Yes, lots.

Some people don’t know when to stop, and Pino Luongo may be one of them. His new book, Simply Tuscan, is wonderful in many ways — I’ll get to that in a little while — but Luongo does tend to go on. It’s not enough for him that we eat and enjoy Tuscan food: We must “convert to Tuscanism.” We must stop acting like Americans — like “New Yorkers in suits” who “swarm in and out of these Towers of Indifference, running like mad dogs from appointment to appointment with pained, stressful looks on their faces.” We must, instead, behave like Luongo, who knows how to appreciate the pleasures of the senses. “Some day,” he says, “I’m going to walk around calling out to these people: ‘When was the last time you took a walk in the park? Have you enjoyed a sunset lately?’ … When it’s warm outside, I wear loafers in the Tuscan style, with no socks, even with the best suits.”

For a while I amused myself by substituting my own homeland — Rochester, N.Y. — whenever I read one of Luongo’s pronouncements about Tuscans. “In Rochester, spring is a great time for children.” “Here again, I remember the Rochesterian idea of the endless cycle of life.” “In Rochester, where there are no barriers between man and nature, we are in touch with the entire world that moves around us.” “It’s also important to note that the privileges enjoyed by Rochesterians are God-given and not based on having a lot of money.” Then I got cranky, and started to rebel. I know Luongo owns restaurants in a jillion cities. But why does he get to be in charge of everything just because he’s Tuscan?

Easter is the one and only holiday when good weather is absolutely essential …

If there’s one occasion young men in [the United States] take too seriously, it’s meeting their future in-laws …

Let me be clear about white wine: I don’t recommend it as something to drink with a meal …

Well, Mr. Luongo, you are not the boss of me, and if you didn’t know how to write good recipes I wouldn’t go near “Simply Tuscan” again. But if you just skip the text, this is a graceful and sensible book — even if it is set in a font that’s designed to look like someone’s old Remington. (I guess Tuscans don’t like our sterile computer keyboards, either.)

The book offers 20 seasonal menus with recipes that are simultaneously homey, elegant and well suited to American kitchens: grilled potato and fennel salad, caramel rice cake with amaretto, polenta with wild mushrooms and spinach, bay scallops and asparagus risotto, oven-baked leg of pork glazed with chestnut honey, roast lamb with a savory mint gelatin (instead of the horrible, horrible mint jelly that Italians have every right to despise Americans for eating).

There’s a fair amount of repetition that should have been caught. An Easter menu calls for a starter that includes hard-boiled eggs and a salad that includes hard-boiled quail eggs. And there are way too many creamy off-white desserts. Panna cotta with strawberries, milk pudding with blueberry compote, and mixed berries with sabayon br{lie all appear within the book’s first 40 pages. On Page 59, we get vanilla cream pudding; a couple of chapters later, chestnut semifreddo; a few pages after that, Monte Bianco, a chestnut purie with whipped cream; then the caramel rice cake on Page 169; then a semifreddo with nougat on Page 183; and 20 pages later, rice ice cream with mixed berries sauce. Don’t they eat any cookies in Tuscany?

Suzanne Dunaway’s No Need to Knead: Handmade Italian Breads in 90 Minutes — what does Pino Luongo think of it? I suppose we’ll never know, but all that really matters is what I think, and even though it’s only May I am already giving “No Need to Knead” the Academy Award for this year’s best bread book. For one thing, any book that tells me I don’t have to knead is my best friend before I open the cover. I hate kneading bread dough. I don’t understand those people who find it soothing and good for the soul; to me, it’s maddeningly tiresome work. When it’s done, you have to scrape all those scabby flecks of dried dough off the counter, and if you get even a drop of water on the work surface, everything turns to paste.

