Rousseau's definition of happiness--"a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion"--would draw no argument from the trio of chefs, amateur and pro, in the accompanying photograph. The one in the sports coat presiding over the feast is George Lang, New York-based chef, author and international restaurateur. Lang's short list of favorite books on cooking is a part of this week's cover story on the growing U.S. love affair with the kitchen. The pair in the chefs' hats with Lang in his Manhattan kitchen are TIME'S Michael Demarest, who wrote the story, and Rosemarie Tauris Zadikov, who assisted with the reporting.

Tauris, who was brought up in Germany and the U.S., is a passionate cook of French dishes. Demarest also admits to being "at home on the range," as he puts it. "When I was growing up," he says, "we had a succession of listless, weary old ladies performing kitchen chores, so I learned to cook almost in self-defense." He learned so well, in fact, that at the age of eleven he entered a newspaper recipe contest. "Cooking was considered a sissy art back then," he recalls. "I didn't want my friends to find out that I cooked, so I entered the recipes under the name of Miss Minnie Demarest."

Minnie's recipes won several awards, and Demarest has continued with his defensive cooking. Like any active chef, Demarest keeps several pots boiling at once, and that goes for his writing too. With reporting from Georgia Harbison, he confected the three-page story on Manhattan's new Citicorp Center in the Environment section.

Midwest Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand, whose reporting included attending a "cookoff' in Evanston, Ill., says he is now "hard into an effort to offset the damage:

I'm dieting." New York Correspondent Mary Cronin, who canceled plans for a vacation (to attend a cooking farm in France) in order to work on the story, visited five cooking schools on five successive evenings. Says she: "It was after this that I realized the subtle and demanding discipline required to be a food critic: the art of tasting--and pushing away."

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