NEW YORK — As a child growing up in Italy, Lidia Bastianich recalls seeing one particular cookbook in just about everyone’s kitchen. It was called “The Talisman of Happiness” and it was often given as a wedding present to couples starting new lives together.

“It has all the basic recipes. And it says the basic thing — that food is a connector, that food is happiness,” she says.

The book by Ada Boni — its Italian title is “Il Talismano della Felicita” — was first published in 1929, and became a go-to place to find the recipe for spaghetti carbonara or pork galantine. Its simplicity and accessibility got it compared to “The Joy of Cooking,” but it predated Irma S. Rombauer’s iconic work.

This fall, the first English edition of the complete work — with nearly 1,700 recipes — arrives on shelves, thanks to years of dogged pursuit by Voracious publisher Michael Szczerban.

He first heard about it from Samin Nosrat, author of “Salt Fat Acid Heat,” and that, combined with his love of Italy, led him on a more than decade-long journey to get the rights to publish it in English. “Just the poetry of that name — ‘The Talisman of Happiness’ — it felt timeless and also like it was from so long ago,” Szczerban says.

Boni, who died in 1973, was one of Italy’s first food writers, and the seeds of “The Talisman of Happiness” grew from a magazine.

She codified and tested dishes that have remained the backbone of Italian cooking and reflect regional differences. There are 10 gnocchi recipes, 12 minestrones and 20 risottos.

“This is a cookbook that’s really meant for cooking. It is a book for cooks. It’s a book that’s intended to be used, not just to sit on a coffee table or on a shelf, but to become yours,” says Szczerban.

There’s no frilly language or stories. Each entry includes ingredients, and the directions are usually just a few paragraphs, telling the home cook to look for the meat to be “done” and the vegetables to be seasoned “to taste.”

Unlike recipes from Milk Street, Bon Appetit or America’s Test Kitchen, Boni didn’t weigh things to the gram or even dictate oven degrees. Her Cod with White Wine only specifies “a few spoons” of wine. Elsewhere, she calls for a “finger of oil” or “a few leaves of rosemary.”

“I think that there was a very specific editorial vision for these recipes, which was to give you enough to make it, but not so much that you couldn’t make it your own,” Szczerban says.

The more Szczerban learned about “The Talisman of Happiness,” the more intrigued he became. What at first was an impulse to find a copy for himself grew into something larger.

“As I began to understand more of what it was — the place that it seemed to have had in Italian history and culture, and then the spread of Italian cooking throughout the world — I thought, ‘I don’t need just a copy of this. I need to be able to use my position as a publisher to bring this to the rest of the English-language world,'” he says.

The book had been updated regularly in Italy and there had been a few stabs at an English version, but the recipes were changed in order to tailor them to American tastes and heavily abridged. “Nobody had translated the full beast,” Szczerban says.