Beyond The Perfect Pot Roast

By John F. Stacks

Cookbooks tumble forth from American publishing houses like frites from a frying basket. In the past six months, hundreds have been published. They are profitable for the simple reason that everyone has to eat, which means that someone has to cook.

That is precisely why I have been messing around in the kitchen since high school days, when I was the first football player to hold membership in the Chef's Club. If I knew how to cook, I would be sure to eat when and what I wanted, even though my mother and father were both steady producers of great food. Cookbooks should serve the same end: better, more flexible eating.

I have been reading and cooking from a large pile of the newest cookbooks for the past several months, full of wonder at the variety and sophistication of modern American cookery. That is all the more remarkable because only a decade or so ago, most of the country was stuck in the pot-roast-and-mashed- potato syndrome. This new crop of cookbooks will tell you everything from how to clean raw abalone to how to prepare a really good, well, pot roast with mashed potatoes, one of my favorites. The cookbooks incorporate all the flavors and delicacy of the new American cuisine as practiced in imaginative restaurants across the country, but there is also a pile of books that resurrect the wonderfully old-fashioned regional cookery, from Cajun to Mennonite. Most cooks won't buy more than a couple of cookbooks a year, so I have ranked the following in order of purchasing preference. Work from the top down, as in a recipe, to stock the kitchen library.

At the very top is a very modern version of the great old war-horse cookbooks like The Fannie Farmer Cookbook and Joy of Cooking. It is called The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins (Workman; $29.95). These are the people who founded New York City's swell little gourmet-food store the Silver Palate and then produced one of the pioneer nouvelle American cookbooks. At 849 pages, The New Basics describes and prescribes just about everything one does in the kitchen.

Let's see, how about pot roast? The comprehensive 44-page index says "pot roast pasta." Huh? Yes, you make this pot roast that sounds delicious, but then you chop it all up and, with its juices, spoon it over a pound of penne or pappardelle. The old pot roast is now actually a stracotto. How modern can you get? You wouldn't want the mashed spuds if you've got the pasta, but let's check anyway. Three listings: the basic one, with sour cream; one that has a whole head of cooked garlic (yum!); and one that is half potatoes and half parsnips (hmm?).

By comparison, the 1964 version of Joy of Cooking has one straightforward recipe for pot roast and one for mashed potatoes. But Joy is an amusing cultural icon, atwitter with the new availability of frozen food and the wonders of the blender. It is stern and didactic in tone, urging its female readers on to culinary excellence: "You will eat at the hour of your choice . . . And you will regain the priceless private joy of family living, dining and sharing."

The New Basics is diverse, sophisticated and essential. It is also, however, cloying in parts. "We have known and loved Sarabeth for years -- and love having breakfast in Sarabeth's Kitchen," begins the recipe for Sarabeth Levine's Goldilox, which turns out to be scrambled eggs with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Go straight to the recipes -- especially the quick and easy bouillabaisse with a peppery rouille -- and skip the biographical musings in the preface, which tell us more than we want to know about the authors' families and herb gardens.

As a rule, cookbooks with big, beautiful pictures should be avoided. The more pictures, the fewer recipes. But my second favorite new book is Pacific Flavors by Hugh Carpenter (Stewart, Tabori & Chang; $35). The gorgeous photography is by Teri Sandison, but it can be forgiven because of the imaginative excellence of the recipes. Carpenter's aim is to blend Oriental flavors with American cooking techniques, thus preserving the flavors of the East but eliminating many of the more tedious steps required in traditional Eastern recipes. Even the Oriental flavorings he uses are now fairly common grocery-store items.

Pan-fried Sichuan chicken is a good example. Chicken breasts are sauteed in a regular skillet, then drenched in a delicious sauce composed of the usual Chinese suspects: oyster, bean and hoisin sauces, sherry instead of Chinese wine, ginger, garlic, chili sauce and Sichuan peppercorns. Another of the charms of this book is the notion of serving these Oriental-style dishes along with Western foods, in this case with steamed carrots in parsley butter.

