697: Translating Italian Cooking’s Holy Grail

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0:31The guy who said, you are what you eat, the French philosopher, judge, Briat Severin, the quote of his that I actually like most is that the discovery of a new recipe brings more joy to humanity than the discovery of a new star. And I am at my fridge a lot more often than I'm at my telescope. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

0:59Book editor Michael Zerbon joins me in the studio to talk about The Talisman of Happiness, a book he worked on for over a decade to have translated from Italian into English and available for all. As we find out, it's an iconic and quite unwieldy text that its author, Adoboni, originally published in 1925. The book's influence cannot be overstated, and for the first time, readers are given insight into the foundational Italian cooking that we still see today. Michael shares how he was introduced to the book by Samin Nasrat while editing Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which sent him down many dead-end roads towards acquiring it.

1:37This is a wonderful conversation for Italian food nerds like myself, and I hope you enjoy it.

1:46Michael Zerbin, welcome to This Is Taste. Long time coming. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Buddy, I've known you for so long, and I'm such a fan of you as an editor of the books you work on. You have a long history in book publishing with a focus on cookbooks. Before we get to The Talisman of Happiness, which is such a remarkable achievement, I'm linking to a New York Times story about it. I think the writer did an amazing job. Kim Severson, did she do it? Yeah, Kim did it. Yeah, the total life honor to have a Pulitzer Prize winning person put your name in the first two words of their story.

2:20It's just incredible. It's so true. And I think that is a great place to go to that article after this conversation because we can't cover the full project. But I also wanted to have you in just to talk about you working in book publishing. And really, I want to get from you as an editor, as you're an acquiring editor, you know, you are the say of like if a proposal is working or not. And we have a lot of listeners who are in the industry who write about food, are interested in writing a cookbook. So I have to ask you this big question is, Michael, like what are you looking for these days? And second part is, is what makes a proposal really pop for you?

3:00That's the million dollar question. I guess sometimes it really is the million dollar question. It can be more if you hit on the right one. Over the years, I've tried to figure out how to answer that question in a way that's not just, you know, I'm looking for whatever the hot subject of the moment is. Like right now, everybody's still interested in protein and fiber. Like, OK, as a publisher, we've got to have our high protein, high fiber books and the things that are trending. But the reason why I'm in this business, why I want to do what I do is because I believe that food touches everything.

3:36I think food is this incredible lens that we can look at ourselves, our lives, our culture, our history, our fascinations. And it can teach us things and bring us to light. There's this – the guy who said, you are what you eat, the French philosopher, judge, Briat Severin. And the quote of his that I actually like most is that the discovery of a new recipe brings more joy to humanity than the discovery of a new star. And I am at my fridge a lot more often than I'm at my telescope. And I really feel like that's the case, like the way that food can take us someplace new. So that's part one of trying to answer the question.

4:21Part two is that as an editor, my practice actually kind of comes from what I thought was going to be my first career. I went to school to be at first a computer programmer, and I did a lot of work with what we would now call interaction or experience design. And that really had me think about the person who's on the receiving end of what you're creating. And so my mantra as an editor, as a publisher, is you've got to meet the reader where they are, not where you want them to be, not where I am, but to humble yourself and to understand or try to understand what somebody else is really interested in.

5:02That's really key to being successful in book publishing. I think with that said, also is key is understanding what readers want. And when we're working in these 18-month windows for books, sometimes 12 months if we're lucky, you kind of have to predict the future as a cookbook editor. And so challenging. So how do you know what the book buying – Well, you don't. We don't. Thank you for being honest. It's not that we're rolling the dice exactly, but we are – we're kind of voting with our investment. Spinning the wheel, we can say. I think for me it comes down to quality at the end of the day. There's the particulars of style or taste, whether pho is going to be hot in 18 months or not.

5:53I can't predict. But I can try to detect in that proposal, to come back to your question, if the person behind it is somebody who's got an integrity to themselves and to their idea, is the expression original? Is it taking us someplace new? Is there the discovery of something? Is there expertise? Is there an authority that is being brought? Is there enthusiasm? Do they bring you in to the journey with them? I think you have to hit like a couple of those because especially with, you know, influencer books and subsect books, love them. So many on the show. We publish many here. Terrific authors.

6:36But sometimes the experience part is not quite there. You're going to get the enthusiasm. How do you negotiate that when looking at creators with big followings or folks with subsects that are getting a lot of attention? They're being super creative with the words, with the visuals, but maybe they don't have the recipe chops. You must have to negotiate this tension. Yeah, I think a good idea can come from anywhere. Love that. And that's part of the fun of the job so that it's not the same thing every day. I'm constantly being surprised. Yeah. I'm really looking to be surprised in a proposal. You know, if you see so many of these things, unfortunately, as an editor, you can start to read just to say no.

