Born to Eat Their Words

By Michael Demarest

Some of the best cookbook authors discover regional tastes

More than 300 years ago, Racine wrote I that a province of southern France could support 20 caterers, while a bookseller would starve to death. Today the ratio is probably reversed, if only because, grace `a dieu, cookbooks have largely replaced caterers. More than a gastronomic manual or a compilation of recipes, a well-made cookbook blends strands of history, geography and philosophy with dollops of legend and even a dash of the unsavory. This is particularly true of regional cookbooks, which have come into their own in recent years as increasingly sophisticated home chefs look beyond the standardized, urbanized formulas that hold stolid sway over many restaurant menus.

For intelligence, authority and charm, few cookbooks can match Anne Willan's French Regional Cooking (Morrow; $29.95). The English-born, Americanized cuisiniere has won international fame with her writing and her La Varenne cooking school in Paris. With four colleagues the author traveled more than 6,000 miles and spent a year choosing and testing the 400 recipes in the book. Their salivant safari takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the Alps, from the sands of St.-Malo to the beaches of Nice, with hardly a dull plat en route. Willan succeeds admirably in analyzing the tastes, products, humors and quirks of each region. She proffers such delicate provincial dishes as dandelion salad, poularde en demi-deuil and sole with stuffed artichoke bottoms (preferably using the slippery little fish known in Bordeaux as "lawyers' tongues"), as well as such robust peasant offerings as potato pie, braised partridge with lentils, and stufatu, a Corsican beef stew with macaroni.

The author is as handy with richesses like sweet-sour duck with cherries as she is with simplicities like fruit flans and potato gnocchi (which originated in Provence, not Italy). Her anthology of country stews--meat, fish and game--is thorough, as is her catalogue raisonne of cheeses. Some of the most luscious of all regional dishes are sweet: the fruity pound cake of the Loire, the tangy tartlets of Rouen and the fritters from the Alps known as pets de nonne (the name suggests they are gaseous). Willan also serves up historical tidbits. For example: Proust's madeleines came from Commercy in Lorraine; the word restaurant originated in Paris more than 200 years ago, when an innkeeper started offering bowls of bouillon known as restauratifs, and chowder is derived from chaudiere, a cauldron in which fishermen pooled their catch.

The Yankee Magazine Cookbook (Harper & Row; $15.95) also discusses the origins of chowder, while adding that the tomatoey Manhattan version of the soup is an apostasy to be denounced from every down East pulpit. A charitable explanation is that Maine chowder is made from "an elongated bivalve," while the New York pretender uses inferior quahogs, "and no State of Mainer in his right mind eats them." If he had to make a chowder out of quahogs, Yankee affirms, a Mainer would put tomatoes in it too, "and garlic and beach plums and chestnuts and about anything else he could think of to improve it." At any rate, the chowders served up by the Yankee cookbook are about as authentic as they can get.

Less familiar dishes from the region include strawberry soup, salt pork cake, snow cake (made with new-fallen snow), Around Cape Horn brown Betty, pup flup (hasty pudding) and a variety of toothsome slumps, grunts, pandowdys, Bettys and buckles, as people in those parts like to call their fruit desserts. More substantive dishes run to Christmas chicken baked under a Yorkshire pudding "roof," spiced roast duck, cashew-stuffed red snapper and Henry Melix's Wampanoag clam pie, an authentic Indian dish.

A lot of Yankee specialties sound funny to "furrin" ears, but the names are seasoned with good sense. Anadama bread, for example, is a delicious loaf invented by a man who tired of the invariable corn-meal-and-molasses porridge served by his wife for supper; he added flour, eggs and yeast to the mixture, popped it into the oven and made bread of it, exclaiming

"Anna, damn her!" as he munched. As solidly rewarding as they sound are such confections as Aunt Mary's apple pepper relish, election cake (a cross between Italian panettone and Russian koulitch), Vermont chocolate potato cake, planked shad with roe sauce, glazed parsnips `a l'orange, hardscrabble oatmeal pancakes with molasses sauce and Cape Cod fish pie. To a Vermonter, a Yankee is anyone who eats pie for breakfast. The Yankee cookbook could make this habit catching.

Some people in Pennsylvania Dutch country also are known to have pastry crumbs on their faces come juice-and-coffee time. We have this on the authority of Betty Graff's Country Goodness Cookbook (Doubleday; $ 17.95), a handsome compendium of down-to-earth delectations from Lancaster County, Pa., and other rustic parts. In the understatement of the culinary year, Groff declares: "People not familiar with the Pennsylvania Dutch way of life may feel we have a preoccupation with food." That is correct, she says. Lancaster County boasts some of the world's most prosperous farms, their products preserve "a way of life that has vanished in many parts of America." The Grofffamily's farm restaurant is a magnet for visitors who come from all over to sample Mennonite fare at its best, if not its strictest (Mennonite Betty Groff permits herself to use wine and liqueurs in her cooking).

