Holiday Gift Books

For All the Cooks on Your Gift List

Relish’s Itty Bitty Cookbook
They say the average family eats the same 10 dishes on a rotating basis. What a shame, when the supermarket is stocked with more than 25,000 foods. If this sounds like you, then you need the first-ever Relish cookbook. Compiled in a groovy paint-chip style format, it contains more than 75 recipes for all occasions, from Chocolate Ranch Cookies for bad hair days to Chicken Tetrazinni for your next supper club. It’s small so you can stash it next to the toaster for easy reference. We think you’ll relish it—we do. At least it may get you to 15 rotating dishes. It’s a great deal at $14.98 (including shipping and handling) and a perfect stocking stuffer for all the cooks on your list.

Best of the Best
Every year, editors Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens scour cookbooks, magazines, food newsletters and anything else they can get their hands on for really good recipes. They take them into the kitchen for a test drive and the best of the bunch make it to the light of print. The recipes in The 150 Best American Recipes (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, $30), for novice and experienced cooks, run from starters to desserts. We loved the Roasted Sausages and Grapes and decided Party Potatoes with cream cheese and sour cream was reason enough to do some entertaining. It’s a delicious assortment.

BYOG
Bring your own glass—this is just one of the ideas the Purcell sisters have when it comes to livening up a party. The idea: guests bring their own glass tied with a nametag (that went out in the invitation or, in the case of email, they made themselves). This does a number of things—it gets them thinking of the party before it arrives and serves as a conversation starter. Plus you don’t have to resort to plastic glasses or invest in expensive barware. You’ll find this and other fun ideas in their book, Cocktail Parties Straight Up! (John Wiley & Sons, 2005, $16.95). It’s also full of useful tips such as the 6:30 friend. This is your tried-and-true friend who is designated to arrive early to help, as you’ll inevitably be running behind.

Take a Bite out of the Big Apple.
Don’t discount Arthur Schwartz’s award-winning book, New York City Food (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2004, $45), just because you don’t live in the Big Apple. Truth is, many of our classic American dishes got their start in the home and restaurant kitchens of immigrant communities. And no one is better qualified to tell the stories of these dishes than Schwartz, a radio show host, cook and native New Yorker. He takes us from Delmonico’s to Dinty Moore’s to Reuben’s delicatessen to explore how Gotham food set the standard for what Americans everywhere ate, and are still eating today.

The Grill Next Door
While we think of grilling as distinctly American, grilled dishes play a central role in Korea, Thailand and Japan. And why not? The smoky, gutsy flavors of grilled foods combine perfectly with the sweet, sour, salty, bitter and spicy notes that form the basis of Asian cooking. According to Corinne Trang, author of The Asian Grill (Chronicle Books, 2006, $22.95), the key to Asian grilling is in the marinade, and if you can combine ketchup and hot sauce, you're halfway there. Add star anise, Thai basil, ginger and lime, and you've got a whole new set of flavors from your grill. Trang includes spice mixes, chutneys, breads and salads to accompany the yummy Spicy Cucumber and Red Onion Salad, Chicken Satay and Thai Basil and Lime Shrimp.

Pie in the Sky
Has high-altitude baking got you down? You’re not alone. Baking teacher and cookbook author Susan G. Purdy experienced her share of failed cakes and breads before setting out to uncover the secrets of baking high above her Connecticut home. Revamping recipes in the mountains of North Carolina, New Mexico and Colorado, she came up with some basic guidelines of her own. To prevent the disappointing cave-in, strengthen and moisten the batter by adding more flour and an additional egg. Also decrease the leavening and sugar, and cook the batter at a higher oven temperature. In her book Pie in the Sky (HarperCollins, 2005, $29.95), she includes 100 recipes for cakes, pies, cookies, breads and pastries and recipe adjustments for those living at elevations between 2,000 and 11,500 feet.

From One Busy Mom to Another
Holly Clegg is not out to impress a restaurant full of diners or the food cognoscenti. She's out to impress the most important people in her life—her family. In addition to writing cookbooks, whipping up brownies on television shows and promoting skillets and sweet potatoes, Clegg is first and foremost a mom. And the busy lifestyle of a mom is what has shaped her food style and cookbooks for the past 20 years. Her latest book, The New Holly Clegg Trim &Terrific Cookbook (Running Press, 2006, $29.95), contains more than 500 familiar favorites, most attainable in less than 30 minutes. Clegg doesn't shy away from convenience items such as canned Mexi-corn, jarred salsa and bottled sweet and sour stir-fry sauce, and her recipes contain a complete nutritional analysis.

Club for Carnivorous Gals
The carnivore-loving clique of Vanessa Dina, Kristina Fuller and Gemma DiPalma has created an über-girly tribute to the holy trinity of barnyard beasts—the cow, pig and lamb—"for girls who love their meat." In The Meat Club Cookbook (Chronicle Books, 2006, $18.95), they've compiled inspiring and easy-to-make recipes—many of them updated classics you know and love—from Slow-Lovin' Beef Brisket and Love Me Tender Pork Tenderloin to Tarted-Up Lamb Steaks with Cherries. With a stiletto-clad pink cow on the cover, clever writing and fold-out identification charts on meat cuts, this book shows that meat isn't just for men. Grill not included.

Cooking Coast to Coast—The New American Cooking.
In 2004, Joan Nathan crisscrossed America to explore how we’re cooking today. What she found was much more than hamburgers and fries and the ubiquitous Chicken Caesar Salad. She found food that merges local ingredients with new flavors and techniques. She also found some regional dishes still alive and well, such as Date Shakes in The Palm Dessert of California, Wild Rice Quiche in Minnesota and Macadamia Bread in Hawaii. In The New American Cooking (Random House, 2005, $35), Nathan does an excellent job of highlighting the food that Americans—of all ethnic backgrounds—cook today.

Southern Comfort
They say what’s old is new again, and that’s certainly the case with Damon Lee Fowler’s New Southern Baking (Simon & Schuster, 2005, $26). When was the last time you made Sally Lunn Bread, Cathead Biscuits or Carolina Peanut Rum Pie? Dig in to this 350-page book and you’ll be steeped in rural Southern flavors and techniques. But you may have to wait to savor these Southern classics as you’ll be too busy reading the history and evolution of each to head to the kitchen.

Road Food and More
In this day of celebrity chefs, Iron chefs and exotic ingredients, it’s nice to have someone looking out for the meat and potatoes (side) in all of us. In Two for the Road: Our Love Affair with American Food (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, $24), Jane and Michael Stern, the car-hopping couple from Connecticut, offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to produce their the best-selling food guide, Roadfood, currently in its sixth edition. They recall failed attempts to transport barbecue sauce from Arkansas and sugary sweet iced tea from South Carolina and describe a handful of foods they absolutely refused to eat. This memoir records both genuinely good and traumatically bad roadside dining experiences.

Mama Mia
Plowing through hoards of new cookbooks, the one that really stood out is one we wanted to take home (the real sign of a good cookbook). An adorable little book, 50 Great Pasta Sauces by Pamela Sheldon Johns (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2006, $14.95) contains recipes for 50 authentic Italian pasta dishes, from a simple pesto or roasted tomato sauce to the more unusual red pepper besciamella sauce. Almost all the recipes in this petite book (6 1/2-inches square) are photographed, making this collection as good to look at as it is to eat.

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