JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
When you think about classic wedding gifts, what comes to mind? A lot of them revolve around food - a new set of dishes, tablecloths, maybe a stand mixer or various other kitchen appliances. Well, in Italy, for many years throughout the 20th century, a classic cookbook published in 1929 was among the most common wedding gifts. The book is called "Il Talismano Della Felicita" or "The Talisman Of Happiness," and now, for the first time, this classic Italian cookbook has been translated in full into English. That is thanks to the efforts of Michael Szczerban, a publisher at Voracious. This new edition of "Talisman Of Happiness" was published in October, and Michael Szczerban is with us now. Hi there.
MICHAEL SZCZERBAN: Hi there. Thank you so much for having me.
SUMMERS: Thanks for being here. Michael, first start by telling us who wrote this cookbook and how did it become so popular in Italy?
SZCZERBAN: Oh, wow. The person who wrote the book was named Ada Boni, and she was born in the 1880s in Rome. And she is, I think, the most important forgotten culinary icon in Italian cooking history. She was the first person to go out and catalog all of the different regional Italian recipes from all over Italy, which had just been unified as one country only 20 years before she was born. And then she turned it into this magical cookbook that told you how to play the symphony of Italian cuisine from just a few simple notes - the simple ingredients she had on hand.
SUMMERS: When did you first hear about this book?
SZCZERBAN: I first heard about this book about 12 years ago. I was working on another book at the time - a book called "Salt Fat Acid Heat" by Samin Nosrat. And we were talking about pesto when she mentioned that she had heard of this book that was in everybody's kitchens that she learned from in Italy when she was over there learning to cook. And something about that title just stuck with me - "The Talisman Of Happiness." Who wouldn't want the magical thing that is your introduction to joy? At first, I just wanted to get a copy of it for myself, but the more that I dug into it, the more I realized there was a whole story that wasn't being told to American cooks.
SUMMERS: Publishing the English translation of this cookbook took you more than a decade. Take us on that journey. Why did it take so long?
SZCZERBAN: Well, usually when you want to acquire a book, there's an easy path to it. There's a publisher that you can call up. There's a descendant that you could lightly internet stalk. You can try to find the person to get the rights to publish it. I tried to do that, but at every turn, it seemed like I was hitting a dead end. It was a very difficult challenge to try to capture this. And so I spent years Google translating scripts and dialing random numbers internationally, trying to find the right way to find the people who could actually help me publish this in English.
Then finally, I had a breakthrough about eight or nine years in with a British packager - which is like a book producer - who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy and managed to unlock the whole thing for us. Eight translators and a few more years later, we've got the book.
SUMMERS: I mean, I am holding this book in my hands in our studio and it is a massive tome - so many different diverse recipes. Michael, what were some of the challenges that came with translating a cookbook that was originally published nearly 100 years ago?
SZCZERBAN: You know, it wasn't as challenging as you might think because the recipes are so simple and so good and so resonant. We did cut a few things that were completely irrelevant to the home cook today, but we kept almost everything else. It's almost 2,000 recipes in total, and it's the framework for all of Italian cooking. So you've got the big classics - your ragu bolognese, a bunch of different lasagnas, 19 different kinds of risotto, 12 minestrones. But there's also stuff that I had never heard of before, and those were the dishes that I thought were the most difficult to make sure that we were getting right. We wanted to translate the book, but we wanted to keep it in its original voice. That was important to us and to the descendants in Ada Boni's family. We wanted it to have her magic in it.
SUMMERS: I mean, there are so many incredible recipes in this book. One thing I'd love to know is were there any that surprised you after you tried them for the first time after discovering them in this book?
SZCZERBAN: What surprised me was how modern this cooking felt and how many sacred cows about Italian cuisine that I had received were actually just not present in Ada's book from a hundred years ago. For instance, there's a risotto - she calls it risotto with seven flavors - that you actually bake in the oven. You're not standing in front of the stove, stirring it endlessly for 30 minutes. You bake this risotto in the oven, then you pour on this interesting sauce of milk and mascarpone cheese and Parmigiano and rehydrated dried mushrooms and prosciutto and a couple of other things. And then you stir it all together once at the end and you serve it. And it's the most magnificent feast-style dish, but it is almost entirely hands-off.
I thought that there were so many things in Italian cooking that they had to be a certain way. And they're great that way, whether you're stirring the risotto or making your lasagna a certain way. But Ada was just like us. She needed to put food on the table. The time when she was writing was a moment of great transformation in Italian society, and people had the same challenges that we do today. They were busy. They needed to be economical. They didn't want to waste things. And so when I'm cooking from one of these recipes, it feels like I've got my own grandmother whispering to me in the background, telling me how to just add just a little bit more to make it taste good.
SUMMERS: Michael, I wonder, do you have a favorite recipe out of this cookbook?
SZCZERBAN: Yes. I would say my favorite recipe out of this book is something called zuppa acquacotta, and that translates literally as cooked water soup. And it's my favorite for a couple of reasons. One, acquacotta was one of the first real Italian recipes - like, Italian from Italy - that I cooked when I was just learning to cook in my teens. It was a recipe from Lidia Bastianich, who wrote the foreword to this book. And so I feel a deep connection to it. But the other reason why I love this dish is because it shows how a good cook can make something out of nothing. Ada Boni's recipe begins just with onions, tomatoes and a big handful of mint, and it is incredible. I love it so much. It is so simple and yet so beguiling and good.
And you, of course, can take it somewhere else. You could add arugula instead of the mint. You could add fewer onions and more tomatoes. You could poach an egg in it if you wanted. But the lesson for me is that if you start somewhere and you point yourself in the right direction, you can get there.
SUMMERS: I mean, Italian food is so popular all over the world. So many of us, including myself, absolutely love it. What do you think it is about Italian cooking that is so widely appealing?
SZCZERBAN: I think it's that all of the notes that you can build a song with are so clear. And so when you put them together, the music sounds good, no matter how you're arranging them. It's simple, it's clear, it's uncomplicated and it's something that any of us can do. Technique is important, ingredients are important, but the main thing is cooking with heart, and anybody can do that.
SUMMERS: Publisher Michael Szczerban talking with us about the first full English translation of the classic Italian cookbook "The Talisman Of Happiness." Michael, thank you.
SZCZERBAN: Thank you so much.
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