Betty and her husband Abe are both descended from the oldest German-Swiss families to settle in Pennsylvania's rolling hills. Most of the recipes came with the Mennonites; the imports include adaptations of Teutonica such as Hasenpfeffer (rabbit stew), Schnitz und Knepp (apples and dumplings), hot potato salad and the thin, tender pancakes called Pflatzlings. Dishes like the celebrated shoofly pie, sauerkraut cake, Amish vanilla pie and the ambitiously named peanut butter incredibles probably evolved in situ. Some of the Groffs' specialties, notably stuffed doves' breasts baked in clay and lamb crown roast with creme de menthe, are considerably more sophisticated than most farm fare. Many refinements have been introduced by the Groffs' son Charlie, who attended New York's rigorous and internationally respected Culinary Institute of America. There is no danger, however, that Pennsylvania Dutch cooking is about to be Frenchified.

The savory pie, in all its manifestations, is one of the mainstays of country cooking; it does not often land on three-star-restaurant menus. Yet in all its rural and urbanized forms, ranging from quiche to pasty and pitta to pizza, it can be a one-dish meal for all seasons, with all seasonings. Anna Teresa Callen, an Italian-born cookery writer and teacher who raises her dough in Manhattan, has the pie squared. In The Wonderful World of Pizzas, Quiches and Savory Pies (Crown; $14.95), she leads a cook's tour of pastry, piquant fillings and their origins. Some of her recipes inevitably show up in other books, but usually in different forms. Callen's version of pounti, the prune-and-ham pie from France's Auvergne, for example, differs in important respects from Anne Willan's formulation, and both are worth trying. The pie crust, filled and adorned to suit the native palate, is almost universal. The pissaladiere of southern France and Switzerland's zwiebelwaehe are sisters under the skin to the Italian pizza--of which, Callen notes, there are many more than 100 variations. Russia has its kulebiaka, Morocco the b 'stilla, Egypt its iflagun, Greece the succulent spanakopitta, and Hungary kaposztas pogacsa.

Some of the dishes captured by Callen are famous but hard to find outside of country cottages and inns. And they can be quite elegant. Torta Pasqualina, the Italian Easter pie from Liguria, is made with 33 layers of dough to symbolize Christ's age at his death. And there is Beautiful Aurora's Pillow, a pastry puffed up by the immortal Brillat-Savarin that combines pheasant, veal, pork, foie gras, Cognac and truffles, which might be accompanied by pinaattiohukaiset, a Finnish spinach pancake that is far easier to eat than pronounce.

In Britain, too, the gourmet must be willing to travel. Great British Cooking: A Well-Kept Secret (Random House; $15.50) somewhat exaggerates the paucity of three-star menus in the scept'red isle. It is no longer quite true, as the old saw had it, that the English have only three vegetables, two of them cabbage. However, English-born Jane Garmey roams far and wide to bag the better culinary hand-me-downs. Though a number of great Continental chefs left their imprint on upper-class English fare--Careme, Escoffier, Francatelli and Soyer all lived for years in London--the good things today come almost entirely from peasantry and province. A well-made Lancashire hot pot, a deep casserole of lamb chops and kidneys, ranks with a French pot-au-feu. Even shepherd's pie, particularly in Garmey's jazzed-up version, can be a treat. Indeed, a number of traditional dishes are in danger of becoming fashionable. Among them: lemony Sussex Pond pudding; Hindle Wakes, a prune-flavored cold poached chicken dish; Welsh onion cake and cockie leekie (chicken-leek) soup; chicken stovies, a succulent Scottish stew; syllabub, the English answer to zabaglione.

Despite the familiar French gibe that Britain is a country with 60 religions and only two sauces, Garmey names several that are unique and pleasant. One of them, made of meat stock, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce and mustard, is called, appropriately, Wow-Wow.

The New James Beard (Knopf; $16.95) was originally conceived as a second updated edition of his 1959 classic The James Beard Cookbook. As he set to work, however, the 78-year-old master chef had second thoughts: "Something had been quietly happening: a shift straight across the whole spectrum of my cookery, all the way from menu making right down to how I now wrote recipes. The new me had to write a new book, from scratch." To some extent the new Beard has been influenced by provincial cooking, especially by Latin American and Far Eastern flavors, though many regional American dishes are included. "What I want to stress," he explains, "is a new flexible approach to ingredients, to the way we put them together, and the way we plan a meal." His new motto is "Why Not?"

True to his words, Beard formulates six varieties of daube, the wine-rich stew of Provence; French seafood sausages; a roast chicken using 40 cloves of garlic; duck, bean and foie gras salad; fresh sardines with mint; brioches with marrow and truffles; and many other dishes that reflect the nouvelle cuisine's concern with natural flavors and unexpected contrasts. Among the little-known local American dishes he includes are solianka, a fish stew introduced to the Pacific Northwest by Russian immigrants; batter-dipped fiddlehead ferns; shrimp Kiev; pepper slaw; Vanessi special, a hearty frittata named for the celebrated San Francisco restaurant.

Beard's book comes at a good time.

As the author observes, "The culinary world was never livelier than now, restaurants were never more experimental, and great cooks were never more appreciated." Salud! --By Michael Demarest

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