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Loading... The Silver Spoonby Phaidon Press
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. There is so much more to Italian cooking than pasta, pizza and risotto and this huge doorstep of a tome has it all in abundance. The hardest thing is deciding what to cook. (  ) gaskella | Dec 12, 2007 |  A heavy tome of cooking goodness. ( ) neontapir | Oct 6, 2007 | This book stays on my coffee table for inspirational ideas at dinner. An easily-understood European instruction for the American palate. (  ) mms | Jan 7, 2007 | If the hype is to be believed, this has been the best selling Italian cookbook for 50 years, regularly given to new brides as an essential for setting up your own kitchen. Well, this is one case where the hyperbole might actually be real. Because if the English translation is anything to go by, this cookbook is a food bible worth reading from cover to cover and revisiting every day. Not only does it contain simple recipes that even the beginner cook could confidently set out to prepare, it includes the kind of information that many books assume you know (how much is a decent serving of certain vegetables, and what is the best way to plain prepare them, for example). There are also explanations of cooking terms, equipment, and explanations of the foodstuffs themselves. I am not sure this is included in the Italian original, but there are also suggested menus from some of Italy’s top chefs. But the real reasons to buy this book are those recipes – very few are more than a couple of sentences long. They are clear; they are simple, often involving only a few ingredients. But they are delectable. They are gorge-worthy. It is enough to make anyone become a devoted Italian food-lover. Also worth noting – though there are sections on meat and seafood, this book has many, many recipes that are either vegetarian, or could be made so with simple substitutions (e.g. vegetable stock instead of meat stock). Please – go and buy this book! ( ) ForrestFamily | Jun 5, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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Though the recipe range is vast, it must be said that American readers, anxious to cook this authentic fare, will encounter problems. Translating a cookbook from one language to another requires cultural recasting as well as word substitution, and in this the book's editors have been lax. The problems include non-idiomatic usages, for example, calling for "pans" when "pots" is needed; awkward conversions from the metric system, resulting in requirements like eleven ounces of zite; and the inclusion of ingredients like cavolo nero (Tuscan cabbage), tope (a Mediterranean fish), and pancetta copatta (ham-stuffed pancetta) that are unavailable here and for which no alternatives are suggested. In addition, the recipes themselves are often insufficiently specific or detailed--even seasoned bakers will pause before cake recipes that don't specify pan size--and can also lack yields. Space considerations have also meant printing recipes in single, one-column paragraphs, which can make place-finding while cooking difficult, and there are typos and other goofs (one recipe for four specifies six cups of sliced scallions; another requires that a marinade be "stirred frequently for five to twelve hours").
All this said, many cooks--casual and serious alike--as well as cookbook collectors, will want The Silver Spoon. It's an essential document of the Italian table and as such a classic. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a complete cookbook library without the book--a welcome evocation of a much-beloved repertoire by those who know it best. --Arthur Boehm
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:19:19 -0500)
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