Simple to execute, anyway—these recipes bring complex, bold flavors to the table, with ways to work with chocolate that may be new even for experienced home bakers.

Young, who worked under chef Marco Pierre White before opening three chocolate shops in London, starts with some intimidating chocolate snobbery. Nothing like a Hershey bar here, or even a bit of Ghirardelli; the book opens with lessons on single-source chocolates, called for throughout the recipes—for example, those from certain countries in Africa, South America, or the Caribbean. No need to be intimidated, though: Young includes a handy chart on flavor pairings for chocolate from each country, and explains the “snobbery” well. He also offers information on how to taste chocolate, and a long lesson on making a truffle, from ganache to the tempered shell. For the ganache, he shows how to make it with cream or other liquids, such as water, fruit juice, tea, or coffee—a little-used technique for many home cooks who equate ganache with cream.

Not quite up to tempering on a regular basis? No worries—there’s plenty here to keep you cooking. Young uses his sure taste to combine chocolate with spirits, herbs, flowers, bacon, Stilton (including a sandwich of bacon, stilton, and chocolate), even … vinegar?

Yes, and that chocolate vinegar really shines. Three ingredients, two minutes, add a little olive oil, and you’re off to an exquisite salad (for testing, it went over a simple salad of red-leaf lettuce, apples, and dried cranberries). Young recommends using the vinegar for salads, pasta, fish, meats, and ice cream; a slightly different version makes a vinegar ganache. The only complaint less adventuresome cooks may have is with the lack of more concrete suggestions and recipes to use the vinegar.

Other simple recipes include two chocolate spreads, one sweet, one savory. The sweet ganache calls for just six ingredients (although American cooks will wish the book explained muscovado sugar, which turns up repeatedly in ingredient lists). Made with cream, water, and a touch of nut oil, this light, silky-smooth spread answered a Nutella craving with ease. The savory option, which blends cream cheese, sugar, Worcestershire, chocolate, and olive oil, may seem more bizarre, but follow Young’s advice and spread this on a sandwich of Stilton and pear slices, or cream cheese and smoked chicken.

Finish that meal off on the spicy-sweet side of chocolate, with gingerbread ganache rolled into simple truffles; for a test, these were rolled just in a mixture of confectioner’s sugar and cocoa powder, though the recipe calls for a tempered-chocolate coating. Rich with ground ginger and bits of crystallized ginger, even this less-fancy test felt rich enough (Young calls for sprinkling the tempered truffles with a mix of ground ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon; testers liked these spices added in small amounts to the ganache itself).

Once you start, it may be hard to stop. Even a first skim through the book will likely lead to many pages marked for further testing: a rich hot chocolate made with cocoa powder, dark chocolate, and water; chocolate syrups (five ingredients), deeply flavored with liqueur, spices, or herbs; dark chocolate sorbet (four ingredients); chocolate water biscuits to serve with cheese (five ingredients, plus two optional ones for variations); ganache made with honey and tahini and rolled in toasted sesame seeds; rosemary poached pears with Stilton ganache and walnuts; tea truffles (three ingredients, using the tea on hand in your pantry); chocolate pancakes with chocolate maple syrup (serve the maple syrup just once, and the book will feel worth its cost); salt and pepper ganache for dipping fruit (four ingredients); lemon-thyme chocolate caramel (six ingredients); an “ultimate” chocolate martini; sweet chocolate pesto (yes, for pasta); chocolate and chili gnocchi; chocolate sauces for white meat, red meat, and seafood; and vodka infused with cacao nibs (yep, two ingredients).

Finish off the evening (and possibly yourself) with “mulled wine hot chocolate,” made with cocoa powder, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, dark chocolate, clementines, rosemary, and red wine—and head to bed dreaming of the chocolate adventures left to test.

And, he says (while acknowledging that he is part of the problem): “I worry that the more cooking becomes entertainment and a spectator sport (instead of a family activity) and the more we fetishize celebrity chefs, the awful result is that we discourage folks from even setting foot in their kitchens. More and more, I’m concerned that by glamorizing chefdom, we turn off the very thing we seek to promote: getting people excited about cooking dinner.”

Does this book help to turn that around? Well, at least somewhat. Despite Mr. Besh’s attempts to gin up the excitement, his book may not strike his audience as thoroughly useful for everyday cooking.

Depending, of course, on who’s in that audience. This cookbook, like many today, leaves this reviewer wondering exactly what readers were the target.

Novice cooks? The book isn’t quite basic enough in most of the recipes for today’s novices—who, in an admittedly grand generalization, are truly completely new to the kitchen, lacking even the basic understanding earlier generations would get from watching mothers and grandmothers cook.

Self-professed foodies? These tend to be, in another grand generalization, either people who think they “know food” based only on much experience eating out, or people who take their cooking and ingredients very, very seriously, for whom this books would strike the right philosophical notes but be far too basic.

