The Talisman of Happiness The Most Iconic Italian Cookbook Ever Written

The most iconic and beloved Italian cookbook ever published—a treasury of 2,000 definitive regional recipes that inspired the worldwide bestseller The Silver Spoon—translated for the first time in full for the American kitchen.

In 1929, two years before Irma Rombauer published The Joy of Cooking in America, and two decades before The Silver Spoon debuted in Italy, Ada Boni turned a decade of experience as a popular food columnist into Il Talismano Della Felicità: an exhaustive compendium of the recipes every Italian should know. The first book to describe Italy’s regional cooking specifically for home cooks, The Talisman of Happiness quickly became a must-have culinary bible, a quintessential wedding gift, and a talisman of luck for newlyweds beginning a new life. “There can be no true happiness,” Boni wrote, “if such an essential part of our daily lives as eating is neglected.”

Talisman became a national treasure, handed down from generation to generation, and growing in length every time a new edition was published. Now including more than 2,000 recipes, it has never gone out of print and has sold more than 1,000,000 copies in Italy. This new and exciting edition is the first time American cooks can appreciate Talisman in its entirety, carefully translated to retain the integrity of the Italian original with the addition of whimsical two-color illustrations and a foreword to be announced by a leading chef. Talisman includes recipes for every component of an Italian meal—from antipasti and condimenti to soups, pastas, polentas, and risotti, along with savory tarts, egg dishes, salads, seafood, vegetables, and meat.

The Talisman of Happiness passionately articulates the core Italian belief about food: that we cook not only to sustain the body, but to nourish the soul.

Ada Boni (1891-1973) was one of Italy’s first food writers. In 1915, she and her husband (a close friend of chef Augustus Escoffier) founded Preziosa, a food magazine and a few years later, Boni opened a cooking school for aristocratic Roman women. In 1925 she crowdsourced her readers and students and if 500 committed to buying a cookbook, she said she’d create it—and that’s how The Talisman of Happiness was born. It has since sold more than 1,000,000 copies and has never gone out of print in Italy.