Any “best of” list can make for endless debates, and this compilation (edited by Marvin J. Taylor and Clark Wolf, published October 2012 by Rizzoli),  which tells the history of American cooking through vignettes about each cookbook, will keep its readers talking back.

For example, cooks of more recent vintage, who can’t recall a time when they actually had to learn how to use a food processor, may be stumped—and amused—by the inclusion of Abby Mandel’s Cuisinart Classroom from 1980. But like many of the cookbooks in this tome, it will remind readers of a major leap in America’s culinary history—along with how much knowledge there is to lose along the way, as in the processor recipe for banana bread. For all the ways we use food processors today, few recipes call for banana bread to be made, start to finish, in one.

Still, should this count as a “classic” cookbook? The vignettes about each of the 101 books, chosen from the enormous Fales Library Food Studies collection at New York University, attempt to justify each book’s inclusion, and generally succeed . . . at least until you study the fascinating list of the 200-plus books first under consideration and start arguing all over again. (Although unmentioned in the title, the choices stick to cookbooks of the 20th century—stretching the definition slightly to begin with Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published in 1896, and ending with The French Laundry Cookbook in 1999.)

The chronological first section offers the cookbook vignettes, with photos of and from each. Some of these will leave readers wanting more, especially about the earlier cooks and books, but this walk through the 1900s spices its history with several essays from food writers on some of the most influential cookbook authors.

Many are obvious choices (Judith Jones on Julia Child, Scott Peacock on Edna Lewis), but what a delight to get two full pages from Jessica Harris on Rufus Estes, the African-American author of the self-published Good Things to Eat, as Suggested by Rufus. Learning about the life of this man, a freed slave who went on to become one of the top chefs with the Pullman company, serving two presidents and the princess of Spain, is a highlight of this book. As is an essay by cookbook collector Dalia Carmel Goldstein about how she discovered the precious (in its truest sense) notebook of recipes written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Such essays alone make the book worth its $50 tag.

So many of the cookbooks included here bring back fond memories of relatives’ cookbook shelves, and many remain in use today: the original Joy of Cooking, of course; Charleston Receipts; Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking; the Time-Life Foods of the World series; Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee’s The Chinese Cookbook; Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts; Simple French Food from Richard Olney; The Silver Palate Cookbook; The Italian Baker from Carol Field; Marion Cunningham’s The Breakfast Book; and Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts.

More of the choices from the waning years of the century, though terrific books, seem to pale in comparison to their long-ago ancestors. Partly that’s nostalgia speaking, but the earlier books speak with a charm and quirkiness we rarely see anymore (and when we do, it feels precious in its worst sense).

The original Joy of Cooking, for example, may have been a bit of a mess, but its charms and author’s personality shine through. And though the Times-Picayune of today may be a sad shadow of a newspaper, its 1901 owners had the foresight to preserve, in an authoritative yet still-familiar voice, so many flavors and stories of New Orleans in The Original Picayune Creole Cook Book.

Recipes are printed verbatim, with headnotes intact, retaining their authenticity, even if this means most readers may skip many of the early books’ recipes. For example, true to its day, a recipe for jelly pie from The National Cook Book of 1932 leaves the bottom crust off the list of ingredients, and provides no instructions on baking temperature or time.

(Pity poor Lulu Hunt Peters: Her Diet and Health with Key to the Calories, complete with charming illustrations by her 10-year-old nephew showing how to exercise—“Important! Keep Facial Expression Throughout as per Artist’s Idea”—apparently so repulsed the 101 Classic Cookbooks editors that none of the “notable recipes” mentioned in its vignette get reprinted in the recipe section. Though she commanded anything but pity in her day: Ms. Peters published her book, left to work with the Red Cross in Bosnia in World War I, and returned to find, to her great surprise, that she had an 800,000-copy bestseller on her hands.)

Looking through the recipe choices will give readers yet more room for argument (two nearly identical recipes for banana bread?), along with many temptations. Although some seem picked solely for curiosity’s sake (are you likely to make roast possum anytime soon?), others are old favorites waiting to be cooked again.

One frustration: Many recipes refer to others in their original cookbooks, but those are not reprinted here. In many cases, resourceful cooks shouldn’t have much trouble filling in the gaps with recipes from their own books or an Internet search—and clearly something had to be left out of a book approaching 700 pages.

This is a serious cookbook—serious in heft and content—but never boring or ponderous, and blessedly “yummy”-free. It will remind longtime cooks why learning about cooking satisfies their souls, and give every cook, new and experienced, many reasons to hit the kitchen.