And now a book that doesn’t care about kneading and still produces fantastic results! Dunaway was a home baker until a friend called “to say in so many words that if I did not get my breads on the market, I was crazy — and then hung up.” For some reason Dunaway obeyed, and soon she was making 1,000 loaves a week out of her home kitchen in Los Angeles. Her husband gave up a screenwriting career to pitch in; when their hands gave out, they bought a commercial mixer, hired a baker and created Buona Forchetta Hand Made Breads. Dunaway writes:

The recipes are my own originals and interpretations, and I think people respond to them because they are not like other breads. The crusts are lighter, chewier, user-friendly; the crumb is moist and stays fresh longer than most breads; ingredients are simple and to the point — no froufrou, as I call it … The majority of the recipes here evolved from going against the grain, so to speak, in order to achieve the moist, wonderfully textured breads I have eaten for years in Italy and France.

Focaccia is the mainstay of her bakery. Dunaway knows as much about bread chemistry as any artisanal baker, but she explains herself in easy, conversational terms. One reason for her success comes from, as she puts it, maximizing the bread’s surface area in relation to its volume. (“Which part of a meat loaf do you love to bite? The soft, steamed inside or the crispy, crunchy crust?”) Another reason is that she adds way more water to her dough than conventional bakers do. (“This compensates for the additional surface area and subsequent moisture loss and gives me a nice balance between two extremes.”) She then pours these light, wet doughs onto a baking sheet and bakes them in a 500-degree oven to “give a boost to the already risen dough and open up even more texture in the focaccia.”

Also — and this is one of my favorite touches — Dunaway doesn’t insist on spring water or Italian flour in her breads. I always suspected that these made no difference, and am delighted to see my hunch confirmed. Having dragged home a liter of Roman water and a kilo of Altamura flour on a 17-hour plane trip, Dunaway baked up some bread and discovered that her extra-”Italian” bread was no better than bread baked with tap water and American flour. “Short of having to use rusty water from an abandoned well or desert mirage water, tap water will work just fine in breads unless it has been labeled ‘contaminated.’”

And the breads themselves? The book starts out with a focaccia dough that becomes the basis for a chewy ladder-shaped bread called fougasse and a rosemary filoncino. Then it’s on to ciabatta, hazelnut-sage filoncino, sourdough caraway rye and pane rustico. From there Dunaway veers back to America with “My Grandmother’s Beaten Biscuits,” skillet corn bread and sourdough flapjacks, then back to Italy for bruschetta with roasted garlic and Parmesan.

This is an idiosyncratic and charming book, and it should be a mandatory purchase for its pizza dough alone. (Also, there are recipes for dill pickles and Wild Turkey chocolate ice cream — I said the book was idiosyncratic.) Here’s the pizza dough recipe:

1 teaspoon active dry yeast

1 1/2 cups lukewarm water (85 to 95 degrees)

4 to 4 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

6 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

In a container that pours easily, sprinkle the yeast over the water and stir until dissolved. Put the flour, olive oil, and salt into the bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade. Blend for a few seconds and then add the yeast and water, blending just until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl. The dough will be slightly sticky to the touch. Dip your fingers into a little olive oil and lift the dough from the bowl, shaping it into a ball. Put the dough in an oiled bowl.

Same-day method: Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise in a warm place until doubled in volume, about 60 minutes.

Overnight method: After first rise, transfer the dough to a plastic freezer bag and seal tightly, leaving a little air in the bag. Alternatively, ignore first rise completely and place the dough directly in bag. Refrigerate overnight or up to 1 week. The dough will rise in the bag and take on a lovely, sour taste. Let the dough come to room temperature before using.

To shape and prepare pizza: Coat two 13-by-18-inch baking sheets with olive oil. Divide the dough in half and stretch each piece on a baking sheet into a 12-by-6-inch rectangle in the following manner: using your palms and starting from the center of the dough, gently press and stretch the dough outward to form a thin 1/8-inch-thick crust slightly thicker at the edge. Push the dough up around the edges to make a 1/8- to 1/4-inch lip to hold the sauce.

