The Silver Spoon
May 13, 2011 by admin
Filed under Italian food books
The Silver Spoon
The Silver Spoon is the most influential and successful cookbook in Italy. Originally published in 1950, it became an instant classic. Considered to be essential in every household, it is still one of the most popular wedding presents today. The Silver Spoon was conceived and published by Domus, the design and architectural magazine famously directed by Giò Ponti from the 1920s to the 1970s. A group of cooking experts was commissioned to collect hundreds of traditional recipes from the diffe
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The New Regional Italian Cuisine Cookbook: Delectable dishes from Italy’s Alpine Piedmont region to the island of Sicily
- ISBN13: 9780764160684
- Condition: USED – Very Good
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
It’s both a beautifully illustrated, recipe-filled cookbook and an armchair guide to Italy’s several distinct culinary regions, from the Alpine Piedmont area in the north to the southern island of Sicily. A separate chapter for each of eight regions opens with a magnificent landscape photo on a two-page spread, followed by several photo-filled pages describing the region’s people, their way of life, and locally-produced foods and wines. The rest of each chapter is devoted to the region’s recipes
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This ‘Silver Spoon’ is only half full,
Like almost anyone with a passion for food living in Italy, I’ve got a copy of Il Cucchino d’Argento on my bookshelf — it’s the Bible of Italian cuisine. Sadly, this first English-language edition of the book won’t be achieving the same status among Anglophile lovers of Italian table fare.
It’s not the fault of the Italian publishers — the book is still a one-stop resource for everything from antipasti to ziti, with great illustrations, and all bound very handsomely — but lazy translators and unambitious editors ruin this English-language edition, which is titled The Silver Spoon.
Just to give a few examples: metric measurements are awkwardly translated (one recipe suggests adding 11.35 ounces of cheese to a dish, another says the cook should add “1 to 4 portions” of salt — without saying how large the portions should be), vocabulary is inexact (the words “pot,” “pan,” and “skillet” seem to be used interchangeably, as do “glass” and “cup”), no suggestions are made for meat and vegetable ingredients difficult to find away from Italy’s shores, and basic information such as how many people a certain dish will serve and how long it will take to prepare (all of which is in the original) are just left out. There are typographical errors and misspellings galore, several of them comical. But my favorite mistakes include some that just left me scratching my head: one marinade must be “stirred frequently and infrequently for 5 to 12 hours” (the Italian says it must be “stirred regularly but not often for 5 to 6 hours”) and there’s a cake that upon completion must be “carefully cooled, or not” when in Italian it must be “cooled until warm to the touch.”
All this is all a real a shame, because this book really should be a staple of anyone’s cookbook library. If you can’t figure out Italian well enough to get Il Cucchino d’Argento and you won’t be frustrated by the awkward and puzzling texts in this beautiful volume, then go ahead and get it. For anyone else, I’d suggest waiting a year or two until the next edition is released (and is, hopefully, edited more carefully).
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Beautiful work – a great accomplishment (with a few nitpicks),
_The Silver Spoon_ was originally published in Italy in 1950 by the Italian architectural and design magazine _Domus_. (Italian Title “Il Cucchiaio d’argento.” The eighth edition came out in 1997.)The publishers at Phaidon, the British publishing house, have done a remarkable job of translating and designing _The Silver Spoon for American and British cooks. The cookbook combines both traditional Italian recipes, and more contemporary Italian recipes influenced by other cuisines. If I had to make a comparison, I would say that it’s much like a Italian version of “The Joy of Cooking,” though not nearly as comprehensive.
I have three or four “classical” Italian cookbooks, and many of the recipes in those books are repeated here. I think that I’ll hang on to them – but more for the extra information relating to Italian cuisine (which this book lacks) than for the recipes.
The food:
_The Silver Spoon_ is divided into 14 chapters (with a preface):
Eating is a Serious Matter (preface)
Cooking Terms – This chapter is a comprehensive glossary of all of the cooking terms used in the book. It covers terms for ingredients, cookware, and cooking techniques. I especially liked how the authors delineated exactly what they mean for specific terms related to technique; for example, “Brown in a Pan: To cook vegetables over low heat in butter or oil until they go a light golden color. This is particularly common with thinly slice donion or garlic cloves. Meat or vegetables may also be cooked in oil or butter ina skillet over high heat until a rich, even brown in color during the first or final stage of cooking.” Equally detailed descriptions are given for everything from “Aceto Balsamico” to “Whisk/Beat”. Experienced cooks may find these descriptions unneccesary, but as an amateur, I really appreciated them. The definitions of Italian words “Cacciatore”, “Ribollita”, etc. are the only indications in the entire book of the origins of any particular dish.