My objection to all the pretty pictures in this and other books is the inevitable sense of inferiority they produce when the food comes out of the kitchen. For example, Michael McCarty, owner of California-style restaurants in New York City and Santa Monica, Calif., has published Michael's Cookbook (Macmillan; $29.95), which rates three stars for art direction. Each food section opens with a page of modern art by, say, Helen Frankenthaler or Richard Diebenkorn. What they have to do with eating eludes me. Worse, in each section there are color plates showing the finished dishes. Each is an artistic triumph. When I took a shot at the grilled tenderloin of pork with cognac and green peppercorn sauce, it tasted just fine, but it looked on the plate more like a Jackson Pollock than a Michael McCarty. I just couldn't get the little slices of pork to form the perfect crescent that was pictured. Still, this book is a perfect distillation of the best of new American culinary inventiveness, in which old favorites get a new twist from the clever combination of other flavors. Good old soft-shell crab, for instance, gets dressed up nicely in a simple deglazing sauce made with lime juice and grated ginger, which breaks up the usual overly buttery taste of this summer treat.

For sheer usefulness, the best book on the market must be La Varenne Pratique by Anne Willan (Crown; $60), the Briton who in 1975 founded the famous Paris cooking school La Varenne. This is a how-to book more than a book of recipes, although Willan has scattered many simple recipes throughout the technical sections of her well-illustrated manual. In one of the most instructive sections, double-page illustrations show the kinds of meat cuts typically available both in the U.S. and France. I have often wondered just how to butterfly a leg of lamb when, at the last moment, I have had to settle for the whole leg. Eight quick steps, each with its own picture, show how to debone the thing, and then it's an easy, two-step process to lay open the fillet so that it's ready for the grill. For the more adventurous, the book teaches the construction of a crown roast of lamb, which is fashioned from two racks of lamb, bent round and tied. A simple roasting recipe features the typical lamb seasonings of garlic and rosemary, accompanied by an elegant rice pilaf served from inside the crown roast.

Just about every technique the home chef could need or aspire to need is contained in this pricey volume. It never occurred to me to make chocolate truffles at home, but the process looks easy in Willan's book. You whip up a genache by pouring a boiled combination of butter and cream over chopped chocolate. Chill that and then roll into little balls and chill some more. Melt some more chocolate, dip the genache balls in the warm chocolate and roll them in powdered cocoa.

^ At the same time that American cookery has become more inventive, there is a resurgence of interest in both purely ethnic cuisines and down-home, regional foods. The best in this category are a pair of overillustrated but authentic books on country cooking from France and Italy. Recipes from a French Herb Garden by Geraldene Holt (Simon & Schuster; $24.95) is as helpful with its gardening instructions as with its recipes. If my lavender ever blooms, I'm going to try the ice cream with fresh lavender flowers and muscat. The companion book, Recipes from an Italian Farmhouse by Valentina Harris (Simon & Schuster; $24.95), is equally beautiful but can be a bit too authentic. I thought the sausage-meat-risotto recipe sounded good right down to the one- half cup of fresh pig's blood, at room temperature (optional, of course).

The casual cook will be intrigued by The Foods of Vietnam (Stewart, Tabori & Chang; $35), especially now that good Vietnamese restaurants have spread across the country. But Nicole Routhier's handsome book presents a difficulty with ingredients, which are hard to come by except in coastal urban areas.

A converse problem emerges in Hot Links and Country Flavors by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly (Knopf; $19.95). Good fresh sausages are available in such variety and quality all over the U.S. that the let's-eat-soon crowd will wonder why they should spend all day stuffing sausages when they can simply buy them. But for the real sausage aficionado, this is the book.

Louisiana has not been slighted in recent cookbook publishing, but Paul Prudhomme's blackened everything has overshadowed the basics such as red beans and rice and pralines. Justin Wilson, who has a Cajun-cooking show on PBS, has remedied that with his humorous tome, Homegrown Louisiana Cookin' (Macmillan; $19.95). Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie by Bill Neal (Knopf; $19.95) serves the same purpose for Southern baking. It is comprehensive and sparingly illustrated.

There is not a wide audience for what is usually called Pennsylvania Dutch food, which is actually a kind of Americanized German cuisine I remember from childhood as featuring at least three starches with every overcooked piece of meat. But in Cooking from Quilt Country by Marcia Adams (Potter; $24.95), this excessively hearty cuisine gets lightened up. The recipes from Amish and Mennonite families in Indiana are less daunting to the cholesterol conscious. But how can there be an Amish cookbook without shoofly pie, that gooey + concoction of molasses and brown sugar? And I still have never found a good recipe for the peach tart that Grandma Fultz used to make in late summer.