The Silver Spoon

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 show more 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! show less

I wasn't sure if I would like this book at first. Ogden Pieter Van Stael aka Peter Van starts off the book as a dull version of Bertie Wooster. But after he's Shanghied and stranded in Lennox the book progresses and he's allowed to grow as a character. Although he seems like a dimwit in the first fifty pages, it's later revealed that he isn't. He just doesn't appreciate at first the practical skills and knowledge that he has. The plot itself is fairly predictable but the ins and outs of how Peter Van makes a real name for himself and builds a company from a single moving van to an entire enterprise is interesting enough to be a page turner.

Some of this I really liked, some of it lost something in translation. There are some great authentic recipes in here, there are also some I'm pretty sure aren't going to work as written. Some of the names of ingredients are just not translated right. Still its very pretty and there were several delicious things. Worth looking it over to decide if would fit in your cookbook library I think.

This book stays on my coffee table for inspirational ideas at dinner. An easily-understood European instruction for the American palate.

It's okay. I'm glad that I didn't spend money on it.

A heavy tome of cooking goodness.

The Silver Spoon by Various (2005)