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

So for readers who just want pretty pictures—and possibly the inspiration that comes with them—Pierre Hermé Pastries might be worth the money. Everyone else, hold on to your wallet.

Fifty dollars for a book as hideously edited/translated as this one? What an insult to readers.

Scarcely will those readers turn the opening pages of the book without finding a confusing direction, odd measurement, or outright error in the ingredients or recipe steps.

At first, a baker may think “it’s just me—I’m just missing something that must be here somewhere—after all, look at how beautiful those cream puffs/yule logs/cookies are in the photo!” But no, gentle baker, in this relationship, none of the fault lies with you.

Confusing directions—or those that seem to make little sense in a home kitchen—can sometimes be explained, if not excused, by the fact that these recipes come from a chef, not a home cook. And odd measurements, even if annoying, aren’t so surprising given that these recipes were probably scaled down from their bakery proportions, then translated out of grams. But reading “In a saucepan, bring the cream to a boil” for 4 teaspoons cream will make a reader do a double-take, and, as in typical in many of these recipes, wonder in the next sentence what happened to the cream (it reappears a sentence later—directions jump around seemingly without reason.

Again, in a commercial setting, these jittery directions may be exactly how the chef works, and sensibly so—but there’s no effort here to explain the “why” for anything, nor to make it more logical for home cooks.

Outright errors, though, abound, and there’s no ’splaining these away. Approached as sport, it’s almost fun to play “spy the lie” in the ingredient list and directions for each recipe—but only if you have no money and effort (and high hopes) involved. What, silly you, you actually tried to bake from this book?

Maybe you should have had a clue that this was never the intention, given the handsome heft of the book—a pastry cream splatter simply doesn’t belong in this neighborhood.

Pierre Hermé is a justifiably much celebrated and praised chef. However this book came to be what it is, it doesn’t do him justice. After all, his concept—provide a classic recipe and then a modern variation of it, with historical background to introduce both—remains a solid idea, despite the execution. Cream puffs, flan, gingerbread, muffins, strudel, crème brulee, cheesecake, chocolate chip cookies, madeleines, meringues, ice cream, eclairs, and tarte tatin, for example, all come what will look like a useful recipe (at first glance) for any baker, and many of the variations would not be difficult, though many others do require specialty ingredients and much time.

The book opens with an apparently straightforward recipe for blancmange. But when it comes to the gelatin sheets called for, the instructions say to soften them in cold water, then place the sheets in a bowl and freeze them for 15 minutes before melting them in warmed almond milk. There may be good reason for those directions, but they don’t follow the standard (soften sheets in cold water, lift them out and gently wring out the excess, then melt in warm liquid). With no efforts made to explain the “why,” this recipe kicks off the unease about the recipes’ reliability.

The next recipe, “Festival,” uses almond sponge cake rounds layered with Bavarian cream, coated in Italian meringue, and decorated with a variety of fruit. Not a quick recipe, though none of the steps would be very tough . . . but where’s the final step? According to the photo, the meringue should be browned, presumably with a torch. The recipe, however, simply ends after piping the meringue around the cake and topping with the fruit.

From there the concerns keep piling up: The yule log recipe lists three 3 eggs in the recipe list (with 4 egg whites coming a bit further down), but then calls in the instructions for “beat the egg yolks.” Further along, the pastry cream calls for a cup of heavy cream, which appears in the instructions only as “add the rum, and then the whipped cream”—with no previous directions to whip the cream. Then, in the buttercream, the ingredient list calls for 1½ egg yolks (!) and 1 egg, but directions say “beat the egg yolks and whole eggs.” So should that really be 1 egg or more? These may be minor issues that a good baker can risk guessing at, but when they keep coming, so does that unease.

And then you hit a major issue. “Infinitely Lemon Choux,” with components of a tart dough, choux paste, and lemon cream, sounds glorious, and looks easy enough at the beginning; make the tart dough, then prepare the choux paste. But, after you cut out rounds of the raw tart dough, they simply disappear from the recipe.

And we’ve only reached page 37 of 288.

Comically, most readers will probably miss the “publisher’s note” on page 6, which talks about the eggs used in the recipes, but could apply to all parts of baking. It begins: “Making pastries requires the precise measuring of ingredients . . . it is recommended that you follow the exact measurements given in each recipe.” Or . . . maybe not.

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

Pie won’t win simply because piecrust seems to offer, even to good cooks, a losing proposition: too much effort for too much risk of failure. Can decent cooks make cupcakes at home at least as good (usually better, and definitely far cheaper) as those in the Cute Cupcake Shoppe? Of course—and they could with pie, too, though most cooks simply don’t believe it.