To bake the pizza: Preheat the oven to 525 degrees F. Place the pizza with topping on the lowest rack of the oven and increase the oven temperature to 550 degrees F. This will give an extra boost of heat to the bottom of the pizza and brown it nicely. Bake for 7 to 10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the crust. The crust edges should be well browned and the cheese bubbling and browned. If, when the pizza is done, the bottom seems a little soggy, place the baking sheet on a stove burner over medium heat, moving the pan continually back and forth over the heat and watching carefully until the pizza begins to send off steam. At this point, the bottom should be well browned and the crust crisped. A wood-burning oven would really do the trick, but alas, not many of us have that luxury! By cooking the bottom of the pizza on the stovetop, you duplicate as well as you can the stone floor of a wood-burning oven. This technique works for other dishes as well.

Take The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, by Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey. This charming little volume promises “a treasure trove of deliciously old-fashioned and deeply satisfying recipes for more than 75 unabashedly self-indulgent desserts.” “Wow! Tortellini salad!” I found myself thinking again, except that this time I was thinking, “Wow! Caramel pecan brownies! Oatmeal muffins! Traditional vanilla birthday cake cupcake with traditional vanilla butter cream!” (This despite the fact that I’ve made all three of those baked goods many, many times over the years.)

The photos in the book are great, and the headnotes are cozy. “Your mouth will be watering in no time!” … “This scrumptious bar is a perfect blend of fruit and crumb.” … “One of our customers came into the bakery one afternoon with this recipe from his aunt, handwritten on an index card.” An index card! Proof of homey greatness.

But that aunt may well have copied a “Joy of Cooking” recipe onto that index card. There just aren’t too many recipes for standard baked goods out there. “We confess we’ve improved on a classic recipe,” the authors say when they introduce their German chocolate cake. True, their recipe has a quarter-cup more sugar than the standard. True, they’ve doubled the standard amount of frosting, but you don’t need to buy a whole separate book to help you realize that more frosting on a cake is usually better.

And speaking of frosting, the vanilla butter cream in this book is the one on the Domino Confectioners Sugar box with an extra tablespoon of milk. (It needs a pinch of salt, by the way.) Why is this vanilla butter cream so much better? The secret, say Appel and Torey, “is that we just whip it longer than you’d think necessary to get that extra-creamy texture.” Again, this is not a hint you need to buy a book for. There’s nothing wrong with “The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook,” but cave canem. Oh, no, wait — I mean caveat emptor. Unless you have a deep, heartfelt need to look at eight pages of color photographs, you should check your shelves before you rush out and buy this. Any cookbook author can tinker with the classics a bit, but it’s almost impossible to make them really distinctive — unless you’re Rose Levy Berenbaum.

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I’m not saying that you should try to save your money. Oh, no, no, no! I’ll buy a cookbook if it’s got even one idea that intrigues me; I like to reward the author for her ingenuity. (This is the same reasoning that made me buy Yoko Ono’s “Season of Glass” after John Lennon was shot. I didn’t want the record at all, but I thought I should help Ono out.) Another baking book, Butter Sugar Flour Eggs, has recipes you absolutely won’t find in the average encyclopedic cookbook. The authors’ crunchy chocolate hazelnut bars combine two chocolate treatments: a thick, dense, fudgy layer made with Nutella and crumbled Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies, two of the modern pantry’s most miraculous ingredients, and a mousse-y layer made with chocolate, whipped cream, crhme fraiche and Amaretto. The bars take about two seconds to make and have maximum showoff value.

This book has other ideas I haven’t seen elsewhere. Grate frozen shortbread dough into the baking pan to give it “a lighter, more open texture.” Add a cream-cheese layer to standard lemon or lime squares; add dried apricots to rice pudding instead of raisins. Use less cornmeal than usual when you make corn muffins. “You’d think that using more cornmeal would yield more corn flavor, but it doesn’t seem to work that way: Cornmeal must be cut with other flours or it can turn bitter and soapy.” A good corrective to my fixed notion that doubling the “good” ingredient always improves the recipe …

“Butter Sugar Flour Eggs” also distinguishes itself with precise explanations for how certain techniques work, and with a certain bravery in authorial tone that you don’t see in most cookbooks:

In the Gand household circa 1965, when Gale was growing up in Deerfield, Ill., butter was the fifth food group. Whole categories of foods were seen as vehicles for butter: muffins, bagels, vegetables, bread, biscuits. Like many schoolchildren, Gale churned butter for the first time in history class, not a dairy barn, but she took to it right away. Soon she was making large batches at home, mixing it with sugar, and hiding the resulting paste in the back of the cupboard to eat by spoonfuls. No wonder she became a pastry chef!