7:17You're like looking for the things like, oh, well, that's not going to work. That's not going to work. But the person who can get you excited the way that you would be if you weren't in this business and you just happened upon a book at the bookstore and you're like, oh, I want that. That always is tantalizing to me. Let's talk about the voracious list right now. Transparently, we work at kind of rival houses. But the spirit of our show is never that. Even though we publish here at Penguin Random House, we want to invite everyone from the cookbook industry in. And I'm always excited about your lists.

7:50I think you have my former colleague Raquel Pelzel is on your team. I love Raquel. What an incredible taste as an editor. But we're in the kind of tail end of the fall season. So catch us up with some of your titles of the fall. Yeah. Yeah. Well, first, just to say Raquel has been an amazing addition to the team, just incredible energy, insight, voice. I miss her as a coworker, man. She's so great. She's great. I love Raquel. She's so great. If I was doing a book, I think I would want Raquel to edit it. We brought her over to help expand the list. It had been me buying all of the culinary stuff for the past five years.

8:26in 2024 I think I published 22 books myself which was too many and so we had an opportunity to slow down a little bit recalibrate with Raquel on board and so our culinary list in 2025 has has been a little bit smaller we've done a couple of books with our longtime partners Milk Street Chris Kimball and his team. Jason Hirsch over there is an amazing collaborator. We've got, I don't know, 15 books with Milk Street by now on all manner of subjects. Obviously Talisman of Happiness. We'll get to that. Absolutely. A great book that's been, that I didn't edit that actually we had a guest editor from the broader Little Brown and Company team, Vivian Lee, that came out as Cat Lou's 108 Asian Cookies, which I have not had a cookie from that book that is not a total surprising banger.

9:23We just had a kind of a potluck cookie swap in the office where Kat came in and like 25 or 30 people from around the group, none of these people, actual bakers, none of them actually cookbook editors took these recipes and we did this swap and it was just incredible. So much fun. I love that book. I think we talked about it in our preview and Kat's a terrific editor. I love the photos too. Really Charity who we just shot with in Seattle. did the photos. And it's a really, really great book. Yeah. Then next year, we're kind of picking up the list a little bit. We've got a Greek book from Maria Koutsianis, who I think is that sweet spot of somebody who's got huge influencer style platform, but incredible integrity and deep recipe development shops and a great aesthetic.

10:13What else do we have? We've got a new book from Esther Choi, a Food Network person. and restaurateur. I mean, Esther, Food Network person, Vox person, but also, you know, Mokbar and somebody who's writing about Korean food. You know, back in like 2013, Esther is here. Like at the start of this amazing journey of Korean food in New York. So incredible talent. I'm so excited. Amazing. Love Esther. That is, this is the book that's going to bring out your inner Halmany, your inner Korean grandma. Halmany, yeah, yeah. Good one. Yeah, buddy. Did you edit this one or was that – did you edit the book?

10:52Yes. Yeah. Editing it right now. It's being co-written by Kate Leahy. Oh, great. Wonderful. Who's terrific. She's so good. And it's just – it's so full of heart and personality. And, yeah, really looking forward to that. Another book that we've got is from – more on the influencer kind of content creator side is a book by Corey Larkin. Okay. Who's on Instagram as Coco Larkin Cooks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the time I think we started talking to her around this time last year, maybe 100 ,000 followers or something on Instagram. But she was doing these dishes that were, to me, all about the glory of a home-cooked meal.

11:31You know, not the fancy thing at the restaurant, but that, you know, the potato dish that's like burnished and crackling and steaming as you pull it out of the oven. And it just makes you feel more alive and more like you're at home. Yeah. And luckily, she's had some nice growth over the next year. So I think that that's going to be a big one for us as well. Very, very, very exciting list. And I can't wait to see where it goes in the next several years as you start to ramp up a little bit too. Yeah, thank you. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. If you're one of those last-minute shoppers, you might know the feeling.

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13:26Terms and conditions apply. From February 20th to March 7th, dive into Canada's biggest culinary festival, Montreal en Lumière, an exclusive partnership with the McCord Stewart Museum and its exhibition, On the Menu Montreal, a restaurant story. The 2026 festival invites food lovers on a flavorful journey through time. Montreal's top restaurateurs will reimagine 65 years of the city's iconic astronomy, crafting inventive, nostalgia-inspired dishes with a modern twist. Prepare your palate. World-renowned chefs, including several Michelin-starred talents, will team up with over 80 of Montreal's finest local chefs to create unforgettable, one-of-a-kind menus.

14:10The full program is available at MontrealOnLumiere.com, presented by Lotto Quebec in collaboration with National Bank. Hi there, it's Matt, co-host of the show. We are currently running a This Is Taste listener survey, and we'd love to hear from you. Do you have a guest request? A restaurant you wish we'd visit to talk about on three things? What about a lesser-known cookbook author who deserves a spot in our studio chair? You can let us know by clicking the link in our show notes to complete the survey. It will only take a couple minutes, I swear, and will help us continue to make the best show possible.

