Tag Archives: The Talisman of Happiness

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. …