Il cucchiaio d'argento

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Il cucchiaio d'argento (The Silver Spoon in English) (ISBN 8872122236, 1997 ed.) is a major Italian cookbook, a kitchen reference work originally published in 1950 by the design and architecture magazine Domus. It contains about 2000 recipes drawn from all over Italy, and has gone through eight editions. It is one of the most popular cookbooks in Italy, and was born from a post-World War II pricing dispute between the publishers and some of the distributors of the popular Il talismano della felicità by Ada Boni. Editoriale Domus still publishes the book as a single volume as well as a series of single-subject books (currently covering Primi (first courses), Secondi (entrées), Dolci (desserts), and summer dishes).

Several English versions (customized for the country of sale) were published as The Silver Spoon by the United Kingdom's Phaidon Press in 2005, then later in German, French and Dutch. They are based on the 1997 Italian edition, with a special section of recipes from prominent Italian cooks around the world. While Phaidon's original edition has been criticized by book critics for sloppy translation and awkward measurements (particularly in the US edition, which does not include metric measurements), the English editions have overall been well-received and very popular.