This is really interesting. I always heard of "the silver spoon" and thought it was some california low-fat cookbook! (Don't ask me why! that's what the title and the cover picture looked like to me).
Having the original of Ada Boni's Il Talismano della Felicita' (and the reduced translated american version -The Talisman) i can say that though it has tons of recipes it tells you nothing about them, there is no injection of anything personal at all, it aims to be a compendium, and presumes you know how to do everything already. Most people I know here distrust cookbooks, because the recipes are often not even tested, and they don;t explain anything so particularly in baking, the stuff just doesn;t come out. (They are always surprised when i give a cake recipe how much detail i put in it, then they say, with wonder and surprise, "It worked!".
Moreover, the index is ridiculous. It's typical of Italian books - when there is an index - that it's almost useless (and i can't tell you how difficult it was to do research here, pre-internet, pre-amazon, practically in the stone age, where even the scientific and academic books had no index at all)
But the index of the Talismano is very literal. Say you want to know what to do with Eggplants and you look up melanzane in the index. You will only get recipes where the first word in the name of the recipe is melanzane - you will find melanzane alla parmigiano, melanzane in barchetta, but you will NOT find pasta alla norma, which is with an eggplant sauce, and indeed if you want pasta with eggplant, you have to know which kind of pasta they say is the right kind to find any recipe - if you want a recipe for arrabbiata sauce, you have to look under "penne all'arrabbiata" and if they think the sauce calls for rigatoni (or fusilli or farfalle or whatever) the index will show it under rigatoni, or fusilli or farfalle!
I imagine the translations are better, and I never saw Il Cucchiaio d'Argento here, but from the experiences i have, I steer clear of any italian cookbook made here because of the lack of description, the lack of technique and the horrendous indexing, when it exists at all. But perhaps the later editions have improved. The talismano I have is very old.