Books : The Silver Spoon

Rating: - I've lost my heart...
to The Silver Spoon! It's beautiful AND practical. I love the colour coding, the 2000 recipes, the simplicity and authenticity of this sumptous book. AND the fact that it sits OPEN on my kitchen table ( oh the cook books I could name that don't!)Anybody can cook real italian food with a book like this -where on earth has it been until now??Christmas has come early in our house.

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Rating: - Brilliant!
This book, apparently the only cook book Italian housewives will ever want to own, is huge!

It contains so much, but isn't overwhelming. Buy it!

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Rating: - The ultimate Italian cookery book
The Silver Spoon is really a bible for Italian cooking. Not only does it have an incredible number of recipes, from classics to more unusual ones, it also provides plenty of information on ingredients and their use. Instructions are very straightforward. The book is divided between the stages of the classical Italian meal and also has sections on sauces and baking. I can imagine using this book for years and still finding recipes that I haven't tried yet.

Highly recommended!

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Rating: - One of the best, not just Italian style
I have owned the Italian edition of this cookbook for years and I can say that it has great recipes that are very easy to follow. It has hundreds of recipes covering Italian classics and many more for every occasion. Every one of them is a success. Just try the pesto: the only receipe without garlic that tastes exactly as it should.

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Rating: - Staggering ... should be on every cook's bookshelf
We really enjoy cooking but are skeptical about most new cookbooks. So many are just "food porn" -- gorgeous photographs of dishes that a home chef has no chance of replicating -- or celebrity ego-fests. That's even leaving aside the seeming hundreds of cookbooks that are published each year that are just "blah".

In the end we find that there are a very small number of books that we go back to again and again because they have proven their worth over time.

It looks like SILVER SPOON will join that select crowd.

The book is physically very impressive. It's huge -- 1,200 pages -- but not so big that it is impossible to use. The design is quite straightforward and easy to use. The photographs are largely decorative -- they aren't used to teach you how to make a dish, for example -- but they are certainly attractive.

With 2,000 recipies the book really functions as a kind of comprehensive reference to Italian booking. You can use the index or the organization into sections by main ingredient to find ideas for whatever strikes your fancy (or whatever you found fresh at Borough Market ...).

There are certainly some sections that are not likely to get a lot of use in our home -- e.g., the chapter on brains (and other chapters on offal, for that matter). But there are so many other recipies to choose from that it hardly matters ...

We have already started using the book -- cooked a great pheasant dish two nights ago -- and I'm sure it will become one of those books that gets very dirty with regular use, as opposed to one that sits on the bookshelf to be admired only occasionally.

By the way, at £25 (less if discounted) it's a pretty spectacular value.