30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEIl Talismano della Felicità is the book Italian households actually cooked from for most of the twentieth century, and it has never before been available in full in English.
Ada Boni was born in Rome in 1881 and founded and ran the magazine Preziosa before bringing the work together in a single volume in 1929. It subsequently became the obvious wedding gift in Italy, generation after generation, and stood in practically every kitchen in the country.
The contents are vast without becoming unmanageable. There are 1,680 recipes organised into antipasti, soups, pasta and rice, eggs, fish, meat, offal, vegetables, sauces, desserts and preserves, along with complete menu suggestions for every month of the year. The point of departure is Roman, but the scope is national.
The tone is what sets it apart from most classics. Ada Boni writes for someone who needs to get dinner on the table, not for someone trying to impress. The instructions are precise, the ingredients are things that actually exist, and nothing assumes equipment beyond a cooker and patience. That is why the book has survived for almost a century while thousands of more lavish cookbooks have disappeared.
A heavily abridged American translation was published in 1950, but it removed most of the content and adapted the rest to American conditions. This edition contains the complete work, with a foreword by Giorgio Locatelli.
Among those who learnt to cook from it was Marcella Hazan, who could not boil water when she moved to New York, taught herself with Ada Boni on the kitchen counter and then went on to write the next great reference work on Italian cooking.
The cover deserves a mention. Stylised black tomatoes and fish against linen beige, in a design that works just as well on the shelf as it does in the hand.
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 912
Number of recipes: 1,680
Foreword: Giorgio Locatelli
Publisher: Mitchell Beazley
ISBN: 9781846018312
Language: English
First published: 1929, this English edition: 2026