Tools and Equipment – This chapter gives information on the types of cookware necessary for the recipes included, some notes on kitchen organization, and two full-color pages of pictures of the different types of cookware neccessary.
Sauces, Marinades, and Flavored Butters – This chapter includes recipes for nearly every sauce that I’ve ever heard of – including all of the mother sauces, each with two to ten sauces based on them.
This chapter is divided into the following subchapters:
Hot Sauces
Cold Sauces
Marinades
Flavored Butters ( five pages of recipes for these)
Antipasti, Appetizers, and Pizzas – Include Crostini, Pates, Quiches, Canapes, and many others.
First Courses – Soups, Pasta (fresh and dried), and Rice Dishes
Eggs and Frittata
Vegetables – How to prepare every vegetable under the sun (including some I have never heard of) and salads. The salads chapter seems a bit short, though meat and seafood salads are including in those sections.
FIsh, Crustaceans, and Shellfish – Includes information on serving sizes, cooking techniques, and how to get rid of ligering fish smells in the kitchen. Has seperate subchapters for 32 types of fish, 12 types of shellfish, snails and frogs (5 recipes for frogs alone!)
Meat and Variety Meats – Gives information on Cuts of meat (Both Italian and American) for Lamb, Pork, Beef, and Veal, along with several hundred recipes. Also includes bits on sausages and “Variety Meats”, or Offal.
Poultry – The basics (Chicken, Turkey, Duck) with Squab, Capon, and Guinea Fowl also.
Game
Cheese – a short chapter giving first Courses and appetizers using cheese
Desserts and Baking – Gives recipes for every type of pastry imaginable, frostings and sauces, creams, puddings, you name it. An exhaustive chapter. (But nothing on baking bread.)
Menus by Celebrated Chefs – Includes menus with recipes from 23 Italian, Italian-American, and Anglo-Italian Chefs. Includes Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali. (No Pictures in this section, but plenty more recipes. )
The book contains both a list of recipes by ingredient and a comprehensive index.
The recipes are not direct translations from the Italian – the translators have converted ingredients into imperial units and have written the instructions so that they are more descriptive.I found the recipes easy to read and to understand. For the most part, the writing is concise, but instructions are given in such a way that a person unfamiliar with a technique used can easily complete the recipe – the Italian version was apparently written for more advanced cooks.
The design is very well executed. This is a cookbook to…
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Great Survey of What Italians Eat. Buy It.,
`The Silver Spoon’, the very first translation of an Italian cookbook in its eighth edition, published since 1950. This 2005 translation is based on the 1997 Italian edition published by Editoriale Domus. While there are credits for drawings, photography, and provisions of props, there is no credit for either author or editor in clear sight.
The blurbs on the book’s cover tout the volume as `the bible of authentic Italian cooking’. I believe this can mislead some buyers in thinking that the book is devoted exclusively to Italian techniques or that the book has the very best and most definitive demonstrations of Italian cooking techniques. It would be much more accurate to compare this to either `The Joy of Cooking’ or `James Beard’s American Cookery’ in that its emphasis is more on completeness rather than depth or excellence in pedagogical presentation. At 2000 recipes, this volume easily trumps some recent big Italian cookbooks, such as Michele Scicolone’s `1000 Italian Recipes’ or Mario Batali’s `Molto Italiano’. If broad range is what you want, this is exactly the book for you.
What it does not have is any but the slimmest anecdotal information on regionality of dishes or exceptionally well explained techniques for such mysteries as fresh pasta making, bread baking, sausage making, or homemade mozzarella. You may also be surprised to find a large selection of terms and recipes from French, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Russian, and Japanese cuisines. This is all in keeping with a book devoted to be a reference for Italian home cooking. Italian bourgeois amateur cooks, it seems, are just as likely to use the French name for many dishes such as souffle or crepe as the Italian name. This belies the statement I read recently that it is only in America where one finds the fascination with world cuisines, as if all Italians spent all their time eating just the foods of their local province.
