Silver Spoon recipe book

The Silver Spoon has been Italy's best-selling cookbook for more than 50 years, being to Italian cooks what Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion is to Australian cooks, only better. And no wonder The Silver Spoon sells and sells and sells; it is without doubt one of the world's most comprehensive recipe guides with over 1200 pages of recipes. Now, for the first time, it has been translated into English so Anglophones can see what the fuss is about.

There's everything here, from simple tips on how to buy, store and cook almost anything. Take for example the humble egg. ("It is not advisable to store eggs near strong-smelling food as their shells are porous and tend to absorb odours easily"), through to complex and bizarre recipes (how to prepare a hard-boiled egg in aspic, to name just one). Indeed, just to prove how comprehensive this book is, there are almost 50 pages of egg recipes alone.

Ahhh, la vita a bella...