Because, at their heart, these recipes are pretty basic comfort food, sometimes with a flavor twist. They do make good food, and, if a home cook is able to practice one of the methods Mr. Besh preaches—cooking something big for Sunday dinner (pork roast, roasted chicken, a big ham or chuck roast), then using the leftovers for weeknight suppers—they will ease the nightly cooking burden somewhat. Cooks who can’t, however, may find many of the recipes, which rely on previously prepared ingredients, frustrating and less useful.

Not that the whole book follows that method; other chapters include “dinner from a cast-iron pot,” with such recipes as braised brisket and coq au vin. Here again, though, one of the recipes that looks appealing and relatively quick—pork and sausage jambalaya—relies on cooked pork shoulder from the previous chapter.

And not all of the recipes are about getting supper on the table; other chapters include breakfast, seafood, “barbecue wisdom,” classics including fried chicken, “jazz brunch,” holiday recipes, and desserts. Recipes run the gamut from fried eggs to an entire smoked suckling pig.

As do many of the recipes throughout the book, desserts stick to Southern standards, such as chess pie, lemon icebox pie, rice pudding, blueberry cobbler, and hummingbird cake topped with a seriously rich icing (1 pound of butter and a half-pound of cream cheese). A tested blackberry cheesecake recipe, in which a plain cheesecake layer covers a layer made purple with pureed berries, offers an example of one recipe that seems geared neither toward brand-new cooks nor toward experienced ones: the recipe is quite basic, despite the slight difference of having two layers of cheesecake, but fails to tell a novice baker how to tell when the cheesecake is done, saying simply “bake one hour, until the topping is set. (Additionally, the photo doesn’t match the recipe; it appears to have another layer on top, like a separate sour cream or whipped cream layer—but this is not noted in the recipe.)

Mr. Besh provides a list early in the book of essential pantry ingredients, with a caveat at the beginning about not worrying too much about ingredients or complicated techniques. It’s an interesting, seemingly somewhat quirky list, and not all are easily bought; still, Mr. Besh provides good reasons for the inclusion of each item. Most are store-bought, but a few, such as chicken stock and a cherry tomato sauce, refer to recipes. (One complaint: for such recipes as that tomato sauce, Mr. Besh talks about enjoying both freezing and canning the recipe—but fails to give instructions on canning.) An ingredient he leaves out, but uses repeatedly, is five-spice powder, one of the flavor twists that elevates many of the recipes.

For all his professed ease with cooks who don’t worry about ingredients too much, readers may wonder how much Mr. Besh means it, when he emphasizes organic ingredients, points out the provenance of many, and notes that he raises his own beef. Not everyone has means or access to do any such thing, of course. Nor does everyone have the lovely photo settings on the bayou, the photogenically mussed children, or the time to do all Mr. Besh recommends—the book may leave many cooks wondering how to live up to the standards set here.

But for cooks who understand the very basics of the kitchen, and those who need a reminder of how to cook both basic and somewhat more complex recipes (mostly Southern but wandering through some far-flung spots such as Asia and Germany), My Family Table may offer just the right back-to-basics preaching combined with chef-kissed basic recipes, such as tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches—prepared with homemade cherry tomato sauce and a touch of sambal chili paste for the soup, and sandwiches made with pecan-baked ham.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

The book breaks down its recipes into comfortably useful chapters on antipasti, soup, sandwiches, salads, pasta, vegetables, seafood, meat, and desserts. It intersperses them with profiles of Italian-American restaurateurs, farmers, vintners, and makers of everything from mozzarella to sausages to ricotta pie—from New Orleans to Seattle, Pennsylvania to Texas, Rhode Island to Missouri, Baltimore to San Diego.

Many recipes seem unnecessary for all but the newest cooks, such as mozzarella and tomato salad; stuffed mushrooms; garlic bread; spinach salad; or a sandwich of tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, and proscuitto, drizzled with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Do you really need another (very simple) baked ziti recipe? Ms. Bastianich may have felt she needed these to fill out a comprehensive look at Italian-American cooking across the country, but they add little to the collection. Other once-common recipes, though, such as clams casino, may be unfamiliar to today’s younger cooks, and seem more useful here.

More often, however, Ms. Bastianich serves up interesting recipes, or basic ones with a twist (such as basil made with pistachios instead of walnuts or pine nuts). Among many recipes for frying, for example, is one for marinated artichokes fried in beer batter (though were the artichoke hearts supposed to be marinated ones from a jar? Judging from the recipe title, yes—though the ingredient list does not make this clear). Her basic recipe for chicken stock adds turkey wings for richness, she says (and also includes the unusual instruction to boil the stock for an hour, contrary to the standard bare simmer).

