Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
One hundred years after the bestselling cookbook “The Talisman of Happiness” was first published in Italy, the full English translation of its nearly 1,700 recipes is now available.
Its author was chef, cooking instructor and magazine writer Ada Boni (1891-1973), who unified the culinary traditions of Italy’s 20 regions for the first time. In 1915, she and her husband founded the food magazine Preziosa, and a few years later Boni opened a cooking school for aristocratic Roman women.
In 1925 she crowdsourced her readers and students, telling them that if 500 committed to buying her cookbook, she would create it. “The Talisman of Happiness” has since sold more than 1 million copies and has never gone out of print in Italy, growing in length every time a new edition is published.
The full English translation, published last year, includes American measurements and forewords by Lidia Bastianich and Katie Parla. Its publication was the result of a decade-long pursuit by Voracious publisher Michael Szczerban, who “made it his mission to track down the rights and, along the way, discovered the extent of Ada Boni’s enduring impact,” a press release states.
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