Il Cucchiaio d’Argento

Friday, December 14th, 2007 | Personal

My wife and I both appreciate good food, be it Danish, French, Chinese, Thai, Italian, or what have you. Our bookcase will most likely bear witness to this as we have an entire shelf dedicated to cookbooks. A few days ago when we were passing the time until my wife’s boots were fixed, we invariably found our way past a bookshop, and, of course, to the cooking section (I had to drag my wife away from the gardening section, but that’s a whole other matter).

In Denmark we have some solid classics like God Mad: Let at lave (Good food, easy to cook), and Frk. Jensens kogebog (Mrs. Jensen’s cookbook), and both are fairly complete with lots of information about cooking. However, the book I discovered in the bookshop put both to shame, Il Cucchiaio d’Argento (Sølvskeen in Danish, The Silverspoon in English) is the traditional Italian cookbook, with more than 2000 recipes from all the Italian regions. As a testament to its completeness, the book weighs in at over a thousand pages, more than 20 recipes with rabbit, themed recipes from antipasto over pesci (fish) to carni (meat) and dolci (desserts).

The cookbook is entirely unwieldy and extremely lovely, and while there are altogether too few pictures of the food, the book promises to turn you into a real connoisseur on traditional Italian food, and with the thorough descriptions of what kitchen equipment serves what purposes, illustrations of how animals are cut and what each piece of meat is good for, it will, in my opinion, be a priceless reference when cooking. Lastly, as the book also mentions, nothing goes to waste in the Italian kitchen, so the book also features recipes on brain, ox jaws and calf head. Intriguing!

Buono appetito.

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