A dozen sandwich recipes appeal with their simplicity, but they point up the noticeable—and frustrating—missing recipes: those for the bread in these sandwiches. For readers who can’t easily buy rounds of muffaletta bread, semolina bread, or good-quality Italian rolls (or those who just prefer to make their own), the chapter seems significantly less useful. Still, many of the recipes will tempt readers, such as soft-shell crab sandwiches “Italianized” with semolina rolls and an arugula and egg salad, or the “gizmo,” a sloppy joe spiked with Italian sausage and fennel and topped with marinara sauce and mozzarella. Tasters did wish for more sauce, but the gizmo makes a quick supper or would work well for tailgating or other casual parties.

That marinara recipe begins with a can of tomatoes and demands little more beyond garlic and basil. Exemplifying the practicality in her recipes, Ms. Bastianich tells the cook to “rinse out the tomato can and bowl with 1 cup of hot water, and dump this into the skillet.” In many pasta sauce recipes, she uses liberal amounts of the pasta cooking water—useful for many American cooks who may know of the trick but rarely use it. (Likewise, she usually has cooks transfer cooked pasta directly from the cooking water into the sauce, rather than pouring it into a colander to drain.)

A beef sandwich from Chicago also keeps things simple, with pickled peppers as exotic as the ingredients get, and only a moderate use of garlic, which will appeal to cooks who find it overused in Italian-American food. Making the full recipe will feed a crowd or make great leftovers to freeze; in a test, the beef was roasted late at night, chilled (making it simple to slice), and reheated for an easy weeknight supper.

A sausage frittata, a skillet version of a strata, also keeps things easy for a weeknight supper or weekend lunch. It did, though, need a bit more seasoning; cooks accustomed to nearly all recipes now calling for “salt and freshly ground pepper to taste” will notice that Ms. Bastianich does not routinely call for pepper, though sometimes the recipes could use a bit more pepper or herbs.

Sometimes the recipes trade precision for the pleasantly casual feel found throughout the book; for example, a recipe for a sandwich topped with French fries tells only how to test the heat of the oil with the tip of a potato. Although not all cooks own a thermometer, those who do would appreciate being told the preferred temperature for the oil as well.

Those are quibbles, though: For an interesting review of classic Italian-American recipes and the communities that nurtured them, Ms. Bastianich’s book provides pleasant reading and comforting, unintimidating recipes.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

The push-pull of Ms. Bijan’s relationship with her parents during their grief as she came of age will feel familiar to many readers, but the details of Ms. Bijan’s life will not.

Born into a well-to-do family in Tehran to parents who built and ran an obstetrics hospital, Ms. Bijan offers up mostly idyllic childhood memories, full of swims in the family pool, elaborate parties, and, throughout, ceremonial everyday family meals—a focus on food as the source of much pleasure.

All that came to a horrible halt in 1978, when the family learned of the Iranian revolution while spending a summer holiday in Spain: Increasingly terrifying phone calls made it clear they could not return home.

With that, Ms. Bijan, 15 years old and itching to try life in America, left her parents behind to stay with a friend attending boarding school in Michigan. From that point on, her story focuses on the need to belong, to fit in, to find home. Despite strong pressure from her father to study medicine, she follows her calling: becoming a chef, first by studying in France, cooking at prestigious California restaurants, back to France for more training, and finally to opening her own, L’amie Donia.

This is a life story with a (so far) happy ending, despite the disappointment Ms. Bijan’s father felt in her and the struggle with that constant need to belong, and despite her mother’s bitter death—all because Ms. Bijan focuses on her mother’s strength and love. The indomitable grit her mother displays carries Ms. Bijan through, even from far away. But while interesting, it isn’t a particularly happy book: sadness continually comes through, even in slight, passing references, such as a mention of Ms. Bijan having almost no photos of her parents from when they started their hospital, long lost to the revolution.

Readers with an interest in Iran and its politics may wish for more than this book offers: More on her parents’ activities there, more introspection about the revolution, and more depth when she discusses the privileged life her family seemed to enjoy in Iran. Too much is left unsaid or unexamined here.

As a food memoir, though, the book comes closer to fulfillment for its readers. Her stories of working her way through French cooking school and finding a Paris to call her own don’t offer great surprises to those who have read other stories about chefs in training, but Ms. Bijan keeps them interesting by combining these with details of her parents’ lives, memories of Iran, and the daunting, exhausting work involved in becoming accepted and thoroughly trained in French and American kitchens.

Ms. Bijan’s own restaurant was thoroughly devoted to classic French bistro cooking, so it makes sense that she include a few French recipes here. But they will likely be easily skipped over in favor of the Persian recipes on which Ms. Bijan focuses, from simple ones, such as rosewater-scented rice pudding, pomegranate granite, and cardamom-inflected orange cookies, to the more complex roasted quince stuffed with lamb, split peas, fennel and currants; saffron yogurt rice with chicken and eggplant; and sweet-and-sour grape leaf dolmas with cinnamon and saffron rice.