On the other hand, some of the writing you should just bleep over. The chapter introductions in this book are a total waste of time — rapturous, overwritten space-fillers. (“Young cheese is a placid and contented milkmaid, soothing and comforting everyone with her strong, milky-white arms.”) So are the suggestions at the end of each recipe for what to drink with it. (“The warm flavor of butterscotch calls for an iced earthy, full-bodied coffee like Indonesian Java. To contrast the creaminess of the pudding, drink it black — maybe even with coffee ice cubes so it stays extra-strong.”) And the book has oddly unattractive photography; perhaps the stylists were aiming for an “anyone can make this” feeling. The cover photo shows some berries piled up on a meringue layer in such a way that you know the berries will spill and smash the minute you try to cut the cake. But we don’t buy cookbooks for the photography, now do we?

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“One thing people don’t understand about cooking,” says my daughter, “is that just because you can add butterscotch chips or caramel doesn’t mean you should.” She was studying a recipe in Cooking Contest Cookbook: a macadamia fudge torte with a pear, chocolate-chip and macadamia-nut filling and a sauce consisting of “one jar butterscotch caramel fudge ice cream topping” mixed with milk. The thing is, the recipe won the $1 million grand prize in the 37th Pillsbury Bake-Off, so I guess my daughter and I are wrong.

We are also wrong about white chocolate strawberry dream pie, in which you combine strawberry ice cream and almond liquor, pour them into a “purchased butter-flavored” pie shell and top them with a white-chocolate mousse. You’d think this would have achieved more sweetness, blandness and fattiness than any one dessert could sustain, but no. “I sometimes make it even more decadent by serving” — yes! — “caramel sauce with it,” confides the pie’s creator, Edwina Gadsby of Great Falls, Mont. And again, she must know what she’s talking about: The pie won first place in the Darigold Quick Fixin’s with Mix-Ins Contest.

I never make cooking-contest recipes, but they’re just about my favorite thing to read, and “Cooking Contest Cookbook” has almost everything that makes this genre great. First, there’s the piling-on of ingredient after ingredient, which is hardly confined to desserts. See, for instance, Rozanne Chan’s Thai’d-and-true strawberry and pasta toss (“toss” is a big word in contests), which combines strawberries, cabbage, bean sprouts, spinach leaves, radishes, angel hair pasta, cilantro, peanut butter, lemongrass, mashed strawberries and “chopped roasted peanuts and scallion brushes” as a garnish. A garnish on a salad — that’s true cooking-contest spirit.

And then there’s the inspired use of brand-name products. By “inspired” I mean “dragged in in the most outlandish way, just to make the recipe qualify for the contest.” Grilled salmon steaks with ginger-chive sauce are perfected with the addition of “one packet Butter Buds, undiluted.” (Guess who sponsored the contest?) Garlic-crusted Tuscany burgers would be fine, or at least OK, as is; the addition of “1/2 cup Kretschmer Original Toasted Wheat Germ” makes them, I guess, magnificent, just as that cup of Fiber One cereal makes all the difference to Edwina Gadsby’s pork chops Cubano.

Yes, that’s the same Edwina Gadsby who sometimes puts caramel sauce on her white chocolate strawberry dream pie — which brings me to my only complaint about “Cooking Contest Cookbook”: Why aren’t there headnotes to describe every contestant? Why do we meet Gloria Pleasants — “It may be that her training as a pharmacist prepared her to understand what makes a delicious recipe” — and not Fran Yuhas, who came up with the name “Grecian skillet rib-eyes”? I still cherish the memory of a Weight Watchers cooking contestant who had “written 900 poems, some of them published.” If this book had more headnotes like that, I’d never read anything else again.

