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| The Silver Spoon | 
 enlarge | Author: Phaidon Press
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $28.46
You Save: $16.54 (37%)
New (39) Used (15) from $16.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  157 reviews
Sales Rank: 785
Media: Hardcover
Edition: US
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1264
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.9
Dimensions (in): 10.8 x 7.4 x 2.4
ISBN: 0714845310
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5945
EAN: 9780714845319
ASIN: 0714845310
Publication Date: October 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 This Cookbook was so good -- I ate it November 20, 2007
Heads up to the spouses of cooks and food aficionados: This is the cookbook to purchase for them. Makes a great (and easy) holiday gift. Pair it up with some cutesy cutlery and a bow and -- viola -- a successful present.
Good luck and happy eating this holiday season.
/s/
GBH
 Less than expected November 16, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Hard to believe that there could be anything more you could want from a book that's over 1000 pages long but it's far less instructional than LA BONNE CUISINE, far less compelling and far less convincing that these are seminal recipes traditionally used. There are nice photos but they have no captions. Sometimes there are 3 different recipes that could be represented but you just don't know. If the spine hadn't been bumped at some point before it arrived at my house, I would have turned around and sold it.
 Extensive, but... November 8, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The authors/editors converted the typical metric system to cups, teaspoons, etc. without any regard to the recipe. It seriously changed the recipes. I've been reading people's reviews and many have encountered the same problem. It's unacceptable. From that point I give the book a star.
The good part is that is extensive, and gives good pointers. So I give the book two stars. Buyer be aware!
I am going to try a few more recipes. I hope it's not a waste of ingredients and time.
 Not so great to me but I guess it's a good book. November 7, 2007
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I bought this book because of so many positive reviews. I guess many people like this book or maybe this book is actually great but I am not seeing why. In my perspective, this book is good because it has miraculous number of recipes and they are organized according to topics. It's easy to notice that this is a pretty serious Italian cook book. One thing I don't like about is that the instruction is not very detailed so sometimes you have to figure out how to cook yourself and that can be challenging. And I don't know if it's my cooking talent or not, some of stuff I cooked didn't turn out very good which didn't happen to me with other cook books. So, bottom line is that this book seems to have a status as an encyclopedia of Italian food... It's a good book to learn some ordinary Italian cooking which we have never heard of. It's just that I don't like the fact that the book is not very kind enough to explain how to cook . That's all.
Exhaustive number of recipes, especially Italian dishes November 4, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
There seems to be a misconception among some English-speaking serious home cooks ("foodies") that this book is an encyclopedic Italian cookbook, which kind of misses the mark. The book is a comprehensive cookbook written by Italians, and so it will contain a fair number of non-Italian dishes, such as nasi goreng (Indonesian), amongside tiramisu, ragu Bolognese, veal alla Milanese. It appears to me the complaint stems from the fact that English-speaking cooks already have other sources to scourge general cooking from (for example, "The New Best Recipes", "The Joy of Cooking", "The Australian Women's Weekly Cook" etc), and thus we expect an Italian-published cookbook talks about Italian cuisine all the time. If we take things from another angle, an Asian cook may well expect "The Joy of Cooking" covering the cuisine of the English-speaking world, thus has nothing but hamburgers, apple pies, American version of lasagna, or pot roasts. Imagine his response when he sees green curry chicken (because it is Thai) or duck a l'orange (because it is French) in the book.
The best thing to treat the Silver Spoon is to chuck away this preconception before reading - there are plenty of excellent works written for English-speaking audiences introducing exclusively Italian cooking, and even though Antonio Carluccio's works may be brief, you can also find relatively masterpiece types of Giorgio Locatelli's "Made in Italy".
In general, the cookbook presents cooking from an Italian perspective so you may find you will end up reading a roast beef recipe and how an Italian approaches it. This often means the cooking is less precisely defined in measurement quantities - I remember cookbooks of Southeast Asian countries' cuisines are like this as well with David Thompson or Terry Tan admitting there are not much literatures of "precise measurements" in Asian cooking but rather, traditionally the food would be prepared "according to feeling". Italian cooking emphasises ease and smooth procedures and I suspect this may contribute to the brief prose.
Even though the book may not be exclusively Italian, the book does cover a lot of most of the common Italian dishes. It is that you may need to have another general Italian food book to discern specific regional specialties from the names. But from what I have read of tiramisu and a couple of other dishes, they appear to be pretty decent.
Some may complain certain dishes may sound anachronistic in the 21st century English-speaking world such as curry stew or Russian salad. Again, this is probably more to do with how we come across food in the English-speaking world in the early 21st century, where as we are spoiled with raw spices, we expect curry family of dishes to be specific Indian or Malay dishes like Kerala fish dishes, lamb korma, or butter chicken, and we are living in a world where we are spoiled with 15 varieties of tomato and lettuce with olive oil and lemon juice dressing as salad on an average restaurant menu in Chicago or Wellington.
Overall, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Italian cooking and in particular, how Italians approach cooking.
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