She closes with apple pie, one of her mother’s many efforts to find her own place in America and adapt its flavors to her own, and with Ms. Bijan’s California version of her childhood memory of snow drizzled with sour cherry syrup—passing to her own child the recipes and memories of a Persian family, now truly belonging to America.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

With the idea of writing a book for the ultimate cookie swap—one with perfect, cheflike confections—author Tracey Zabar began hitting up mostly New York chefs and bakers for their best recipes. Too many chef recipes could easily spell disaster—so many chefs, so many terrible cookbooks—but One Sweet Cookie, a calm, graceful book, provides a number of tempting recipes that serve up what they promise.

Bakers and restaurant-goers will recognize many of the names here, including Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, Daniel Boulud, Karen DeMasco, Todd English, Daniel Humm, Dorie Greenspan, Thomas Keller, Sarabeth Levine, Sirio Maccioni, Marcus Samuelsson, Jacques Torres, Jean-George Vongerichten, and Eli Zabar.

A brief introduction leads straight into a brownies and bars chapter, and the second recipe, Maida Heatter’s Palm Beach Brownies, filled with a layer of peppermint patties, runs in classic Heatter style over three pages. The bottom third of the third page however, is Ms. Zabar’s “Bali Hai” variation with ginger, coconut, and macadamia nuts replacing the mints and walnuts of the original. It’s a variation worthy of the original, deeply moist (though watch carefully to keep from overbaking the edges), rich, and, as the author says, extravagant—and worth it. Do use the optional crystallized ginger in these, which provides a necessary counterbalancing zing.

This recipe, with all its detail, precedes a cheesecake brownie that just fills a page. Although not lacking in any basic information, the contrast remains striking. The cheesecake recipe better shows what will come in the rest of the book; namely, recipes with reasonable amounts of instruction, though sometimes falling a bit short of all the explanation a novice might appreciate.

For example, a recipe for pizzettes, in the chapter on biscotti, spice cookies, and seed cookies, could have used more detail in the headnote or the instructions. A test of the recipe suggests that these are to look like traditional biscotti, though they are baked just once and thus stay fairly soft. The instructions say only to roll out a “small portion” of the sticky dough to “form a rope the thickness of a sausage,” to be flattened slightly and cut into inch-wide pieces. “What sort of sausage?” will be the baker’s first question, while wrestling with the sticky dough and wondering exactly what these cookies should look like. In the end, it didn’t seem to matter; whether cut into small, thick squares, or longer, angled fingers, and spread with chocolate frosting, the pizzettes, flavored with cinnamon, cloves, chocolate, cocoa, and almonds, come out as tender, slightly cakey cookies with a bit of crunch, just right alongside a cup of strong coffee.

Another recipe, “chocolate knobs,” didn’t quite live up to its billing as cookies that are more like old-fashioned chocolate candy; they came out neither very candylike nor all that different from standard chocolate cookies, but still solid chocolate cookies—a good thing, as the recipe makes 5 dozen.

Recipe yields vary widely in the book, from 200 miniature pistachio cookies to 100 corn cookies (buttery lemon cookies made with cornmeal) to 7 “jammy dodgers” sandwich cookies.

The extravagance level of the recipes also, happily, varies widely; not all the cookies are as rich as the Bali Hai brownies.

Only one recipe test was a thorough failure. Trendy macarons, filled here with raspberry jam, use a slightly different technique than many recipes, whisking confectioners’ sugar and almond flour with an egg white and apricot jam before a whipped egg white is folded in. That may not have caused the problem, but these failed in an initial test to puff upon baking, which is done at a higher temperature than many macarons. For all the simplicity of their ingredients—mainly just egg whites, almond flour, and sugar—notoriously fussy macarons can give bakers a fit. Given that, some troubleshooting tips would have been nice with this recipe.

Look past some of the recipe titles to see the tweaks and twists that make some of the common ones more interesting. For example, multiple versions of gingerbread and molasses cookies include some with crystallized ginger and cardamom, or ground ginger, cardamom, and candied citrus peel, or with a technique that involves spreading the dough in a sheet pan, chilling it, cutting it into bars, freezing them, then sugar-dipping and baking the bars.

Candied orange peel turns up in several recipes, as do some other non-standard pantry ingredients, such as melon confit cubes, a packet of Dr. Oetker vanilla sugar (with no suggestion for a substitute), and red fife flour. But for all but the most novice baker, most of these recipes call for what kitchens would already stock.