But a few days later the memory of that salmon drifted back into my head, and I began longing for it. Hearing that I was going to have grilled salmon at the house of a friend in Lawrence, Kan., I thought excitedly, “Maybe she’ll make Bob Blumer’s recipe.” How could she have? She didn’t own the book. Nevertheless, I was stupidly disappointed, and the instant I got back home I made Blumer’s salmon a second time. I decided that the recipe was, in fact, very good, and that my original “Eh” had been due to the fact that no actual food can live up to a really luscious prose description. (You’d think I would have learned this from eating in countless restaurants whose menus have been written by food poets, but I haven’t.)

If you’re my age, 154, the rest of “Off the Eaten Path” may seem too young for you. What busy centenarian has time to mess around with poaching fish in the dishwasher, baking shrimp on top of a car engine, cutting honeydew and cantaloupe so that they look like (pale green and orange) fried eggs or making a bed of polenta that actually looks like a bed, with little ravioli pillows? (“You can find uncut sheets of pasta at fresh pasta stores. Alternatively, use extra wide sheets of dried lasagna pasta and make single ‘beds.’”) What’s the point of food that looks wacky but tastes ordinary? Still, that maple-soy salmon …

If you buy only one cookbook from which to make only one recipe, let this be the one. Add a little salt to the pepper crust, though. And maybe sprinkle some chopped scallions on top when you take the salmon out of the broiler.

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When you think about it, it’s odd how often cookbook authors single out only a few recipes in their books for particular attention. Doesn’t a comment like “This is the best chicken I’ve ever tasted” hurt the feelings of all the other chicken recipes in the book? Aren’t all the book’s dishes supposed to be the best the author has ever made? You can’t introduce a recipe with “This is only OK,” of course, but that seems implied when just three or four recipes in a book are given a red-carpet introduction.

On the other hand, raving over every single recipe in a cookbook is asking for a different kind of trouble. This is the challenge faced by Fran McCullough and Suzanne Hamlin in “The Best American Recipes 1999.” Reading the book makes you aware that choosing the year’s best recipes is a task akin to writing restaurant reviews. To an outsider it may sound like fun, but there are just so many recipes out there.

When we first embarked on this project [say the authors], we were filled with joy and a huge sense of fun. There we were, let loose on the entire world of food to do our favorite thing: search out the year’s most fascinating recipes and race into the kitchen to cook them. At first slowly, then at a more alarming rate, our house began to fill with hundreds of cookbooks, towering stacks of magazines, piles of Internet printouts, newspaper clips, handouts and even the odd recipe clipped from a food package. We were literally drowning in recipes (well, not literally), thousands upon thousands of them … Sometimes a recipe that sounded great on the page failed to deliver in the kitchen. Just about as often, really good dishes came from obscure sources, not the celebrated food establishment.

Many of the recipes we tried were perfectly pleasant but not truly great. So, just what IS a great recipe? Margaret Ann Surber, the recipe tester for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, puts it simply: “It gives you maximum return on your effort.”

Exactly. And yet a cookbook has to be well balanced, which means the authors had to find as many “great” recipes for vegetables as for the much-easier-to-track-down “great” desserts and main courses. Thus there is a certain amount of hype for recipes like roasted green beans with garlic: “This is one of those astound-your-guests recipes; everyone who tastes them will be amazed by the beans, and they won’t guess the secret ingredient.” But I made it, and my guests did guess — the secret ingredient is anchovies — and I noticed that none of them was “amazed” enough to have a second helping. On the other hand, this book is well worth buying for its cajeta poundcake alone and also for Marion Cunningham’s buttermilk pancakes. And while we’re at it, the “amazing” roast duck brushed with Thai curry paste actually is amazingly good, and easy.

Besides, it’s plain old satisfying to see a year’s worth of food trends summed up in one book. I hope this book turns into a series. Are you listening, Houghton Mifflin? You should do much better with recipes than with the year’s best short stories and essays.