But with Pie It Forward: Pies, Tarts, Tortes, Galettes and Other Pastries Reinvented, Gesine Bullock-Prado can change the minds of at least some of those cooks. For true beginners, her book may still intimidate; although easy recipes appear here, many take multiple steps and particular tools (not just pie plates, but square and round tart pans, cake rings, springform pans, flan rings, and special crust cutters). Most bakers, though, will find plenty worth putting in a pie shell.

Pastry Chef Bullock-Prado maintains a distinctive and humorous voice throughout her books; how readers will respond to that voice depends on their tolerance for writing that includes “bullpuckies,” “they stand alone on the yummy stage,” “succulent yumminess,” “gives you all the yummy,” (those last two yums appearing on facing pages). But the writing seems designed to put bakers at ease, while giving them many details, photos, and “notes from the sweetie pie” to help Bullock-Prado’s recipes produce what they promise.

She begins, of course, with pie’s foundation, offering standard pie and tart crust recipes, an unusual version with sweetened condensed milk for hand pies, classic and quick puff pastry, and strudel and pizza doughs. She follows those with a few master recipes for fillings and glazes, including basic pastry cream with multiple variations, including salted caramel, green tea, coconut, and pumpkin.

A clue to how the book will go comes with the first pie recipe, a berry galette. Galettes can be quite quick—roll out a disk of simple pie dough on a baking sheet, cover with fruit and a bit of sugar, fold in the edge of the dough, and bake. This version, though, calls for quick puff pastry and an interesting filling mix of rhubarb, cranberries, black raspberries, and strawberries. Although still freeform, Bullock-Prado suggests using a cake ring to hold everything in place. That’s the book in a nutshell: recipes with flavor twists and pretty presentations that, while not necessarily hard or time-consuming, are rarely as quick as they may first appear.

For example, two recipes later comes one for tart shells spread with a mascarpone filling and topped with mounds of coconut panna cotta, decorated with raspberries and lemon zest. The ingredient list looks pleasingly short, and no step takes much work—but added together, this isn’t a quick dessert. The rich result, though, provides a well-worth-it, thoughtful combination of cream and crunch, fruit and coconut.

Other recipes do offer quick rewards, such as a three-ingredient apricot tart, sugar cream pie, and cherry pie.

Many pies are both easy and special, if not quick, such as a chocolate tart crust topped with a simple caramel filling and dressed up with an edging of chocolate truffles. Similarly, a tart filled with chocolate pudding enriched with a bottle of chocolate stout provides a dinner party-worthy twist on a classic kids’ pie. A kid-safe version follows, still dressed up by filling a puff pastry shell with a lining of soft ganache topped with ganache-enriched pastry cream, whipped cream, and chocolate shavings.

Despite the photos on the book jacket, Pie It Forward mercifully doesn’t include a bevy of cutesy “pie pops” (tiny double-crust pies on lollipop sticks); it does provide one full-fledged recipe plus another page detailing possibilities and suggestions.

A few recipes take advantage of Bullock-Prado’s well-explained and illustrated strudel dough, such as a classic apple strudel, cheese strudel, and baklava. As with the rest of the book, there’s no suggestion here for shortcuts (such as purchased puff pastry for pies or phyllo for strudel).

Recipes for savory pastries and pizza follow the strudels; these seem overwrought and overthought, such as one that wrangles the classic low-country boil of sausage, corn, shrimp, and potatoes into a pie shell along with cheese and grits, or another that complicates the summer simplicity of fried-green tomatoes, forcing them into a crust made with tasso and cheese and spread with a barely recognizable “pimento cheese” of cheddar and jack cheese, cornichons, garlic, and sour cream.

Oddly, this recipe also ruins the tomatoes by having them fried first, then left to go cold and soggy at room temperature while the crust is prepared, baked for 45 minutes, cooled, and filled with the cheese spread. And her chicken potpies, though prepared with a classic filling, again complicate matters by requiring puff pastry on the bottom and biscuits on the top.

Pizzas seem somewhat out of place here, but the toppings mostly take Bullock-Prado back to her signature style of interesting but not overdone. For example, a takeoff of a “Vermonter” sandwich tops the crust with apple, bacon, cheddar, and a sprinkling of dried cranberries and a touch of maple syrup—wisely leaving out the turkey and aioli that she says are standard in the sandwich.

Some recipes could use a bit more attention to the details, such as recipes for pizza that call for the dough to be rolled out and placed on a peel before all the cooking of the toppings begins; bakers would be better served by instructions to roll out the dough after the cooking, to minimize its rising too much and sticking to the peel.

