The Silver Spoon. Phaidon Press, New York 2005
My younger sister gave me this book for Christmas a couple of years ago. I saw it under the tree, this oddly-shaped wrapped parcel with my sister's usual artistic wrap job that puts the rest of us to shame. I picked it up and hefted it - I could tell it was a book, but what kind of book could be this heavy, this thick? Even my college textbooks weren't so huge! Then I unwrapped it: a giant tome of cooking. I could just see Indiana Jones skulking his way through my kitchen, dodging flying place settings and hostile native cats, to make it to the cookbook stand. There he would open the mighty volume and find the instructions. If he interpreted them correctly, he would have the perfect souffle and impress all and sundry with his kitchen prowess. If he failed - well, not only would he have a major mess on his hands, but a giant stock pot would chase him through the halls of my house and the more hostile native cat would feast on his steaming entrails.
Well, that didn't happen. My own Indiana Jones days are long gone, and we've moved into a home with more storage space (negating the threat of the stock pot.) The book continues to be a mighty tome, though. It is apparently the best-selling Italian cookbook, translated for the first time into English. It's kind of like a very basic cookbook, an ultimate reference manual for your kitchen. I guess it's kind of like our own Joy of Cooking or something like that. Organized by course and by type of ingredient, it offers exhaustive advice on how to prepare a whole wide, wonderful world of food. With 1,199 pages of recipes and instruction, you'll be hard pressed to find an ingredient that doesn't show up somewhere in here!
If you're looking for pictures, this book is not for you. While there are photos, there are too many recipes in here to show pictures of them all. I haven't cooked very many recipes from this book, either. I tend to use it more as a reference, to get some of the basic ideas behind how to prepare certain ingredients if I'm not overly familiar with them. Some of the recipes seem very odd, almost like the kinds of recipes you find in your mom's old cookbooks but you've never seen made. I'm not saying that they're not made, just that to an American palate they seem a little strange. Still, I refer to this book on a pretty regular basic. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who does a lot of cooking or to a newly wed couple.
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