A Well-Laden Table of Cookbooks

By Michael Demarest

Viands and vegetables from all over, for all seasonings

"Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else. "

--Dr. Johnson

Well said, Sam. Belly may have become a derogatory word in modern times, but Johnson properly viewed it as the locus and focus of gustatory enjoyment and sensual wellbeing. Still, Johnson was at a beggar's banquet compared with the modern diner's choice of delectations: ingredients, recipes and techniques from the kitchens of the world. Not least of these blessings, to a Johnsonian, is the cornucopia of culinary literature. A good cookbook is a perpetual feast, and this year's table is well laden.

The season's most savory surprise is English Provincial Cooking by Elisabeth Ayrton (Harper & Row; $16.95). Tradition au contraire ("In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce"), well-flavored sauces and gravies have graced English food since the Roman occupation. (Pastry, too, was introduced by Caesar's men.) English cuisine, even more than the French, is most notable for its regional diversities, which Ayrton explores and exalts with expertise and charm. She tells how to confect Wiltshire lardy cake and Yorkshire hot wine pudding, chickens as lizards and rum roast of lamb (for the sailor's return) --not to mention belly-warming Bedfordshire clangers, Oxfordshire sweet devil or the great Melton Mowbray pie, which long before the sandwich was the foxhunter's favorite lunch munch.

French cuisine--or at least its literature--seems to be divided like Gaul itself into three parts: classic, nouvelle and provincial. Many of the top chefs who miraculously find time to write these books are, helas, unable to spread the flavors of their tables across the printed page. Louisette Bertholle provides a salivating exception. A collaborator with Julia Child and Simone Beck in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Bertholle has written a comprehensive, down-to-earth guide to French family cooking that is both witty and percipient. Her French Cuisine for All (Doubleday; $19.95), meticulously edited for the American cook, covers the Gallic spectrum from country soups and dandelion salad to such exotica as iced caviar-flavored consomme and roast loin of young wild boar (frozen joints of European boar are available at specialty stores in some U.S. cities). Bertholle's recipes for chocolate cakes are guaranteed to leave her pages stained with fudgy fingerprints.

Though Japanese restaurants have popped up like bean sprouts throughout the U.S., all but the most intrepid American cooks refrain from emulating their cuisine. A pity. For, as Master Chef and Teacher Shizuo Tsuji demonstrates hi Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art (Kodansha; $14.95), Japanese food at its best is intrinsically austere, as much a matter of balance--texture, flavors, colors and freshness--as anything else. Not unlike Escoffier and the gurus of nouvelle cuisine, the Japanese chef insists: "Let little seem like much, as long as it is fresh and beautiful." Tsuji, a former journalist with a degree in French literature who trained with some of Europe's greatest chefs, has written more than a cookbook: his 517-page tome is both an essay on the culinary philosophy of his country and an explanation of the cultural background of its foods. Along the way, he shows in words and excellent artwork the basic repertory, from sushi to a gala banquet consisting of as many as 30 small portions.

This admirable volume, with an introduction by M.F.K. Fisher, includes charts of North American and Japanese fish and an exhaustive list of U.S. stores where Japanese ingredients and implements can be bought. Tsuji-san is a man of all seasonings: in addition to a wallful of international culinary awards, he boasts one of the world's most extensive private collections of Bach recordings, is an authority on ice cream and has written 29 books. This must be his most valuable.

The Italians, fortunately, are resistant to culinary trends. After all, pasta is pasta is pasta. Nevertheless, ever since the tales of Marco Polo's bringing back ice cream and noodles from the Far East, Italy has been receptive to worthy new dishes and techniques. This apertura is explored in The New Italian Cooking (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $15) by Margaret and G. Franco Romagnoli, who in two previous books have done a commendable job of explicating la cucina italiana for Americans. Their new book largely concerns itself with the adaptation of traditional recipes to contemporary methods and lifestyles: using an electric pasta machine; preparing a ragu in 45 minutes instead of the conventional four hours. For lagniappe, the Romagnolis offer some interesting modifications of traditional formulas, such as leg of lamb with gin and lemon spaghetti. A handy companion book is Teresa Gilardi Candler's Vegetables the Italian Way (McGraw-Hill; $12.95). Candler, the daughter of a restaurant family in Turin, brings the U.S. a choice, non-cultist collection of vegetable recipes that include such rare surprises as artichoke bread, zucchini chocolate cake and artichokes with filets of sole.

