01. Tap the source
My uncle laid the book on the Formica table. He tapped it with his fingers, sliding it gently in my direction. “Thought you might like to have this, Lisa,” he said.
We were sitting in his Baltimore kitchen (once my grandmother’s), the window open to the sweltering summer air. I’d sat at this oval table on this vinyl floor in one of these cushioned metal chairs since before I could remember. Little had changed in the passing years. On one wall, next to the corded, hanging phone: the yearly calendar from St. Anthony’s Church—holy days and saints’ days highlighted in blocks of blue and gold. On an adjacent wall: loose photos propped behind a small, wooden cross, one in particular of my grandfather younger and more handsome than I'd ever known him to be, dapper in a grey suit, standing on the Ponte Rialto in Venice.
My uncle was 84, his eyesight seriously impaired. Months before, he’d had a second stroke. His hip hurting, he’d begun walking with a cane. He was all I had left of his generation—my mother (his only sibling) had died fourteen years before, my father already nine—and he was getting things in order. Or at least beginning to.
He didn’t know much about the book, just that it had been in the house for some time. If it had once had a paper jacket, it was long gone, as was the back cover of the book, a substantial tome of—I checked—1320 pages. The front cover had fallen off and now simply rested on top, a deep glorious red, the title etched within aromatic steam lifting from a dish. Il Talismano della Felicità, it said. The Talisman of Happiness. By Ada Boni.
A cookbook he told me as he brought to the table a plate of dark purple figs picked that morning from a tree in his backyard. I had a fig tree as well, flourishing in my small vegetable garden in southern California, its fruit not tear-shaped like my uncle’s, but bulbous and green skinned. Over the years, when I’d traveled to Baltimore or spoken with my uncle on the phone, our conversations almost always focused on food: the summer’s crop of heirloom tomatoes, the sprawling zucchini with their delicate, sweet blossoms. The success of his tiramisù, the failure of my gnocchi. Our longing for coniglio (rabbit) and piccione (squab) so common in Italy.
He poured dark coffee into two espresso cups, added a splash of grappa. I helped myself to a fig and opened the book. Five pages of faded photos and lots and lots of dense text. The copyright was November 1956, a first edition, it said, of its “gold series.” It was even signed: was this Ada herself? Il Talismano della Felicità: I was struck by its boldness, the ambitiousness of its title. This, I suspected, was not your average cookbook
I’d lived in northern Italy with my children and their father for three years (now more than twenty years ago). In the time since, I visited when I could, though still my Italian was little more than passable. I did okay in verbal communication. But this cookbook? It would be a challenge, though I was hoping to have some in-house translation help.
A classic! Paul, my Italian love said, when I showed it to him upon my return. He was acquainted with the title and the book’s lore, though he admitted he’d never actually seen it. He flipped through the pages, smoothing his fingers over the well-loved surface. Impressive, he said, weighing its heft in one hand.
An online search revealed that Il Talismano della Felicità was published in preliminary forms beginning in 1915, and in 1929 (the year my mother was born) it apparently took its current form. Many editions followed, the book apparently growing fatter with each subsequent release. The preface to the 1929 edition (roughly translated and clearly in this early edition geared toward women of means, Ada herself coming from wealth) is a treasure:
Many of you ladies know how to play the piano well or sing with exquisite grace, many others are literate or fine painters, and others are experts in tennis or in golf or driving with steady hand the wheel of a luxury car. But, alas not all, doing a little self-examination, could pretend to be able to cook two eggs to perfection. [...] Do you think that there can be a real happiness where so essential a part of our everyday life is neglected? Ladies, learn to cook well. A simple menu well-executed is the peace of the family, and also ensures the emergence home of your partner at the end of his business day.
I located only one “translation” of the book: The Talisman Italian Cookbook. What happened to the happiness? Its editor had added her own intro, selected her favorite recipes from those in the original, and altered ingredients to what she felt were preferred American equivalents/substitutes at the time. Dramatically trimmed to less than a third of Il Talismano’s size, gone was the essence of the original. Especially absent was what I would come to know as Ada’s flourishing (and occasionally self-indulgent) prose. In the gentle, joyous walls of the kitchen, she wrote, the center of affections....