14:47That's the This Is Taste Listener Survey link in our show notes. Let's get to Talisman of Happiness. Love the spirit of this book. It's a personal project for you. That's why you're here talking about it. First off, just tell me a little bit about Adeboni, the author of the book that you kind of shepherded the translation into English for the first time. This is an iconic book that many Italian-American and Italian homebooks have at home. I know Mario Carbone is in the New York Times article talking about having it in his home growing up. So it's known, but it hasn't been translated. And to be clear, you know, she founded a magazine in 1915.

15:32Tell me a little bit about her and this magazine she founded. Yeah, well, the reason why you're talking to me is because she died about 40-some years ago. Yeah, yeah. I think that Ada Boni is the most incredible figure that most people in this country have no idea about. And obviously I've drunk the brodo on this book. But I think that without Ada's place in Italian food history and just kind of the global gastronomic lexicon, we would not have a thousand competing recipes for carbonara or cacio e pepe. You know, would there be like 19 Italian restaurants on every corner in midtown Manhattan? When she was born, this was she was born in sometime in the 1880s.

16:22That was only 20 years since Italy had become itself. Before that point, there was this historical moment called the Risorgimento, where that was the unification of Italy, where all the previous republics and city states and kingdoms. became one. Up until that point, there were separate regions. So she was born at this moment where her country was just becoming itself. There was this incredibly intense period of political, social, and economic change. This is right before the World Wars. It's a moment when Italian culture was going from being principally agricultural to moving more to cities. And what she realized as she was putting this magazine together, Preziosa, with her husband Enrico, is that the families that had been passing their culinary traditions down kind of orally, like at your nonna's elbow, that wasn't necessarily going to be the case anymore If you had moved from, you know, some small village to Milan or to Rome or something like that.

17:31And she wanted to catalog what these recipes were to explain Italy to itself, but also to give people the ability to cook for themselves and their families. Yeah. I mean, I have to ask, like, when she's starting this magazine, this is like very early food media, like, in the world. I mean, you have like the French guys writing the cookbooks, of course, in the late 1800s, but you don't have food media. You don't have magazines really in America. There isn't a long tradition. In working on this translation, what's like the genesis of these recipes? Because these recipes, at least at first, are coming out of this magazine.

18:15Do you have any sense of her workflow, the way she did it? Yeah. I mean, well, I think the best reason to write a recipe is so you can eat it later. So I think the appetite was the primary drive. Her uncle, Adolfo, was a prominent chef in Rome. And the stories that I've heard involve her kind of developing recipes as early as 10 years old in her family kitchen. and as she started the magazine and before then she would travel around Italy to understand the local recipes and bring them home it was clearly a passion for her and it was very much her and her family she worked with her husband she worked for many many years with her brother Marcello and the great nephew who now I believe is in his 80s Stefano wrote to me and said And what he remembers most is these huge family gatherings around the Boni table, 35 or 40 people sometimes, but always at least 10 people a week.

19:19And when he was a boy, he would recall Ada and Marcello just testing and testing and testing these recipes. He said they would they would eat the same thing for a week sometimes until they got it right. So although this is not a test kitchen type scenario, the book itself has, you know, leave some things to the imagination or to the cook's discretion. But there was a passion there and a discipline. And I think, as you say, it was early food media. There was no example there. This is recipe writing when recipes weren't really written. So she was creating something. Very, very new in just the global stage of writing down recipes, and especially at the scale, the size of this book.

20:03It makes a very loud sound when you drop it from a height. I want to, Michael, hear about your connection to the book. And I love learning that you first heard about the book when you were editing Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, you know, Samin Nasratt's iconic debut that you worked on to great success. You know, it seems like Samin was somebody who knew Auduboni's work and kind of hipped you to it a little bit. Yeah. Well, I mean, the world knows Samin as the incredibly generous and wonderful cooking teacher that she is. But I think great teachers are first great students. And one of the pleasures of working with her on Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat was to talk about all the things that we wanted to know about the world.

20:47And it was one of those conversations in which Ada's name came up. and she must have told me that the title because in my recollection it was just the poetry of this the talisman of happiness i thought like oh my god i gotta hold that close that uh yeah it hipped me to it yeah i started googling there wasn't anything i didn't have a wikipedia page at the time there was nothing yeah um and i you know just kind of little by little at first i just wanted to have a copy. And then when I realized that it wasn't available here, at least certainly not in the full translation, there had been a diluted kind of weirdly translated version from 1950 that was in some Italian American homes, but that nobody had done the whole, I wanted to say the whole enchilada, but maybe, you know, the full Timbalo.

