The story behind cookbooks 'The Talisman of Happiness' and 'Will This Make You Happy'

Hello there, it's NPR's Book of the Day, I'm Tim Bidermias.

Today, two cookbooks that are a real treat.

In a moment we'll hear about baking as catharsis, but first, a classic.

The talisman of happiness, the most iconic Italian cookbook ever written, was first published

in 1929.

It was written by Otto Boni, and as the title suggests, it's economical work, but until now

hadn't been translated into English.

It is until book publisher Michael Zürban got to work on making it happen.

He tells all things considered host-wanna summers about that process, and some of his favorite

recipes from the book.

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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, Youll 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 Zürban, a published right voracious.

This new edition of Talisman of Happiness was published in October, and Michael Zürban

is with us now, either.

Hi there, thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for being here.

Michael, first start by telling us who wrote this cookbook and how did it become so popular

in Italy.

Oh, wow.

The person who wrote the book was named Adaboni, 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.

When did you first hear about this book?

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 Samine

Nussrat, 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.

Publishing the English translation of this cookbook took you more than a decade.

Take us on that journey.

Why did it take so long?

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 stock.

You can try to find a 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 packageer,

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.

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?

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 ball and aise, a bunch of different lasagna's,

19 different kinds of risotto, 12 ministronies.

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 Otabone's family.

We wanted it to have her magic in it.

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?

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 Otabone's book from 100 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 it 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 Otto 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.

Michael, I wonder, do you have a favorite recipe out of this cookbook?

Yes.

I would say my favorite recipe out of this book is something called Zupa Aquacotta.

And that translates literally as cooked water soup.

And it's my favorite for a couple of reasons.

One, Aquacotta 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 Lydia Bastianich who wrote the forward 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.

Ateboni'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 baguiling 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.

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?

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 were ranging

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.

Publisher Michael Zerban talking with us about the first full English translation of the

classic Italian cookbook, The Talisman of Happiness, Michael, thank you.

Thank you so much.

Up next, will this make you happy by Tanya Bush?

It's a cookbook all about baking, but was developed at a time in Bush's life that was

pretty tough.

So she took the baking and learned a lot about herself in the process.

She tells all things considered Hoscott-Detro all about it.

Having a gray New York winter during the height of the pandemic, Tanya Bush was depressed.

The present, the future, everything felt bleak.

At the time she was in her early 20s, unemployed and living in Brooklyn with no idea what to

do next.

She barely had enough motivation to get out of bed, let alone plan her life.

So Bush turned to something that had made her feel good when she was a kid, baking, even

unless she hadn't baked anything in years.

I was just sort of desperate, anything that I could possibly make, I wanted to make, and

I turned to the kitchen, I tried to make this almond cake, and it doesn't go exactly

as planned, it goes awry, and I think that's kind of rare in cookbooks to see, you know,

the first instance of baking turned out to be, you know, this sort of humiliation, this massive

failure.

You wrote it in such a succinct way, I deem it a failure, I feel like a failure.

It thumps like lead as I slide it into the trash.

I can still feel it, all these years later.

In her new cookbook, Will This Make You Happy, Tanya Bush writes about her experiences and

recipes during a year of baking and self-discovery that eventually led to her current position as

pastry chef at Little Egg in Brooklyn.

I asked her how she learned to deal with all those failures.

A lot of the cookbooks that I was, you know, consuming while I was teaching myself how

to bake were these beautiful glossy tombs that are really offering this like perfect finished

product, and that was just so different than the experience that I was having.

And I think that one of the things I really learned, you know, in both sort of writing

and in baking, the first version is rarely the right one, and it takes work to make anything,

you know, meaningful and to really teach yourself a new skill.

And I think that I wanted to articulate in this book that it's not going to be this

like easy linear journey, you know.

And I think that's, you know, true of life, right, that the cake might crater in the center

or the Madelons will have weird pock marks and, you know, that's okay.

And there are ways to think about rescuing a mistake in pastry and you can always try

again.

Mm-hmm.

I've probably not alone in this.

I'm sure lots of people play this to you.

Like I love cooking, like I have a very hard to quiet mind and I find it to be a relaxing

thing to do because there's so much motion, but baking intimidates me and I just look at

a baking recipe and I'm paralyzed by the exactness of it and the complexity of it.

What do you say to people who kind of have that paralysis feeling when they're like I love

the idea of eating a creme brulee, but making it seems terrifying?

Mm-hmm.