Attractive photos convey the simplicity of many of the recipes, and some of the prettiest will tempt bakers to buy new equipment, such as the “jammy dodgers,” which require a 3-inch square cookie cutter; these sandwich cookies, square with an off-center small circle cut out of the top, show how easily simple cookies can go fancy. Likewise, photos of poppy seed linzer cookies filled with lemon curd could easily propel a baker into the kitchen.

No photo accompanies the recipe that left the crumbs all over this review, and it’s probably just as well. The small “Sandys,” though bursting with chocolate chips, were nothing exciting to look at. This is one of the recipes that calls for candied orange peel; bakers will appreciate that it’s listed as an optional ingredient, given that it can be hard to find and a bit time-consuming to make, but it would surely be a worthwhile addition. Even without the peel, though, the combination of butter, chocolate, and cinnamon in a bite-size cookie makes a quick treat well worth the minimal effort.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

One section is headlined “lacking restraint”—a mighty fine candidate for the entire book’s title. The missing restraint isn’t just in the writing: This is also not the book for you if you object to a pound of sugar, nearly a pound of chocolate, 10 eggs, and 4 cups of sugar for a 9-by-13-inch pan of chocolate bars. Or a cup of sour cream, five egg yolks, and ½ pound butter for sour cream rolls, plus another stick of butter and cup of sugar for the streusel that goes on top—all for just 16 buns. And that qualifies as a relatively restrained recipe.

Want more? Consider the recipe for 10 cinnamon pastry twists, made with yeast: A stick of butter in the dough, a half-stick of butter and ½ cup of sugar in the butter-sugar filling, and nearly another stick of butter and more than a cup of sugar in the spiced butter topping. For 10 twists.

For the reader who finds all that heavenly instead of repulsive, Ms. Yockelson will grab her by the apron and talk and talk like a best girlfriend. (And the reader will, most likely, be a “her”—the pure pinkness of the book—from cover to interior photos to page borders—combined with the old-fashioned, flowery design, aims squarely at girlyness.) The book’s unusual format seems designed to invite readers to dip in and out of the conversation, reading baking essays almost randomly, as one would leaf through a scrapbook.

The book (published September 26, 2011, by Wiley) opens with a long section on baking basics, covering ingredients, technique, definitions of baking terms, and equipment. This is followed by the “baking storybook,” in which a few recipes are introduced at a time with an essay; recipes themselves have no headnotes. Thus within each mini-section of essay and recipes, there is some vague organizing principle behind them, but the book does not provide the further overall structure most bakers would expect (such as cakes, cookies, pies). Instead, a peanut butter cookie precedes a cornbread recipe, which is followed by a coffeecake.

A detailed index saves time—but only if, for example, you know you want a chocolate chip cookie recipe. Otherwise, the lack of useful organization may make it hard to bake from the book routinely or on the spur of the moment (for example, roll recipes are scattered throughout, which complicates finding and comparing them).

In many cases, the recipe concepts are nothing unusual—oatmeal rolls, shortcakes and fruit, chocolate chip cookies, Bundt cakes, sugar cookies. It’s the high-impact ingredient quantities that make the recipes stand out: shortcakes, for example, aren’t topped just with peaches and blueberries, but rather with a blueberry sauce, buttered peaches (yes, really), and vanilla whipped cream. Four dozen sugar cookies call for ½ pound butter, 1 cup oil, a cup each of granulated and confectioners’ sugar, and another 2 cups of sugar for dredging the cookies before baking. Given the structure that invites a longer reading to unearth all the spots where, say, a cake recipe may be hiding, by the time a baker finishes that reading, the sheer quantities of butter and sugar may leave her feeling slightly queasy.

But: For those not put off by the ingredient lists, and not in a hurry to just get to the recipe, the question remains, do the recipes work? Yes, they do. Ms. Yockelson tests thoroughly enough and provides adequate instructions (often with little notes about what should be happening as, say, you spread a batter in the pan) to ensure sweet success. For example, a toffee cake, while slightly muted in flavor by its half-pound of butter, emerged from its Bundt pan tall (or, shall we say, buxom?) and fine-grained.

One odd note: For all the detail given here, the emphasis on repeated testing and tinkering with recipes, and the mention of frequent use of a scale in the section on measuring, weights are listed generally only for chocolate and butter, not flour or sugar. Experienced bakers know that the most reliable, easiest route to recipe consistency is through weighing ingredients—and the lack of that information seems especially noticeable in a book as thorough as this.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

So the secret may still be safe, but Desserts from the Famous Loveless Café (Artisan Books, September 2011) does serve up a hefty helping of many of the café’s most popular recipes.

Pastry chef and author Alisa Huntsman notes that the Loveless, which traces its roots in Nashville to 1951, started out so small and busy that dessert wasn’t even on the menu—why encourage diners to linger over coffee and pie? Customers were plenty happy at first to get the fried chicken and biscuits that the café built its reputation on.

