Time travelling with a cookbook

2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.

WEEK 15

The book

Il talismano della felicità by Ada Boni

How/where/when did I get it?

Inherited from my mother’s shelves when she died.

Have I used it since then?

Not once.

What Did The Random Recipe Generator throw up?

See below.

So, what about it?

It’s a big book – 1263 pages, eight and a half inches across – and takes up a good chunk of valuable shelf space. It’s written entirely in Italian, a language I speak at ‘smattering’ level, at best. I haven’t opened it since inheriting it from my mother when she died six years ago.

Yet I would no more get rid of it than I would deliberately chop my hand off with a spatula.

I’m not even sure my mum cooked from it. She was a great browser, forever taking things off shelves ‘just to check’. My memory of this book is as the ultimate authority on all things Italian (it was published in the 1920s, and is known as the first Italian cookbook aimed specifically at housewives). Which cheese to use in an authentic pesto alla Genovese? Parmesan or pecorino, it turns out, so let’s stop being sniffy about it. What do you really put in a ragù alla Bolognese? You would, I think, be surprised. How do you make a good bechamel sauce? You just make a good bechamel sauce.

Most of all, every time I catch a glimpse of this book lurking on the shelf, I see my mother, hear her voice, feel her presence in the room. So it’s more than a book – it’s a time machine.

Rather than fire up the Random Recipe Generator, and more to comply with the rules of this project than for any other reason, we made fresh pesto, following the recipe to the letter. It was, as you’d expect, good.

The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?

Well, what do you think?