I do think that there's this anxiety that like baking is all chemistry and science, and

if you don't adhere to the recipe exactly right, it's going to fail.

And you know, my experience is that there are of course, you know, technical demands and

certain rules to adhere to, right, you know, we know what it looks like to like, you

know, beat your butter and sugar together until it's fluffy or, you know, what is dairy

look like when it's simmering.

But within the margins, I think there's a lot of room for play and experimentation.

There are a lot of ways to insert your own palate into a pastry recipe that already

exists.

When it comes to embracing the failure, I want to talk about one particular part of the

book that I'm sure was not really fun to live through, but is a really entertaining

read.

And this is when you go to Italy for this internship that you're at first really excited

about.

This seems like an opportunity, especially during the pandemic to get out in the world,

to start testing and learning and maybe you know, begin your journey to becoming a professional

baker.

And that is not quite what happens.

Tell us about this experience.

Yeah.

It was sort of a misguided attempt to have my own eat, pray, love experience and it went

awry.

I, yeah, it was like very hungry to learn in a professional setting, you know, before

I started working in bakeries in New York, you know, I wanted to travel.

I wanted to be steeped in the tradition of Italian pastry.

And it turned out to be, you know, very different than what I had anticipated.

It was a agraterismo in Italy that was very much sort of serving a tourist's palate.

It was very persnickety, tweezered, fair.

And unfortunately, I had sort of a little bit of a failure at the beginning of the internship

and they really were not interested in having me bake.

And it was actually really a formative experience for me because it taught me a lot about the

kinds of pastry that I didn't want.

I was less interested in this sort of 10 component, fastidious, you know, little perfect

Pavlova.

I realized that I loved the slightly messier and the more informal and the things that

are like delicious and hearty and homey but are not, you know, meant to be served on

a like fine china platter.

Tweezered fair is such a specific insult.

I really appreciate it.

To that end, can you tell me how you think about when you're professionally baking and when

you're baking at home for joy and how both of those things ideally should influence

each other a little bit more, what you take from one to the other when everything is

going well?

Yeah.

So I'm the pastry chef at Little Leg, which is the community restaurant and prospect

heights.

And, you know, there I'm thinking a lot about scaling things up for production and, you

know, we're making hundreds of crawlers a week and cinnamon rolls and brioche buns.

But it is, you know, it's institutionalized baking, right?

It's everything should look the same, everything should be consistent and taste the same.

But when I'm baking at home for myself, I'm really getting in touch with what I'm hungry

for.

And I think that, you know, the reality is that I bake a lot less at home because I have,

you know, made baking my job, right?

And it has fundamentally changed my relationship to the nature of pleasure in baking.

And so when I do feel hungry to get into my own kitchen, I'm really thinking about like

simple things that come together pretty quickly.

I'm thinking about what I want to bring to people who I love and who I'm in community

with, you know, a simple spoon cake, a delicious sort of like shortcake moment with a quick

whipped cream.

I'm not going to spend a ton of time.

I just want something like easy and delicious that's going to make other people happy.

Writing a book like this is a little bit like mental time travel.

What would you tell your 2020-2021 self if you could reach through time and get a message

to 2021 you trying to figure out how to bake and trying to figure out what to do with your

life from this from this vantage point given all the success?

I would tell her to keep playing and to trust her own instincts.

I think that there was a lot of moaning and groaning and worrying and wishing.

And I think at a lot of junctures, I wondered if I was on the right path.

And I think now I can say in retrospect, you know, there was no one linear right path,

but just applying yourself to something, trying to learn something new is in and of itself

a success.

And you know, I hope that that ethos sort of comes through in the book and more generally

comes through in living and in life that you have no idea how things are going to unfurl.

And you've got to make some mistakes along the way in order to actualize it and trust

yourself.

Trust your own curiosity and interest.

That is Tanya Bush, author of the new cookbook and memoir.

Will this make you happy?

Thank you so much for talking to us.

Thank you so much for having me.

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day.

Let us know what you think.

You can write to us at bookofthedayatnpr.org.

I'm Tim Bidermias.

The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan.

Our founding editor is Petra Mayer.

The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Emiko Tamagawa, Todd Mund, Ryan

Bank, Edmignaulti, Elena Torek, Samantha Ballaban, Melissa Gray, Gable Connor, Fernando

Nero Roman, William Troop, Daniel Hoffman, Elena Burnett, and Jeanette Woods.

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Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much for listening to this week on NPR's Book of the Day.