But with her desserts, Ms. Huntsman rounded out the menu—after, she says, she figured out just how sticky the Southern sweet tooth really is. And many of her recipes prove it: There’s no shortage of sugar, honey, corn syrup, and sorghum in these pages.

The book covers the standards—pies, cakes, cobblers, cookies, puddings—and many of the recipes are quite standard: blackberry pie, buttermilk pie, chess pie, apple cake, apple crisp, snickerdoodles, lemon squares, chocolate pudding. In some, interesting touches pop up: cardamom (an underused spice in American kitchens) in the apple crumb pie and a blackberry/raspberry crisp, rose water in the blackberry pie and raspberry pie.

Some variations on the standards would make useful additions to a baker’s repertoire, such as the brownie bread pudding (not tested for this review). Made with day-old brownies instead of stale bread, this rich pudding gets a topping of bourbon-infused caramel sauce, a perfect riff on a standard. (One quibble: The recipe calls for a 7-by-11-inch baking pan, but the accompanying photo shows individual puddings baked in ramekins. Presumably the recipe, which serves eight, would fill eight ramekins—why not say so?)

Many recipes seem aimed at fairly novice cooks who may be short on time; the miniature lemon meringue pies, for example, call for store-bought crusts (a disappointment—is this really what the café uses?), and notes that cooks who don’t want to juice six lemons should use frozen lemon juice instead—a trick many bakers know but would be hesitant to admit.

Some other shortcuts or traditional recipe tweaks may seem like heresy, and sometimes unnecessary; preparing banana pudding with ladyfingers instead of vanilla wafers may, as the recipe says, make it more sophisticated—but “sophisticated” and “banana pudding” don’t seem right in the same sentence. The ladyfingers, while not bad, didn’t improve the pudding. But, other than being a little light on the vanilla, the recipe doesn’t go too wrong—how could it: with a custard of 3 cups of whole milk and 8 egg yolks, plus a topping of sweetened heavy cream?

Ms. Huntsman notes in the introduction that her early attempts at desserts for the café were routinely met with “not sweet enough,” and these desserts show how she had to keep upping the sugar to meet customers’ expectations. Lemon squares, for example, are a solid rendition (with the interesting addition of an egg yolk for a slightly sturdier crust) that may not be tart enough for non-Southerners.

The “Muddy Fudge Pie” follows suit with brown sugar and a cup of corn syrup; this creamy, baked pie, served with a chocolate sauce and whipped cream, was pleasantly tooth-achingly sweet. This was tested with Huntsman’s “Easy-as-Pie Dough,” which contains butter, confectioners’ sugar, and two egg yolks. That combination provides a sturdy, tasty crust, but bakers should keep a close eye on it, because the high sugar content easily leads to an overly browned rim.

Two recipes that included peanut butter were a bit less successful. A baked peanut butter pie, unlike the common chilled versions using cream cheese and cream, comes together quickly in a chocolate cookie crust. Like the book’s peanut butter brownies, the pie’s flavor was surprisingly muted. The brownie recipe worked fine, but with peanut butter and 2 ¼ sticks of butter for a 9-by-13-inch pan, produced bars that were greasy and didn’t hit hard enough with either the chocolate or peanut butter flavors.

In another test, black bottom cupcakes were tasty enough, but the proportions were off. Made with a simple cake batter topped with a dollop of cream cheese batter, this recipe needed about twice as much cake batter as it produced to use up the cream cheese portion.

A cherry coffeecake, on the other hand, offered a solid blend of cherries (though some bakers may wish to use more than called for) and a cream cheese filling. Although the recipe refers to pouring a batter into the pan for the base, it actually makes a stiff dough that produces a tart-like crust, perfect with a cup of tea and quickly polished off by tasters.

Other promising recipes (not tested) frequently turn to the greatest hits of spring and summer fruit. They include an open-face “out-of-the-pan” peach pie flavored with pumpkin pie spice; strawberry rhubarb pie with orange zest, apple pie spice, and cinnamon; blackberry jam cake with coconut caramel glaze; pear cobbler topped with brown sugar scones; a blueberry and peach buckle made with cornbread; blueberry shortcakes made with lemon curd and oat scones; a variety of pound cakes; and lemon tunnel Bundt cake with a cream cheese filling.

Homestyle recipes, generally simple to make, rarely running more than a page: A sweet gift for those who love the Loveless, as well as the rest of us—even if we never get to Nashville.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

Mercifully, those tales won’t involve reading anything like that.

With Martha Hall Foose’s first book, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, readers were charmed by mouthwatering recipes and some gentle stories of the Mississippi Delta—stories that felt authentic without laying on the Southern charm too thickly.

