. “He helped generations of cooks and eaters fall in love with and master Italian food.”
For “The Fine Art of Italian Cooking,” Mr. Bugialli took a deep dive into the history of various dishes. He examined cookbook manuscripts going back to the 1300s and traced the dissemination of those early recipes throughout Europe.
Mr. Bugialli took his cooking classes on the road, bringing the gospel of Tuscan cuisine to cities all over the United States.
“There are many dishes we now do not consider Italian that probably originated there,” he wrote, “or at least we can say they are present in 16th-century Italian cookbooks. These include cherry soup, which we now associate with Hungary; turtle soup, now thought of as English and American; fruit pies, again English and American; stuffed cabbage, Eastern European, and so many dishes now thought to be French that it is not possible to list them.”
His book, his cooking schools and his traveling cooking seminars generated so much interest that they may have helped alter the culinary supply-and-demand chain.
“Discussion of ingredients has required revisions,” he wrote in the preface to the second edition of “The Fine Art of Italian Cooking” (1990). “Olive oil availability has changed drastically, for both gastronomic and health reasons; extra-virgin olive oil has changed from an esoteric term to a household phrase. Pancetta, porcini mushrooms, a great variety of Italian cheeses, fresh herbs, radicchio, are all so generally available that one need no longer suggest substitutions.”
Giuliano Bugialli (boo-JYA-lee) was born on Jan. 7, 1931, in Florence. Though he extolled the virtues of traditional recipes lovingly prepared, it was not because his mother, Clara Bugialli, logged a lot of time laboring over a stove. She was a fashion reporter.
“She was one of the first liberated women,” he said. “She hated the kitchen.” (The dedication to his first book reads: “To my mother. Who was the worst cook in the family. But the best everything else.”)
His father, Anselmo, who was in the wine business, did cook a bit, and a grandmother and two aunts who lived with the family were also enthusiastic cooks.
“I was lucky to be born in a family that takes really seriously what is eaten,” he said. Giuliano eventually started preparing family meals himself.
He studied business at the University of Florence and languages at the University of Rome. In the late 1960s he was teaching Italian to American students in Florence when the food he prepared for end-of-the-semester parties attracted notice. In 1972 he taught his first cooking class in Florence.
He moved to New York in the fall of that year to teach Italian at the Dalton School. Again his cooking for extracurricular gatherings drew attention. He was soon teaching cooking classes in New York as well.
Mr. Bugialli thought of himself not as a chef but as a food writer, historian and teacher. “I would never own a restaurant — too depressing,” he told the Copley News Service in 2007. “As a chef you have to compromise, cook what others want. I want to cook what I want.”
Mr. Bugialli’s book “The Fine Art of Italian Cooking” was published in 1977 and has been reissued several times.
He capitalized on the surge of interest in cooking classes in the 1970s and early ’80s. He was a magnetic if exacting teacher.
“The participation classes cover pasta-making, peasant breads, vegetables, meat, fish, poultry and desserts, with samplings of Tuscan wines throughout,” The New York Times wrote of his course in a 1980 article summarizing dozens of the available classes in New York City. “Sound advice on equipment and shopping are included. Students are not encouraged to question the master, however, and this can be a problem.”
He also took his classes on the road. He maintained a demanding touring schedule for years, taking the gospel of Tuscan cuisine not only to other East Coast cities but also to places like Iowa.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper, a creator and former host of the radio program “The Splendid Table,” recalled a class in which Mr. Bugialli was teaching how to make pasta with a pasta machine.
“It was puzzling because he started out with a great heap of dough and started cranking out this supple ribbon of pasta,” she said by email. “He kept cranking, explaining how as the dough comes out of the machine you must lift it with the back of your hands so as not to damage it or let pile up.
“And he kept cranking,” she continued, “urging people to pass on the ribbon until the entire classroom was surrounded by people standing along the walls with pasta draped over their hands, laughing.”
Mr. Bugialli’s Florence school also flourished. After teaching classes at locations in Florence for several years, he and his partner, Henry Weinberg, renovated a farmhouse near Siena.
The school became a stopping point on the culinary travel circuit, drawing famous names. In a 1992 interview with The Guardian, the actor Alan Alda said his trip to Florence to take Mr. Bugialli’s classes was the best he had ever taken.
Mr. Bugialli followed up “The Fine Art of Italian Cooking” with 10 other books, some of them, like “Foods of Italy” (1984), coffee-table volumes lavishly illustrated with photographs. He also turned up on cooking shows and made instructional videos and DVDs.
He is survived by a brother, Sandro.
Mr. Bugialli would sometimes bristle at what he viewed as a lack of knowledge about food among the public, and even among food writers. But if he held strong opinions about cuisine, he also had a sense of humor.
Once, when asked what he would like to eat for his last meal, he replied: “Fusion cuisine and bastardized Italian food. Then, I wouldn’t be afraid to die.”