What’s the opposite of preparing a great meal for people you love? There are two answers. The first: force-feeding an ailing rabbit from a syringe, as I’ve been doing for the past few days. I bet you didn’t know there was a rabbit food called Critical Care, did you? It’s mainly powdered hay, with powdered oat groats and soybean hulls added for fiber. Still, I’d rather eat Critical Care than squirrel, which brings me to my second opposite: reading “Swamp Cookin,’” a book I swore I wouldn’t review because it’s in dialect and it has lots of disgusting pictures of people gigging frogs and wrestling alligators. Just the introduction lets you know what kind of trouble you’re in:

Now, if y’all are slap in the middle of a big city where most people have never tasted a mudbug, Gator Stew, or Smothered Frog Legs in their whole lives, it’s high time you met the River People. Read this here cookbook and learn how to hunt, catch, cook, and serve up a whole mess of scrumptious fixin’s at your next supper party.

Scrumptious fixin’s for Cletus, the Slack-Jawed Yokel on “The Simpsons,” you mean. Tree rat stew (it’s just squirrel, but still!) … Terral’s barbecued nutria … Barbara’s needle-nose gar — what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a Two Fat Ladies cookbook for people who think poor people are funny.

So why am I mentioning “Swamp Cookin’” at all? Because these days, I get a lot of cookbooks in the mail. I never get them put away; stacks of them are piled up on my kitchen counters for my friends to paw through. And this is the one that has gotten most of the attention in the past month. People toss aside all the glossy chef books to fight over it, squealing like boys in the past looking at bare-breasted women in National Geographic. “Gross! Look at this wedding picture with the two brides having their garters taken off!” “I know, I saw them,” I say tiredly, but my friends don’t notice. “Ugh, what’s a mudbug? Why is that man stapling that fish to a tree?” If you need a birthday present for A Certain Kind of Friend, this is the one to get. You deserve to go to hell for lining the author’s pockets, but the book will be the hit of the party.

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“The Cook and the Gardener: A Year of Recipes and Writings from the French Countryside” is exactly the same kind of thing — oh, no, wait, it’s not. This is no gag gift; it’s a genuine treasure, a culinary Beauty and the Beast that should become required bedside reading for anyone who appreciates Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher. Amanda Hesser, a New York Times food writer, spent a year in France as an apprentice chef at the Chateau du Fey. (Hey, that’s the dream job I wanted!) During that year she gradually befriended the chateau’s cranky old gardener, Monsieur Milbert.

“I had been warned to be polite when making my daily request for vegetables,” she writes, “and to avoid him whenever possible. He was a coarse and unpleasant old man.” But of course he actually wasn’t. As she hovered at the garden’s borders, Hesser gradually began to appreciate Milbert and to learn about the kind of gardening that has shaped French cuisine for centuries:

Although I couldn’t barrage him with questions, observing his everyday life spoke volumes. Sometimes he seemed as though he had been brought back from two centuries ago, dusted off, and set free in today’s world … While most French gardeners go down to the Bricomarche for a new handle for their shovel, Monsieur Milbert still cuts and trims tree limbs for his. While most of his gardening friends use fertilizers to boost growth, he follows the moons.

The book contains 200 excellent recipes that rely on fresh produce, but its real charm is in Hesser’s month-by-month storytelling about a castle garden as bewitching as any in a fairy tale. In spring, she helps the gardener plant radishes. “After dragging the spade along the rope to scratch the crusty soil, he sprinkled the wispy seeds, then stroked the soil with his iron rake, gently smoothing it over the trench. It was like icing a cake.” In summer, she picks hundreds and hundreds of raspberries. “The best were the squat berries with supple, overgrown cells. They had a velvety fuzz all over their swollen cells that collapsed on your tongue.” In fall, in the woods, she discovers a cache of trompettes de morts — delicious wild mushrooms that

are extremely difficult to spot. They avoid sunlight, preferring to bathe in dank earth littered with oak leaves, acorns, chestnuts and bugs. Because they are disguised to the unfamiliar eye as dead, gray leaves, searching for them is much like trying to make out constellations in the night sky.