Foose’s second cookbook, A Southerly Course: Recipes and Stories from Close to Home (Clarkson Potter, 2011), offers more tales of Foose’s neighbors and food inspirations tucked into the headnotes of most recipes. Especially at first—and especially for readers who missed the first book—the stories can feel random, a bit forced, and sometimes unnecessary. But those who take the time to settle in with the book for a bit will find the stories sweet enough—and the recipes well worth marking for experimentation.

Foose talks in the introduction of Southern culinary eccentricity, and that trait keeps this book from being yet another compilation of Southern standards. Although many of the recipes offer straightforward Southern specialties—such as thick sweet potato fries, chicken liver spread, skillet fried corn, pan-fried fish, custard pie, and blackberry jelly roll—there are more than a few pleasant surprises. Southern-with-a-twist ones include pickled crawfish tails, pickled quail eggs and sausages, and pimiento cheese soup (not entirely new, but worthy of wider renown), collards in a dumpling soup, sweet-and-sour salsify, and asparagus with country ham and egg gravy.

Others come from Foose’s experience, and the variety is a welcome touch—from kibbeh to a variety of venison recipes, to peas with paneer and soy sauce- and sake-glazed grilled scallions.

The first recipe tested was fine but not outstanding. Chicken drumsticks marinated in a mixture that includes Mexican Coca-Cola, ginger, Worcestershire sauce, onions, and garlic tasted surprisingly subdued—and cooks should be warned that they’ll need a very big pan in which to simmer all four pounds of drumsticks.

Other recipes, though, provided far more flavor, rarely with any great effort. “Sausage Dinner,” essentially a popover or pannekoeken batter over Italian sausages, makes a comforting supper with little work, surprisingly tasty given its short ingredient list. (In testing the onions and sausage were cooked longer than called for in order to cook off most of the liquid—likely deepening the flavor of the onions.) One quibble: Why tell cooks to pour in the batter then season with salt and pepper? Given that there’s no real way to know how much salt or pepper is needed until the dish finishes baking, the recipe should provide some guidelines on amounts.

Crawfish bread—turnovers filled with a mix of crawfish, smoked Gouda, chili sauce, and onion and bell pepper)—provided a winning flavor combination. The dough, quickly made with eggs and ricotta cheese, but no butter or other fat, could be tricky for a novice baker. A recipe that offers no range of liquid to use could frustrate a baker when, as in the recipe test, the dough was far too dry to come together. Adding both more milk and more ricotta worked, producing a tender, moist wrapper for the crawfish.

Pickle-braised pork also offers deep flavors while requiring almost no time from the cook. Pork shoulder takes a quick sear then gets mixed with relish and barbecue sauce before going into the oven for three hours. The recipe calls for searing slices of the cooked pork before serving, but a lazy cook could skip this step and still be satisfied.

The desserts chapter offers fewer surprises, though still well-executed, with basics such as upside-down cake, cheesecake squares, carrot cake, baked Alaska and fudge. A blackberry jam cake, with jam and spices in the cake batter and caramel in the cream cheese icing, makes just the sort of sweet, old-fashioned dessert to finish a Southern Sunday supper. Funnel cakes, fried in just 2 cups of oil, bring the taste of a country fair home with ease. And if you grow daylilies, an apricot mousse served in daylily-lined flutes makes an impressive presentation.

The book breaks recipes down by “courses,” with chapters on appetizers, salads and soups, vegetables and grains, main dishes, and desserts. Each chapter opens with a list of recipes, though not unfortunately, with a page number for each.

Many of the recipes could use a bit more detail (what kind of cherries in the cherry pie?) and are not for complete novices, but they generally take a clear, to-the-point tone in explaining the process.

With nary a y’all in the book, Foose has, again, produced a book of Southern-ish recipes that retain the South’s best flavors without its clichés.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

Fogg’s journey gives Lyons, the author of Someone is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, a chance to show off her impressive list of travels. She does so in an attractive book, with a nifty 3-D cover and photos throughout. Along with the dining descriptions and overviews of each city she covers, Lyons give sidebars on the area around each restaurant, with suggestions for shopping, tourist sites, and other places to eat.

The tour begins, of course, in London, moving on to France, Italy, India, Singapore, China, and the United States. Lyons doesn’t attempt to stick strictly to Fogg’s route; she throws in detours to Brighton, Taiwan, Delhi, Rome, and Beijing, among others. Throughout, Lyons does a reasonable job providing a sense of place in the introductions to each destination.

This isn’t a book to read straight through, or it will begin to feel repetitive, and the meal and place descriptions will run together (and readers may, after getting in to the book, find the cute plays-on-words a bit much). Pop in and out of the chapters instead to experience the joy Lyons clearly felt on her travels.

