for the love of food

Silver Spoon

italy’s version of mom’s ‘joy of cooking’ …….. the bible of authentic italian cooking ( every italian bride is gifted a copy)………italy’s best selling cookbook for over 50 years…………the silver spoon cookbook.  it was first published in the states in 2005 and we immediately purchased - as did a few of our friends. all of us being fans of italian food & wine - we decided to form a supperclub around it.

every 4-6-8 weeks one of our 3 couples would host a dinner (usually inviting a 4th couple / friends ) and cook 4-5-6 courses from the silver spoon. guests would bring wine- trying to out do & surprise each other.  of course !  many fantastic dinner parties were had & the supperclub lasted 4 years.

a natural unraveling began with “cheating’ -as we began to admit our minor recipe ‘improvements’. after a couple of years we tired a bit of the ‘constraints’ of the silver spoon ( there are 2,000 recipes !) and moved on to include other favorite italian cookooks.  ultimately we just lost interest with the ‘limitations’ of italian food (hardly !) ….but it sure was fun while it lasted.

some favorite recipes were artichokes stuffed with chicken liver mousse, vitello tonnato freddo (cold veal roast with tuna, egg lemon sauce), ricotta & spinach crepes, spaghetti & mussels steamed in parchment, radicchio risotto, crostini with smoked salmon butter and caviar butter, chicken in almond sauce, whole fish braised with white wine & fennel, sweet-and-sour duck, panna cotta.

phaidon press (a british co. publishing visual arts books) first branched into cookbook publishing with silver spoon and moved on to publish other large cooking tomes.  i love them all.

i just now spied - and pre-ordered - their latest cookbook titled india.  perhaps another supperclub ?

I N S P I R E D

often i am asked the questions- when did you start cooking ? how did you become interested in cooking ?

and it goes way back to when my mother gave me a kids cookbook at age 12. my family endured so many dinners of ‘surprise meatloaf’ - you know the one with the hard boiled egg in the middle !

i wish i still had that book.

but i do have the second cookbook i ever owned - and the 19 that followed. it is my faded 20-volume collection of the grande diplome cooking course.  i devoured every word and  recipe in each book before purchasing the next.  my mother matched my $5 for each $9.99 book.

who knew at such a young age i was being taught by anne willan !

even now - with my collection of cookbooks in the hundreds- i still love to browse these pages - and am still inspired by some of the recipes.

take the photo on volume one.

it will look familiar to those of you who dine at our restaurant ASTI Trattoria.

yes ! it is the well loved  “chocolate cannoli “

with added cocoa powder to the brandy snap recipe - and chocolate mousse instead of whipped cream.

i tried to change this chocolate dessert once -  but it was quickly brought back by popular demand.  it has been 10 years running !

thankyou ann willan !