The introduction to this volume states that in the course of translating the book, care was taken to convert names of ingredients to designate provisions familiar to the American home. Unfortunately, they were not entirely successful in doing this, as I found multiple references to `Caesar mushrooms’ with no explanation of what species of mushroom may be similar in the American megamart. What’s doubly odd is that according to `Larousse Gastronomique’, Caesar’s mushroom is rare today and remarkably similar to a poisonous variety of mushroom. I also found the recipe directions still relatively sparse in detail and not entirely up to date to the latest in American culinary technique. One example is that for the recipe for veal saltimbocca, it calls for salting the meat after the saute. Modern practice recommends salting meat before sauteeing. Similarly, the recipes for fresh pasta or pizza dough are just a bit terse, with no good tips on the finer points of various equipment for kneading, rolling out, and cutting fresh pasta.
All this means is that this is not necessarily a good first book on Italian cooking. Marcella Hazan’s books, especially `Marcella Cucina’, are far better introductions to classic Italian technique, with Carol Field’s `The Italian Baker’ being a far superior introduction to Italian breads. But that doesn’t say there is not a whole lot to like about this book, whose great strength lies in the great number of variations it gives on common dishes and the coverage it gives to dishes which many Italian cookbooks don’t even bother to mention.
This book includes several great chapters on subjects that are almost entirely ignored by modern cookbook writers and Food Network faves. Anyone who has dabbled in Italian cuisine knows a little about timbales, mostly as a dish that is very complicated and done only for major celebrations. All treatments of the dish I have seen up to now reinforce this notion. It was featured as a celebratory dish in Stanley Tucci’s movie `Big Night’ and as a `tour de force’ recipe in an episode of `Mario Eats Italy’. The best recipes I have seen for it are in excellent books on regional cooking and are all very long. This book gives us a whole chapter on timbales with twelve (12) recipes, none of which take more than one page. Another `lost’ culinary subject is covered in the chapter on eggs. You expect and get lots of frittata recipes, but you also get ten recipes for shirred (baked) eggs plus recipes for eggs en cocotte, medium cooked eggs, and hard cooked eggs. And, while frittatas are a darling of the Food Network set, I have never seen them do a filled frittata or a frittata cake. You get them here!
One of the most useful items in the book may be the comparison of Italian versus American cuts of beef and the appropriate cooking techniques for each cut.
The chapter on baking and desserts is surprising in its size (about 120 pages) and by the heavy presence of both French and Austrian pastry…
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Great Regional Italian Cookbook,
This is an excellent book, I got it a few months ago and have been slowly trying the recipes, some are harder to find ingredients than others. At this very moment I’m making the Palermo Rib eye steak recipe from it. Twice I’ve made the Zucchini Casserole. Because of this book I’ve started cooking with anchovies as an ingredient in dishes something I never would have considered before.
Every dish has a picture which helps me a lot to decide if I want to make it.
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Awesome!!!!,
What an awesome book! I gave it to my Italian-food-fan mother in law for her birthday and for the entire week I was there we cooked out of it! Delicious, creative, new! Wonderful addition to the “old” cook book!!!
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coffee table… leveler material.,
This book is udder garbage. Don’t let the pictures fool you! The recipes are just simply untested. None of the pasta doughs work. And procedures are missing.
Terrine of chicken livers and white asparagus.
the recipe calls for the livers and asparagus to be cooked far longer than what is required, the livers would be rubber, and the asparagus would be mush.
Nougat Honey Semifreddo
“cook the honey until dark in color” is it too much to ask to get an exact temperature here? honey is already dark in color, any darker and its burnt!
Wine Cream Gratin
Zabaione did not thicken and had to alter it.
Mussels in Fennel Gravy
Terribly under seasoned!
Chocolate Mousse
Probably the worst recipe in the book. Baking chocolate is very different from a 70% cocao chocolate. Because the recipe calls for baking chocolate, it is EXTREMELY bitter, i want some sweet for dessert not this crap. Oh and not to mention the 2 tsp of black pepper in the mousse, that just pushed it over the edge of nasty.
Rabbit with Saffron
we all chuckled at this one. “1 rabbit cut into 12 pieces.” Cut the freakin rabbit into its primal parts and cook it!
Baked potatoes and Dandelion greens.
Are they guessing on cooking times???? I have never met a casserole that has to cook for 1 hour 15 minutes. It was dry as a bone after that long. Cook this thing 45 minutes tops.
Fried ricotta with stewed figs
Unlike the picture, serve these two mixed together, because the ricotta have NO flavor.
All of these recipes plus the pasta recipes that are just plain incorrect. These doughs tear long before they can be rolled thin enough, the minute amount of eggs in these recipes can no way activate enough gluten to give enough extensibility to the dough. And with the intentional or unintentional exclusion of steps in most of the recipes i give this book 1 star. Don’t forget to wash and scrub those lemons ladies and gentlemen!.
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