Everyday Epicurean

I’ve been reading a few food related blogs recently and one of them (the red kitchen – see sidebar) mentioned a book called “The Silver Spoon”. This has apparently been the bible of Italian cooking for the last fifty five years and has only recently been translated into English.

Well yesterday while buying a copy of “Moorish” by Greg and Lucy Malouf for my Mother, I spied “The Silver Spoon” sitting there in the store waiting to be bought. I didn’t immediately buy it (since at $70, it’s a bit of an outlay), but gave in on the way home and purchased the hefty tome (and I do mean hefty, at 1263 pages in a hardback it’s no light-weight cookbook).

As one would expect it was standing room only on the train, and having parked at Mum & Dad’s I had a four block walk before I could finally put the book down. Needless to say by the time I got home I was weary and in no mood for cooking a full meal. So I hit the pages of the book for something fairly simple to make (after slackly feeding the children canned baked beans and toast – yes I know, disgusting stuff, but they enjoy it once in a while).

What I found was “Eggs en cocotte with Leeks” (or Uova in cocotte ai porri, in the original Italian). Basically it’s caramelised leeks with a little freshly ground nutmeg, placed in a ramkin with an egg placed on top and cooked in the oven. It looks like this:

!/recipes/images/Eggs_en_cocotte_with_Leeks.png (Uova in cocotte ai porri)!

And it tastes fantastic.

I look forward to more Italian cooking from this wonderful book.