A different kettle of poissons, drawn from dozens of national cuisines, is Ruth A. Spear's Cooking Fish and Shellfish (Doubleday; $16.95). The theme of her book is "taking fish seriously," which steak-and-tater Yankees seldom do, even on the seacoasts. Americans are blessed with a biblical abundance of seafood; some 200 varieties pass through Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market. They range from the eel (Anguilla rostrata), much prized by Mediterranean diners, to squid, abalone, Boston scrod, the sadly underrated pike and San Francisco Dungeness crab. American oysters--notably Lynnhavens, Bluepoints, Chincoteagues and the Pacific Olympias--are as delicious and nutritious as any that Roman emperors had shipped from England packed in snow. (Louis XI ordered his advisers to eat this bivalve regularly as "brain food.") Though it is as expensive as beefsteak today, seafood can be stretched in astonishing ways, and Spear prescribes 29 fish soups and stews that elongate budgets while widening nostrils. For the more extravagant, two of her finny finest: shrimp with melon in kirsch, and the New Orleans oyster loaf known as la Mediatrice, which errant husbands used to bring home to placate spouses after a night on the town.

One of the most successful ways to mollify a ms. or missus is, of course, to take her out to dinner and leave the cookbooks at home. In Manhattan, the greatest repository of restaurants in the world, there is a special place whose very atmosphere is as heady as champagne. It is The Four Seasons, whose owners and chef have published a treasury of their most prized and coveted preparations. Rumanian-born Tom Margittai and his Hungarian partner, Paul Kovi, took over the restaurant in 1973, at a time when the decor far outdazzled the dishes.

Sensing Americans' growing interest in food and wine, they decided to recast their menus to emphasize "the best and freshest seasonal foods" and, rather than pay slavish obeisance to Continental cuisine, create food in an American idiom. In this, with Swiss Chef Josef ("Seppi") Renggli, they have succeeded admirably; their prize recipes bloom in all of The Four Seasons (Simon & Schuster; $24.95). Unlike many books by more celebrated restaurateurs, The Four Seasons trio present their recipes, and raisons d'etre, in succinct and practical form. Elevating basic family dishes to haute cuisine, their prescriptions range from the basic souffle and chicken pot pie to such palate pleasers as cold peach soup, filet of pompano with citrus fruits and pistachio nuts, and filet of veal with crabmeat and wild mushrooms --capped perhaps with a topless chocolate cake or a walnut tart.

The book no serious cook or gourmet can afford to pass by is Food by Waverley Root (Simon & Schuster; $24.95). This is, quite simply, the long-needed English-language equivalent of the classic Larousse Gastronomique, written with vast erudition and tingling humor for the English-speaking reader. Root, a Paris-based American writer (The Food of Italy, The Food of France), has produced an encyclopedic, beautifully illustrated 602-page dictionary and history of the world's foods. It travels from aardvark, which is eaten in tropical Africa, all the way to zucca, the extravagant orange Italian squash. En Root, the armchair gourmet is served tidbits and morsels and banquets of information.

Root writes of radishes (known in China in 1100 B.C.) and raccoons ("Try stuffing them with sweet potatoes"), of oranges (first imported to the New World by Christopher Columbus), olives (the mainstay of the Mediterranean economy) and onions, which French Gourmet Robert Courtine called the "truffle of the poor." Or as Dean Swift put it:

There is in every cook 's opinion No savoury dish without an onion; But lest your kissing should be spoiled The onion must be thoroughly boiled.

Bon appetit!

&151;By Michael Demarest

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.