Over the years Il Talismano became a classic and a traditional wedding gift for Italian brides. Was it, I wondered, given to my mother when she traveled to Italy on her honeymoon? My parents stayed for a while with my mother’s family in Friuli, north of Venice. Considering that she arrived the year following the publishing of this revised and expanded gold edition, it’s conceivable, I figure, even likely.
I try to imagine being newly married and presented with this daunting work (in Italian, no less). The giver would offer an earnest nod, a well-wishing smile. This, my dear, you must learn.
Turning its pages for the first time, I wonder what my mother may have thought as she did the same. Who was she then?
Could she have found use for Ada’s cooking philosophy in an America of the 1950s and 1960s—where the focus was decidedly less on fresh and more on (prepackaged) convenience?
The cookbooks I remember seeing in our home were by Julia Child, Pierre Franey, and Marcella Hazan, along with a binder filled with ideas my mother had torn from the Baltimore Sun’s food section. These were the recipes she tried, then annotated. On one: Terrible! On another: Added salt, sage, doubled the onion. On another: a simple star.
Il Talismano has no page dog-eared, no scribbled commentary. Still, stains run along the edge of a cluster of pages. It was oft used, more likely by my grandmother. Was it during one of the frequent visits home that my mother dropped the book on the oval Formica table? Here, Mamma. Per te. The two of them would have sipped a coffee, shared a biscotto. Thought you might like to have this.
I smooth my hand over its faded surface. Why has this book come into my life now? Il Talismano della Felicità: what does this mean, exactly? Is there such a thing: a talisman to ensure happiness? Will serving a well-thought meal every evening keep my man coming home as Ada once boldly promised? Sweet. Certainly it is part of what Paul and I share: meals prepared then relished together, dishes washed afterwards, conversation throughout. Additional friends and family at the table make for me a near perfect evening.
Paul and I open the book and begin with the introduction, reading aloud together. I am absorbing little more than half of it. There are words here that I’ve never heard, words that clearly have nothing to do with cooking, per se.
Paul begins an exacting translation. “The requirements of the woman of the house who dedicates herself to the wellbeing [benessere, a beautifully melodic word] of the family are not many but she must have them all simultaneously and to a high level. First of all, she must love order and cleanliness, she must be careful and precise, she must be outgoing and have the ability to think on her feet within a logical and strategic view of the various situations....”
He drops the book into his lap. “So basically...” he says, “stuff happens. You need to keep the big picture of what’s going on, but be creative and adapt.”
“Right,” I say.
“My god,” he says, his expression comically pained, “I mean, really: if you just want to know whether to cook something for ten minutes or twenty....“
But that’s the point, isn’t it? If there is a point. Other cookbooks do that. Clearly that is not the intent here. There is a seriousness to this, a reverence.
We read further, revealing a language that is often flowery, occasionally beautiful, sometimes archaic. We eat the meal, Ada says, anche se il sugo non è abbastanza saporito (even if the sauce is not adequately flavored). It is important to try, to begin, I sense she wants to impress. First, acquire a foundation. Then explore, be spontaneous. With practice comes knowing.
I’m reminded of my grandmother standing in front of a warm cast iron pot, lifting a spoon of polenta, stirring, stirring, then lifting again. See how it pulls, her actions silently implore, how the color changes in the heat, in the light? She hands me the rough wooden spoon, heavy with the hardening corn meal, watching me, nodding: It’s nearly ready, do you feel it?
Italian cooking is, after all, not a series of menus, but an approach, a philosophy. Ingredients are fresh, undisguised, natural, simple. The blending of flavors is accomplished not with overwhelming spices or sauces, but with time, in a layered process.
Insaporire—one of the most poetic of Italian words, a verb which has no direct equivalent in English—is this process of allowing flavors to swell and flourish, in layers. Patiently, you must wait. There is a moment when everything turns, when the aromas join, the chemistry magically completes. At that moment you may continue adding ingredients—the next layer—but not before.
Insaporire. It is a way, also I find, to recollect the past, and from it, to build a story: beginning with a single memory, perhaps an aroma, then adding another, waiting as the image intensifies. Something else falls in; slowly the scene expands.
And so, I begin. My plan is to prepare some of the dishes while exploring a language I love, and to discover ... what, exactly? I’ve no idea. But this is part of the magic. Da cosa nasce cosa, as Italians say. One thing leads to [literally: births] another. With each recipe, with each page, something newly inspired.
