We really enjoy cooking but are skeptical about most new cookbooks. So many are just "food porn" -- gorgeous photographs of dishes that a home chef has no chance of replicating -- or celebrity ego-fests. That's even leaving aside the seeming hundreds of cookbooks that are published each year that are just "blah".In the end we find that there are a very small number of books that we go back to again and again because they have proven their worth over time.
It looks like SILVER SPOON will join that select crowd.
The book is physically very impressive. It's huge -- 1,200 pages -- but not so big that it is impossible to use. The design is quite straightforward and easy to use. The photographs are largely decorative -- they aren't used to teach you how to make a dish, for example -- but they are certainly attractive.
With 2,000 recipies the book really functions as a kind of comprehensive reference to Italian booking. You can use the index or the organization into sections by main ingredient to find ideas for whatever strikes your fancy (or whatever you found fresh at Borough Market ...).
There are certainly some sections that are not likely to get a lot of use in our home -- e.g., the chapter on brains (and other chapters on offal, for that matter). But there are so many other recipies to choose from that it hardly matters ...
We have already started using the book -- cooked a great pheasant dish two nights ago -- and I'm sure it will become one of those books that gets very dirty with regular use, as opposed to one that sits on the bookshelf to be admired only occasionally.
By the way, at 25 (less if discounted) it's a pretty spectacular value.
