THE Silver Spoon (Phaidon, 1263pp, $69.95) has been Italy's best-selling cookbook for more than 50 years, being to Italian cooks what Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion is to Australian cooks, only better. And no wonder The Silver Spoon sells and sells and sells; it is without doubt one of the world's most comprehensive recipe guides. Now, for the first time, it has been translated into English so Anglophones can see what the fuss is about.
There's everything here, from simple tips on how to buy, store and cook an egg ("It is not advisable to store eggs near strong-smelling food as their shells are porous and tend to absorb odours easily") through to complex and bizarre recipes (how to prepare a hard-boiled egg in aspic, to name just one). Indeed, just to prove how comprehensive this book is, there are almost 50 pages of egg recipes.
Being an Italian cookbook does not restrict The Silver Spoon to pizza and pasta recipes either. This book carries some of the most unusual dishes I've encountered, including a whole chapter on brains (brain roulades with truffle, brain sauce, brains and bone marrow in curry sauce, brains au gratin and so on). There are myriad other offal suggestions for the not so faint of heart (chicken giblets, calf's head, lamb heart, pig's liver) as well as dishes of kid, eel, snipe, sturgeon, frog's legs, pigeon and more.
Donna Hay this ain't. In fact, reading this book put me in mind of a retro dinner party. The menu? Why not start with prawn vol-au-vents (page 192) followed by duck a l'orange (page 878) with sides of veloute brussels spouts (page 448) and turnips with bacon (page 555), with creme caramel (page1028) for dessert.
Australian readers may be interested to know The Silver Spoon's recipe for bolognese sauce does not include a tin of tomatoes or cups of water but works off a base of finely chopped onions, carrot, celery and garlic with only a small amount of mince and a little tomato paste. It is served with tagliatelle, not spaghetti.
In all, The Silver Spoon is highly recommended for adventurous chefs or those bored with standard cookbook offerings. 'Spoon fed' A LITTLE FOOD FLIGHT READING Elizabeth Meryment in The Australian November 19, 2005