One off-note in a book devoted to highlighting the author’s favorite restaurants: Lyons writes about at least two that have undergone major changes (a fire and renovation, in one case; a renovation and change of management in another) while noting that she hasn’t been to them since those changes. Certainly restaurants often cycle quickly through such ups and downs, making it hard to stay current with them on a book’s production schedule, but it still makes these recommendations feel less solid.

For some, but far from all, of the restaurants, Lyons provides labels from “inexpensive” to “crushingly expensive.” The missing labels fit with the editing through the rest of the book, which will be distracting to readers who like their punctuation punctual. (Hyphens come willy-nilly, commas appear with utter inconsistency, and words—or entire recipe directions—go missing. The section on the restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower, Le Jules Verne, instructs readers not to bother with dessert—but runs, you guessed it, a mouth-watering photo of a chocolate dessert.)

The 14 recipes here range from easy (scones—fine, although the recipe gives no oven temperature) to a two-page curried crab appetizer, but home cooking isn’t the point, of course; the food in this book to tempt a reader generally goes far beyond what a home cook would attempt. Better to bookmark a few pages, then book a trip to Lyons’ favorites.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

a) Think food and high-tech belong in the same sentence;

b) Own at least one smoker;

c) Travel with your whipped cream canister and multiple cartridges;

d) Keep liquid glucose in your pantry;

e) Dream of buying your own $1,000 immersion circulator so you can go around talking about your “sous vide” supper;

f) Answer e) with “Whaddya mean, dream? I own two!”

Or

g) Just want some fun facts to share at your next boring work party?

Answer “yes” to at least one of these, and you’ll know it’s time to read Ideas in Food (Clarkson Potter, December 2010). From smoked maple syrup to octopus confit, this is a book to make food science fun.

Authors Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot, who met (and later married) while working as chefs in Boston, own Ideas in Food, a Pennsylvania consulting business, and maintain a blog by the same name filled with sometimes far-out kitchen experiments.

Those attempts lead to recipes that often demand special equipment: smokers, cream canisters, immersion circulators, pressure cookers, a pain de mie bread pan, and vacuum sealers. Although the authors give alternatives where possible, they require more persnicketiness than many cooks could tolerate. Lacking an immersion circulator, for example, you could bring a large pot of water to 152.5 degrees, add potatoes, lower the heat to 149 degrees, and hold it there for two hours—but would you?

Of course, if you’re reading this book, you would likely at least consider it—and then you’d be on your way to a batch of ranch-flavored gnocchi, one of many recipes that turn the standards on their heads. After the water bath, those potatoes get salt-baked for an hour before finally getting turned into dough.

For some of the recipes, the extra effort involved just won’t seem worth the trouble for a home cook, for whom the first two-thirds of the book is written. If you want a hard-boiled egg, will you really cook it for an hour in a circulating water bath? Maybe so, since it requires little other attention—but how about gently cooking an egg, icing it down, peeling it, then reheating it for 10 minutes at 140 degrees before serving . . . a simple soft-boiled egg?

Yet even for cooks who can’t see themselves taking on that hassle, the book makes a great read, with explanations of the science behind the recipes leading every section (for example, on meat, dairy, fruit, bread, brining, and freezing—oops, make that cryo-blanching).

Even the chapters that lack a gee-whiz recipe offer some impressive ideas: sourdough spaetzle, anyone? Ideas in Food also offers a variety of useful, quicker, gadget-less recipes, such as “BBQ rigatoni,” which calls for soaking pasta in a mixture of water and barbecue sauce for four hours before a quick final cooking, or a straightforward Hollandaise sauce made with browned butter.

Cooks can also pick up tips easily applied to their own recipes, if they’re reluctant to go all the way with the book’s versions. Mozzarella recipes, for example, usually call for mixing salt in as the cheese is stretched, not always an easy way to distribute it evenly. Ideas in Food instead offers what is, in retrospect, the obvious suggestion to salt the hot liquid used for the final dipping.

The last section, “Ideas for Professionals,” may be the least-used but most-read for many home cooks. Learn here how to use xantham gum, methylcellulose, transglutaminase (“meat glue”), and liquid nitrogen, in science-for-nonscientists explanations. Whether you find these recipes fascinating and mouthwatering or too much messing around with your food, the straightforward writing will hold your interest with its details of trendy chef methods, setting the book apart from other food science books.

And even this section offers recipes easily attempted at home, with the ordering of a few special ingredients. Make a chef-worthy foam of cherry juice with a blender, stand mixer, xantham gum, and Versawhip (a treated soy protein), or light and crisp onion rings from a batter flavored with coffee and aerated with carbon dioxide from an iSi canister (or a pricey carbonation rig and CO2 canister, if you start feeling like a pro).

Pro or no, if you’re going to read Ideas in Food, start clearing some shelf space and prepare your wallet: Serious, supersize-gadget desires will surely follow this food-science fun.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.