Bullock-Prado ends on a high—if intimidating—note, with four sort-of pie recipes for absolutely beautiful, beyond-Martha creations. The modestly named “strawberry love pie” layers puff pastry with strawberries and pastry cream, then wraps this cakelike pie in a sponge cake that has had messages of “love” and beautiful designs baked into the sponge with tuille batter. “Lemon blues” takes puff pastry rounds and tops them with a lemon curd-mascarpone filling, then uses white chocolate-coated transfer sheets to decorate the outside.

Intimidating but hardly impossible, these recipes put an exclamation mark on Pie It Forward’s case for the demise of cupcakes.

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

And for European-style round loaves, this wet-dough method does produce a flavorful loaf with a crisp crust and pleasantly holey interior. But it’s a one-trick dough; and while it’s great to keep some in the fridge for everyday loaves, once the breadbaking bug bites, bakers will still want to try out kneaded, drier doughs that allow more options in shaping and flavor.

The trick does work for pizza crusts, though, and with his second book, My Pizza, Lahey, owner of the New York pizza restaurant Co., explains his broiler method for creating a thin-crusted pie in a home oven.

By heating the oven, then running the broiler for 10 minutes before sliding the pizza onto a now-superheated stone, bakers can approximate the crisp underside and charred top of a restaurant pie. Pizzas cooked this way require a close eye to guard against burning, but the method works well.

And how does the dough work? Sometimes, just fine—but others, thoroughly frustrating. When it comes to instructions on shaping the dough, Lahey is a bit of a minimalist. He describes how to divide the dough into four portions and shape them into smooth balls, but doesn’t suggest letting them rest a bit after that, which could help the dough relax.

(Interestingly, Lahey does call for an hourlong rest in the version of his recipe he publishes in Bon Appetit magazine—a recipe that doubles the ingredients from the book, but divides the dough into bigger portions, then calls for them to be formed into the same size pizzas as those from the smaller dough balls in the book. Why the discrepancies?)

Lahey offers two methods for stretching the dough, one on a work surface and the other over your knuckles (no mention of spinning it, airborne, though the chapter opens with a photo of him doing just that). He emphasizes being gentle, allowing gas bubbles to stay inflated—so no rolling pin on this dough. But stretching the dough, using either method—and especially without a rest after shaping the balls—can lead to multiple rips and holes.

Lahey makes no mention of this possibility, much less what to do. Pinch it back together? Patch it with other dough? Set it aside to rest, because as soon as you patch one hole, another will likely appear? His relaxed attitude here needs a little balance—yes, tell cooks that it doesn’t matter whether they use bread flour or all-purpose, but no, don’t emphasize handling the dough gently and then fail to address the inevitable issues that follow.

But once cooks get a reasonably shaped, thin crust onto a pizza peel, they’ll find a variety of useful, interesting toppings. A simple, fresh tomato sauce can stand on its own, or take fresh mozzarella for a classic pizza. The author turns to arugula and corn for one pizza, zucchini, capers, and anchovies for another, and radicchio, olives, and caramelized onions for another. His pepperoni pie plays a little trick, because pepperoni here just means pureed red peppers, a base for homemade lamb sausage.

Other toppings sit on a creamy white (béchamel) sauce, made with a quick, flour-milk slurry. Toppings include a combination of bacon and caramelized onions; prosciutto and peas; sauerkraut, mustard, and German sausages; roasted cauliflower; and potato, leek, and Gruyere.

Another chapter offers pizzas with no sauce, including Lahey’s “popeye pie” with fresh spinach, artichoke with walnut puree, and squash with pumpkin seeds.

With that, the pizza recipes end, but the book continues, with chapters on “toasts, soups, and salads,” and desserts. Lahey suggests serving slices of toasted Italian bread topped with chicken liver puree, spiced cannellini beans, or broccoli rabe and homemade ricotta while waiting for pizzas to cook. He offers a gazpacho recipe made smoky by a roasted poblano pepper and bonito flakes, and salads including one with baby octopus.

Six dessert recipes include a basic gelato and variations, some gelato sundaes, an olive oil cake flavored with black olives and orange zest, and chocolate chip cookies baked fast at 500 degrees, to come out crisp-edged and soft inside. That interesting technique produces fairly ordinary cookies, but the recipe is quick, though it does require a close watch to guard against burning.

Those final chapters seem superfluous (and unexpected) in a work marketed solely as a pizza book, but they provide Co. fans with some recipes for their favorites in the restaurant. Because the pizza dough recipe and technique are now widely available online, cooks will appreciate the more unusual toppings and sides that make My Pizza: The Easy No-Knead Way to Make Spectacular Pizza at Home worth buying.

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

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.