“The Cook and the Gardener,” which has been out for a year now, is a remarkable find itself and deserves the wide audience it’s undoubtedly reaching.

Potatoes are “the testicles of the earth.” Asparagus is “a fine, firm phallic symbol.” “Carrots are a prime source of vitamin A, a necessary nutrient in the production of sex hormones in both men and women. In men, vitamin A contributes to a healthy prostate and increases the number of sperm in each ejaculation.” He doesn’t leave out the ladies, either. “With Middle Eastern sesame treats such as halvah and tahini now widely available in most supermarkets, exotic foreplay was never so tasty. Women find sesame especially enlivening.” (No, they don’t.) Medieval maidens “imprinted their intentions onto bread dough by pressing it against their vulva before baking.” Funny — I don’t find these passages arousing.

Elsewhere Sodamin’s ejaculations don’t even make sense. Of thyme, for instance, he writes that the herb’s assertiveness “pays off sometime after dessert, when you two are getting to know each other better.” Of eggs: “Today the Japanese favor rich quail eggs, while Filipinos patiently give their eggs a bit more time in the nest, as they believe duck embryos are a source of sexual vitality.” And lobster: “The greenish blue beasts will blush bright red when boiled, as you might when your mate gets you home.” And boils you? The recipes in the book are fine and the photography is, of course, darned sexy, but I don’t care. I wasn’t a bit sorry when my daughter took a black permanent marker and turned the avocados on page 13 into cute little mice.

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Love occasionally besmirches the pages of the otherwise respectable Kitchen Suppers, by Alison Becker Hurt. It’s just somehow more than I wanted to know that Hurt’s husband calls her “Little” and she calls him “Bigger One.” But the book’s basic concept is nonetheless appealing. Hurt is the owner of two restaurants — Alison on Dominick Street in Manhattan and Alison by the Beach on Long Island — and might therefore have been expected to turn out one of those showoff coffee-table books favored by some restaurateurs. But she’s gone in the opposite direction, and it’s a refreshing change.

“When I married my husband,” Hurt writes, “we inherited the kind of large, formal dining-room table I had always dreamed of, with repoussi Kirk silver and miles of lace napkins, tablecloths, and runners. I love to cook, and I loved the idea of cooking grand and graceful dinners, and I did — twice.” Then, sick of soaking the tablecloth in the bathtub and washing flatware for three days, Hurt threw in the lace towel:

The food had been splendid and a good time was had by all, but I learned that this exercise in grandeur and gracefulness was only that. It seemed to take the heart out of creating the meal by causing too many worries and complications. And it was not about cooking, which is what I really love to do. Realizing this, I ran back to the comfort and safety of my checkered tablecloths and what I like to call “kitchen suppers.”

I came to exactly the same conclusion — after way more than two formal dinners, alas — which is why my husband and I are still married and why we now have a pool table in our dining room. (Note to any readers contemplating marriage: Don’t register for crystal. It all breaks. Just get regular wine glasses that you don’t care about losing.) The recipes in “Kitchen Suppers” are appealing and fashionable without torturing the family cook. Eye of round with orange cream and horseradish; a gin-scented tomato bisque; roast duck with cinnamon stuffing, tangerine juice and honey wine sauce — the emphasis is on hearty, simple foods that are also pleasantly novel, and their names are the only cumbersome thing about them.

Still, there’s a little too much talk and not quite enough recipes. I love cookbook chat, but half the chapters in “Kitchen Suppers” are devoted to basics that have been covered more than adequately elsewhere. The difference between poaching and braising … what a brandy glass looks like … the facts that a centerpiece should not dominate the table and that you should clean the kitchen as you go along and that “loaf breads are made in pans” … Anyone buying “Kitchen Suppers” is likely to own “The Joy of Cooking” already, and “Joy” has all this information in far more detail (as Hurt surely knows, since she is related to Marion Rombauer Becker, one of the coauthors of “The Joy”). There’s a slight mismatch between the text’s primer-like tone and the recipes, which, though simple, would not be easy for the novice cook. The spot art here and there — a pig, a basket of flowers — contributes nothing except a faint girlish sweetness. Doubleday’s designers would have served the book better with actual illustrations.

