The making of The Talisman of Happiness by Ada Boni

‘Many of you, ladies, may know how to play the piano well or to sing with exquisite grace. Many of you may have prestigious degrees, may speak foreign languages or be pleasant writers or fine painters. Others of you may be master tennis or golf players, or know how to drive a luxurious automobile with a firm hand. But, alas, if you examine your conscience, I am certain that not all of you can honestly say that you know how to perfectly coddle an egg.’

- Ada Boni

This is how Ada Boni began her first edition of Il Talismano della Felicità—perhaps the most important Italian cookbook ever published. Hers was the first comprehensive cookbook to catalogue recipes gathered across the regions of Italy and designed explicitly for the use of the home cook. Without it, the rest of the world may never have come to know and embrace Italian food the way we do today.

Ada was a trailblazing writer and cook who believed that mastery of cooking and the domestic arts was the key to a good life. ‘There can be no true happiness’, she wrote, ‘if such an essential part of our daily lives as eating is neglected.’

When Ada was born in Rome in 1881, the city had only recently been named the capital of Italy. In fact, Italy itself was only formally unified twenty years earlier. While each region had its own unique food culture, a coherent national cuisine was only beginning to take shape. Ada’s talent for cooking revealed itself in childhood, perhaps inspired by her uncle, a prominent chef named Adolfo Giaquinto. Later, she married a writer and artist named Enrico Boni, and in 1915, they launched a magazine dedicated to ‘home economics’ called Preziosa. Ada was its chief editor. This was a time of massive change and modernisation in Italy as politics shifted, global conflicts emerged and social and domestic practices evolved. Many well-to-do families no longer employed cooks and women began to enter the workforce as industrialisation took root. As lifestyles changed and young people, especially newlyweds, moved to urban centres for professional opportunities, the recipes and food traditions that had been handed down from generation to generation needed to be gathered and written down if they were to be preserved and practised.

That is where Ada came in. In Preziosa, she published recipes each month from all over Italy, and even opened a cooking school in Rome. Ada quickly amassed a large recipe collection that eventually turned into The Talisman of Happiness—whose first edition contained a massive 882 dishes. Before The Talisman, other books had attempted to define Italian cooking, but no other book brought together the cuisines of each region so comprehensively, or in a way that addressed the home cook as its primary audience.

Extraordinarily comprehensive while remaining practical and family-friendly, the book became an instant classic—an essential wedding gift for couples creating a new life together. It became hugely influential as the go-to for how to cook just about everything. The iconic Italian-American culinary teacher and cookbook author Marcella Hazan credits The Talisman with teaching her to cook: it was her trusted source for recreating the flavours and dishes she treasured after moving to the United States.

The book has never been out of print in Italy. Over the years and across many editions, it grew more than double in size, with each edition adding and subtracting recipes based on trends and culinary movements. A much-abbreviated version of The Talisman was published in the United States in the 1950s, though it contained a small percentage of its recipes and veered far from the original text. Until now there has never been a full English translation of this seminal book.

One of the extraordinary things about The Talisman of Happiness is how from just a few ingredients we have so many recipes. From basic pantry items such as butter, oil, flour, eggs, tomatoes, anchovies, Parmesan and more, Ada conjured one of the greatest cuisines in the world. There is not one recipe for minestrone; there are 12—each offering a variation on the theme, accounting for seasonality of ingredients as well as versions specific to a time, person or region. This is the Mediterranean diet as it really was, and is.
Ada’s recipes are written in simple, everyday language and punctuated by asides— she often includes tips, advice, variations, suggestions to reuse leftovers, ideas for presentation and how to pair a dish with other recipes.

In many ways, The Talisman was the predecessor to the modern cookbook of today, with many of these rubrics still being championed by authors around the globe. Unlike modern cookbooks that spell out every last detail, The Talisman of Happiness reads like being in the kitchen with a grandmother telling you to add a knob of this and a glass of that. We might call it intuitive cooking today: the kind of cooking that tells a story on the plate by starting with what you have on hand. It is a style of cooking that creates abundance out of nothing. It challenges you to think about the ‘why’ of a recipe, to be in tune with your senses and appetites, and to be fully present in the kitchen.

The Talisman of Happiness is a humble invitation into the kitchen and carries the glory of Italian food and spirit of hospitality on every page. Over the nearly 100 years that it has been in print, it has equally influenced and inspired renowned chefs, food television stars, legendary cookbook authors and everyday home cooks who are drawn to Ada’s clear voice and sound teachings. That is why, after all these decades, this book remains not only a priceless culinary and cultural artifact, but the mother of all other Italian cookbooks that followed.

Images by Ryan Stockall from the Thames & Hudson x Tipo 00 exclusive book launch lunch featuring a menu selected from The Talisman of Happiness.