Soup To Nuts, Cookbooks Fill Every Niche

Anyone who’s ever bought a cookbook knows there is more than just a bunch of recipes acquired in the transaction.

Some cookbooks are surrogate moms, ready to coach us through our first formal dinner or remind us what goes into a pot of chili. Others are coffee table fodder, destined to be admired but seldom used.

Just in time for holiday shopping, here are a handful of choices from the season’s current crop. Each has been selected with a particular recipient in mind, and all have passed a road test in a home kitchen.

For the busy home cook: “The Woman’s Day Cookbook,” by Kathy Farrell-Kingsley and the editors of Woman’s Day (Viking, $24.95).

Here’s a book that understands the contemporary home cook, who needs to put meals on the table quickly most nights, but also likes to experiment in the kitchen now and then. Thus there are recipes for spicy beef stir-fry, and ham and cheese pita pizzas, as well as paella and tiramisu. And each is flagged with a little banner that tells you what you’re about to tackle: “Easy,” “30 Minutes,” “One Pot” reads the flag above instructions for vegetable mint soup.

One of the more user-friendly new cookbooks on the market, this one also provides nutritional breakdowns, preparation and cooking times, and chapters on entertaining, celebration and “investment cooking” - spending three or four hours on a weekend to make a parade of meals for future eating.

The stodgy color photos appear to have been plucked from a home economics text, and some of the prose borders on the middlebrow. But overall, “The Woman’s Day Cookbook” is a welcome kitchen companion, fusing the straightforwardness of “The Joy of Cooking” with some of the flair of Martha Stewart.

For the baker: “How to Bake,” by Nick Malgieri (HarperCollins, $35).

One of the most respected professional bakers in the country, Nick Malgieri takes the fear out of focaccia, brioche and pie crusts with this enticing paean to things baked.

Malgieri paces his information so that beginning chapters start with easy instructions (think quick breads and scones) and continue with ever more technical recipes, culminating in classic puff pastry.

Whatever your skill level, there’s something to explore, be it a winning “Best and Easiest Banana Cake” or Chocolate Raspberry Mille-Feuille. In this encyclopedic work, there are low-fat recipes, savory as well as sweet instructions, and recipes for such chestnuts as coconut layer cake, English muffins and lemon meringue pie.

For the soup lover: “The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup,” by Mimi Sheraton (Warner Books, $22.95).

Sheraton, a former food critic at The New York Times, Time and Conde Nast Traveler, takes readers on a global journey that detours to Mexico (for a taste of Aztec Tortilla Soup), France (for a classic consomme) and the Republic of Georgia (for a rousing and utterly addictive bowl of chicken soup made crunchy with walnuts and bold with red wine vinegar and cilantro).

The recipes are varied and interesting enough to be served frequently; Sheraton writes of a dinner where she served nothing but chicken soup in a range of guises, from the chilled ivory-colored Baked Chicken Custard to a sassy Fried Chicken and Andouille File Gumbo.

And the opening chapters detailing the basics of chicken soup-making, from buying poultry to seasoning the stock (Sheraton prefers kosher coarse salt to iodized), answers a multitude of cooking questions.

For coffee fans: “The Joy of Coffee,” by Corby Kummer (Chapters, $22).

Many are the books devoted to Seattle’s No. 1 habit, but few live up to the lively, informative and personal guide written by Kummer, an editor with The Atlantic Monthly and intrepid food hound.

Just about everything you want to know about the bean and its transformation into coffee is addressed in these pages. (Should beans be stored in the refrigerator? The author says coffee readily absorbs odors in the refrigerator and freezing the beans causes the oil in them to congeal, harming the body of brewed coffee.)

The advantages of various brewing methods, a tour of coffee countries, a discussion of the effects of caffeine - it’s all trotted out here, followed by a stellar array of recipes that either use coffee or pair well with the beverage.

For the restaurant maven: “The Lutece Cookbook,” by Andre Soltner with Seymour Britchky (Knopf, $35).

For more than 30 years, Lutece reigned as one of the finest restaurants in Manhattan, a haven for the rich and famous who came to watch one another and dine on chef Andre Soltner’s refined French and lusty Alsatian cooking. Lutece was sold last year and Soltner has retired from its kitchen, but his triumphs remain for the rest of us to savor in his delicious story and recipe collection.

Medallions of veal in puff pastry (calf’s brains optional) and terrine of eel with red wine jelly might not be the dishes you’d tackle after a day at the office, if ever. And if you typically fold truffles into scrambled eggs, you can probably afford your own cook, too. But as a historical record of classical cooking, “The Lutece Cookbook” is a fount of information. The chapter on sauces and stocks alone is worth the price of admission.

This is by no means an encyclopedia of complicated recipes based on staples of the rich, however. Alsatian cooking relies on humble ingredients - potatoes, onions (Soltner preferred shallots from Walla Walla), sauerkraut, noodles - and the recipes that incorporate them are among the book’s best.

For armchair cooks: “The Artist’s Table,” edited and compiled by Carol Eron (Collins Publishers, $28).

The premise is a delicious one: round up great art, frame it with great recipes and mount the two in a tribute to world-class painters and their fans in the culinary world.

What you get is Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Partie de campagne” served with an onion tart, cold roast pheasant and chocolate lace wafers - courtesy of Julia Child. And Jean Simeon Chardin’s “Still Life with Game” accompanied by a menu of sunchoke soup, roasted saddle of lamb and warm chocolate tarts with honey ice cream from chef Patrick Clark.

And on and on, for a total of 65 full-color reproductions from the National Gallery of Art and musings and recipes from the likes of such respected chefs as Alice Waters, Joel Robuchon, Paula Wolfert and Lorenza De’Medici.

Will anyone bother to make prickly pear sorbet or wild boar in sweet-sour chocolate sauce? Maybe, maybe not. But this mouthwatering gallery tour offers plenty of recipes that are within the grasp of the average cook - spiced walnuts, mashed potatoes with olive oil, jicama salad sparked with cilantro and sweetened with tangerines - and provides more than a few reasons to look up from the art and start imagining tonight’s dinner.