On the other hand, the basics aren’t always spelled out fully enough. In the wine chapter, Hurt explains that “if you have a computer and are on the Internet, you can go to many different wine-related Web sites, including the Wine Spectator site” — she doesn’t provide its address — “and ask questions. Someone somewhere out there will e-mail you his or her ideas about the perfect wine to go with your dinner.” This doesn’t strike me as a reliable solution. Nor is Hurt’s description of how to select a cheese. “Cheese is not supposed to be bitter or sour. If it is supposed to be a ‘stinky’ cheese, it may taste similar to the way it stinks, but even so, the flavor should be a bit milder than the stink.” I’d like for Hurt’s next book to be more grounded than this, and it should have more of the recipes she’s so good at creating. Still, “Kitchen Suppers” is a promising debut, as I believe reviewers are required to call first books.

As Alison Hurt has learned, these days it’s tough to write a cookbook for the general public because it’s so hard to assess what your readers already know. The current thinking has it that no one cooks at all, no one knows how to hold a fork or what a napkin is, and as for gutting a fish, forget it! I mean, if they had a video game about gutting fish, or a takeout guy who could gut the fish for you, then maybe, but I mean if you go to a fish store it’s all fileted already, and how’s anyone supposed to learn anything that way?

Don’t you hate people with opinions? I do. Anyway, many cookbook authors seem to believe that their readers are either four-star chefs or idiots with catchers’ mitts instead of hands. Fortunately, James Peterson is able to conceive of a middle ground where readers know the culinary basics but want to learn more: hence his Essentials of Cooking, which contains 250 “core techniques and recipes” and more than a thousand photos. And finally! Photos that aren’t beautiful — that are even ugly when they need to be! I’m through with gorgeous photography that does nothing besides raise the book’s price and prove that the publisher could afford a food stylist. Here, instead, is a sort of Field Guide to Culinary Technique, with close-ups of hands doing everything hands need to do in the kitchen — chopping garlic, poaching seaweed, peeling roasted beets, de-tendoning chicken breasts, butchering a double rack of lamb …

Peterson explains:

Because I’ve wrecked entire afternoons screwing together my own garden furniture and bookcases, it’s easy for me to imagine one of my poor readers, string in hand, trying to truss a chicken and after ten minutes, forgetting trussing and moving on to strangling. So I decided to illustrate certain techniques with an almost obsessive number of color photographs. I’ve tried to make the photographs cheery (see how easy this is!) and life-like — they were shot under real-life conditions in my cramped Brooklyn apartment — so that if the going gets rough, things won’t seem utterly hopeless.

But his work is so clear that it’s hard to imagine going astray with this book in front of you. The only concession to art (and I mean this in a nice way) is the page of photos facing the Acknowledgments. Everything else is clean and well-lit, like a Clinique ad, but supremely utilitarian.

“Essentials of Cooking” is organized in the same sensible way. It has only six chapters: “Basics,” “Vegetables and Fruits,” “Fish and Shellfish,” “Poultry and Eggs,” “Meat” and “Working From Scratch.” (“Working From Scratch” shows you how to gut a fish, by the way.) Technique is what’s emphasized, not recipes. “Once you’ve gotten a handle on roasting, poaching, grilling, frying, steaming, sautiing, and braising, you’ll know how to cook most food, and if you understand the logic of how these techniques work, you’ll be able to improvise intuitively and give your own special style and identity to your cooking.” Not necessarily; you can have plenty of technique and still lack the improvising gene. But once you’ve learned the technique it’s a lot easier to go to conventional cookbooks and steal their improvisational skills. I can’t imagine saying this about many other cookbooks, but “Essentials of Cooking” really is essential. Even if you think you already know enough about cooking, I command you to buy a copy right now.