21:40The full Timbalo, great, great extension metaphor. And just to be clear, how many recipes are in this book? The version that we published at 1 ,680 recipes. I'm, that's, I'll put that in the intro because we maybe buried the lead in this conversation. That's an incredible amount of recipes. It's crazy. And yet in some ways it only scratches the surface. When Ada first published it, it had something like 880. But this was roughly, the publication of this book was roughly at the same time as the publication of The Joy of Cooking in the United States. Many people say that, you know, talisman is like the joy of cooking of Italy.

22:21And like joy, it grew over time. Every so often, she would put out a new edition that would have more recipes and more recipes and more recipes. At its maximum, I think it had more than 2 ,000. And what we did with the English translation was to look for the things that were just, you know, completely not going to be used here, but tried to include everything else. I think some of our listeners may have The Silver Spoon. Yeah. So let's just be clear about the difference between these two books because I think people assume The Silver Spoon may be the joy of cooking of Italy, but you're making a different case here.

22:57Yeah. I mean The Silver Spoon is absolutely an incredible book. I mean monumental undertaking. I can't stitch together the historic link between the two, but Ada predated The Silver Spoon by decades. Yeah. My experience of The Silver Spoon is that it's encyclopedic but cold. There isn't one person behind it. What you have with Ada, and it was created by an editorial team that came out of a magazine, a lifestyle publisher in Italy. But with Ada, you have a person with a perspective. And that warmth is one of the things that attracted me to it. So I think when we come to cookbooks, we're not just coming for the three tablespoons of butter and the four tablespoons of flour and the whatever of salt, but to make a connection with somebody else.

23:55How do you see warmth in the book? I agree with you. Fully Silver Spoon, I think, leaves a lot of people flat. It's a gorgeous package. It looks cool on your shelf and definitely great info in there. This book doesn't have head notes. So it's not going to be sold in the writing. But I want to tap into the warmth. How do you see warmth in this book? Just on the way over, I was thinking about eggplant. Yeah. And so in her eggplant parmigiana recipe, she takes a moment to say, and by the way, I think salting your eggplant before you fry it is a complete waste of time. Okay. And you see her popping up in these recipes.

24:43It's – I kind of – the grandmother who taught me how to cook, my baba, was Ukrainian. And in fact, she was illiterate. So she couldn't have passed written recipes down to me. I never had the experience of her telling me, oh, and here's, you know, holopji. and the reason why we call it that is this and in order to have the most tender rice and meat mixture, blah, blah, blah. She never gave me a head note in her kitchen. It was just, let's start cooking and then you cook. I think it's that kind of, you're in the kitchen with Ada type feel that creates this sense of warmth and humanity for me. And then she's there at the crucial moment, either set you free sometimes, maybe challenge your assumption or other times say like, by the way, stay away from this, or this is the exact thing you're looking for.

25:39I love seeing that because I also share that. And we can talk like frittatas too a little bit. That section is crazy. Let's go back to your journey with acquiring this book. You know, it's not an easy acquisition. Samin tells you about it. You start Googling, you get this kind of watered down version that has been translated. But you kind of are running into some roadblocks, Michael. But you eventually have a breakthrough. Tell me how you actually were able to get in touch with somebody in Italy and maybe some of the challenges along the way to actually get the rights to it. I mean, usually when you want to publish a book, there's an established system for it.

26:19There's a rights holder that you can phone up or send an email to. There's somebody you can go to at a trade fair or a book fair, a literary agent. The world of publishing is a network, and there's usually a path from one node in the network to the next. With Talisman, I could not find it. The publisher of the book in Italy is Editore Colombo. My understanding is that Mr. Colombo was a friend of Mr. Bonis way back in the day, and that today Colombo is mostly a government printer. They produce stuff for the Italian government and the government of Rome. So it would be like trying to find the rights to the joy of cooking, but you have to find the person who prints the postage stamps for the USPS.

27:09Just like not at all the usual way that it would happen. And I can't tell you how many times I got hung up on or struck out with an email. Frustrating. Yeah. Must have been. But, you know, what I wanted, particularly at that moment in my career, I was young. I was hungry as an editor. I was working with Samin. I just acquired a book by Dominique Ansel, the Cronut creator. I had the aspiration to do books that were cultural and generational touchstones. And very happily, some of those books have become that. But I also needed books to publish. Now I've got a fancy title and run an imprint and stuff, and people send me good stuff.

27:56But back then, people were like, zzzzzers? Nobody knew who I was, and so I had to be scrappy. And so my habit was every week to pursue something. And so for many Fridays, I was just trying to spend half an hour to move the ball a little bit further. I would talk to the Italian Trade Commission. I would talk to every rights director from Milan or Rome who stopped through, and I just couldn't get anywhere. And then a British packager named Elwynn Street, the woman who runs it is named Sylvia Lankford. She had come in, and a packager is kind of complex to explain. Basically, they work with publishers to produce books.