Ada Boni

Ada Boni (1891-1973) was one of Italy’s first food writers. In 1915, she and her husband (a close friend of chef Augustus Escoffier) founded Preziosa, a food magazine and a few years later, Boni opened a cooking school for aristocratic Roman women. In 1925 she crowdsourced her readers and students and if 500 committed to buying a cookbook, she said she’d create it—and that’s how The Talisman of Happiness was born. It has since sold more than 1,000,000 copies and has never gone out of print in Italy