Twelve: A Tuscan Cookbook

You will not find Twelve on any tinned fish listicle. It is a Tuscan cookbook organized by month, written by a London-born, South African-raised food writer who came to Tuscany in her twenties, fell in love with the food and a man named Giovanni, and stayed. It belongs in this library for one reason that matters more than shelf categorization: it is the cleanest English-language account of what Italian oil-packed tuna actually is, which is to say — a pantry staple so fundamental it barely requires explanation, which is exactly why no one explains it.

Tessa Kiros’s background is unusual. Born in London to a Finnish mother and Greek-Cypriot father, raised in South Africa, then restaurants in Mexico, Greece, and Sydney before Tuscany — she writes from the position of someone who chose the food she writes about rather than someone who inherited it. That position creates a particular kind of attentiveness. She notices the things that would be invisible to a writer who grew up eating Tuscan food for granted: the specific way a can of tuna is drained and broken by hand rather than flaked with a fork; the unselfconsciousness with which a September salad becomes a November braise by swapping one tin for another; the way anchovies appear in a lamb marinade without a single word of explanation, because of course they do.

Twelve is organized by month, each chapter beginning with a quiet introduction to the season’s available ingredients, the weather, the pace of life in the Tuscan countryside. The recipe chapters are not dominated by tinned fish — this is a whole-kitchen Tuscan cookbook, and the months are as likely to bring rabbit in October or fresh fava beans in May as they are to bring tuna. But tuna in olive oil appears the way it appears in Italian home cooking generally: as a given. Pasta al tonno in the warmth of August, because there is excellent pasta al tonno in August. A conserva-dressed salad in July. Anchovies in an oil-and-caper sauce for pasta in the winter months. These are not featured recipes with headnotes and ingredient backstory. They are just things people eat.

The reason to buy this book for your conservas education is the corrective it provides. The American tinned fish conversation is overwhelmingly Iberian-coded — Spanish anchovies, Portuguese sardines, Galician razor clams. Italy’s relationship to oil-packed tuna is older than the trend, quieter, and arguably more instructive. Italians have been eating tuna from a tin over pasta since before their grandparents were born. It was never elevated, because it never needed to be. Understanding this tradition reframes the whole category: the conservas moment is not about upgrading a forgotten food into a premium product. It is about Americans catching up with how large parts of the world have eaten, unself-consciously, for generations.

What this book will not give you: ten different anchovy preparations with tasting notes, a tin sourcing guide, or a region-by-region breakdown of Italian preserved fish traditions. It is a domestic book, warm and unhurried, and the tinned fish content exists inside a much larger whole. If you want an Italian conservas reference, this is your Trojan horse — the Italian sensibility is here, absorbed through a hundred quiet recipes rather than declared in a chapter title. The recipes are reproducible and the prose is good. Both are rarer than they should be.