New Menus for All Seasonings

By Michael Demarest

Volumes for cooks without time to shop and chop

If music be the food of love, cookbooks are the love of food. At their frequent best, the cook's companions are a fine if rarefied form of literature.

The harmonious balancing of a menu is perhaps more important to Italian cuisine than to any other this side of China. This can be a twice-a-day exercise, since most Italians still favor the three-course midday repast. Italian Cooking in the Grand Tradition (Dial; $24.95), by Jo Bettoja and Anna Maria Cornetto, addresses itself primarily to seasonal family meals and honors the year's special occasions. The two fare ladies, Bettoja from Millen, Ga., and Cornetto from Rome, are former models who run a celebrated Roman cooking school called Lo Scaldavivande (the covered dish). Jo married into an old Roman family, Cornetto comes from one, and together they have scoured the regions and wrung the memories of old retainers for recipes that have rarely seen print.

The menus, both aristocratic and earthy, exude all the warmth and good humor of la cucina Italiana at its best. For the primo piatto, traditionally pasta or a rice dish or soup, recipes go from the outrageously calorific, like a macaroni concoction with both cream and meat sauces, to simple ricotta croquettes (the ricotta in Rome is made from sheep's milk). To shock the neighbors, there is a fashion able pasta with vodka and red-pepper flakes.

For the second course, Grand Tradition runs naturally to veal. Most notable are a classic Sicilian stuffed breast and a roast, vitello tartufato, with truffle sauce, and damn the expense. Holiday favorites include Christmas turkey, which the Italians devoured long before the Pilgrims, and is served here with hot fruits; and milk-fed baby lamb, traditionally tendered at Easter, accompanied by egg and lemon sauce. A savory pork roast in pizza dough was invented by Bettoja's husband Angelo, who also prescribed the wines throughout. There are surprisingly few game dishes, but Angelo did contribute a rustic pheasant pate. Desserts include a chocolate and amaretti pie from Parma and one lavish sweet, Sicilian cassata: lemon cake lopped with a heady mixture of rum, chocolate and ricotta. The baking of this elaborately decorated cassata is so distracting a labor that in 1575 the Roman Catholic Church forbade nuns to make it during Holy Week.

American cooks, with even less time for complex dishes than Sicilian nuns, are fast learning the value of whole menus that can be cooked in advance. Ready When You Are (Crown; $15.95), by Elizabeth Schneider Colchie, consists entirely of what its author felicitously calls fetes accomplies. Her book presents dishes that need "no last-minute fussing. Turning on the oven and setting a tinier, heating a soup, tossing a salad are tolerable tasks." Laboring over a hot stove in party finery is out. New Yorker Colchie arranges her 32 menus by seasons but appends a number of ad hoc niceties like a Sensuous Birthday Dinner, the Last Outdoor Supper and a Valentine Weekend for Two, including love feast buns and amuse-bouche (tease the mouth) canapes.

Despite such cute headings, there is nothing frivolous about Colchie's approach to food. Her winter menus include such bracing soups as Scottish cockaleekie and a potage of winter vegetables with ham, chestnuts and dried mushrooms. Notable main dishes: a Mexican turkey in chile-nut sauce with cornbread crust, a leg of lamb divided into components for three main dishes (butterflied leg, pastitsio, with macaroni and cheese custard, and a thick curried soup with lima beans), and veal sweetbreads in a sauce thickened with pureed chestnuts. For a Traditional Thanksgiving--Updated, she suggests smoked turkey, which needs no cooking and can be ordered by mail, and oysters with the original (1889) piquant sauce served at Delmonico's. No slouch at desserts, Colchie dangles blackberry frozen mousse and a rumbustious, Scots-descended black cake with almond paste topping.

The Foods & Wines of Spain (Knopf; $17.95), by Penelope Casas, is the first comprehensive English-language volume on Spanish cooking, a cuisine that is totally unrelated to the hot, spicy fare of Latin

America. The author boasts impeccable credentials: magna cum laude degree in Spanish literature from Vassar, marriage to a Spaniard, and miles of travel (35,000) to garner regional dishes, many of them unknown even in Madrid. As Casas points out, Spain has no national cuisine, which may explain why its cooking is so miserably interpreted abroad. Paella, for example, as served in the U.S., bears only the faintest resemblance to the real stuff. The original Valencian paella, made with saffroned short-grained rice, does not use sea food at all; it is composed of snails and rabbit or chicken.

Actually, according to Casas, "if a Spaniard were exiled to a far-off island and allowed only one food, I have little doubt that he would choose eggs. Nothing is more basic to Spanish cuisine." Indeed, a covering of beaten egg forms a crust on one paella variation; eggs are used in tapas, sweets, breads and soups, including gazpacho; and, of course, in tortillas, or omelets, which are "a way of life in Spain" and totally unrelated to the Mexican dish of that name save for a common Latin root (torta, meaning a round cake).

Casas offers some 60 varieties of tapas--the unique, hard-to-pass-up Iberian appetizers--many of the great spicy soups, including an orange-flavored Cadiz-style fish broth, and a variety of glorious Spanish sausages. The book's most interesting dishes revolve around the fish and shellfish of Spain, which has Europe's longest coastline and some of its richest fishing grounds. No other cuisine can draw on so large a variety of shrimp, from the minute quisquillas to fat prawns (shrimp are never deveined in Spain). These and other shellfish are often served with the great garlic almond-and-peppers romesco sauce of Tarragona or sauteed quite simply with garlic and onions. Their briny neighbors, squid and octopus, show up in delicacies like stuffed calamares rellenos and the habit-forming dish called black rice. A boon for the cook-in-advance are the regional soups and meals-in-a-pot (sopas y potajes), among them the famous caldoga-llego, a soup of beef, greens and beans from Galicia, and

Menorca-style lobster stew-soup with tomatoes and green peppers. Casas includes a useful section on Spanish wines, which, though insufficiently well known to the rest of the world, have been enthusiastically embraced by Americans in recent years. Some, most notably the Rioja Reservas, can take their place with the world's choicest.

In Casas' wild-game section, the accent is on wild: partridge in a chocolate-flavored sauce ("it will not taste like a Hershey bar," the author assures) and rabbit with almonds and pine nuts. Next to its architecture, Spain's desserts remain the principal testimony to the country's 400-year occupation by the Moors. As they are in North Africa, almonds, egg yolks and honey are the major ingredients of most sweets; regional specialties, however, feature a delicious 16th century cheesecake, rich custards like tocino del cielo (literally, fat from heaven) and some memorable fruit flans, including a luscious apple tart with custard and apple-jelly topping. Que aproveche! Good eating!

Maida Heatter's New Book of Great Desserts (Knopf; $17.50) has two equally good apple tarts: one, with an apricot glaze, might belong on the Thanksgiving or Christmas table. The book's most celebrated item will undoubtedly be her French chocolate loaf cake, the result of "a lifelong search" for the recipe for a particular gateau sold at a French pastry shop in New York City.

Heatter's re-creation of this chocoholic's dream may not be "the ultimate chocolate cake," as claimed by her publisher, but the moist, dense, candy-like confection has one virtue: it is too rich to be addictive. The same could be said of Pearl's Southampton fruit cake, in which eleven varieties of fruit must be allowed to marinate for at least a week in cognac and Grand Marnier.

But there is good news for the calorie-conscious. For them, Heatter proposes a fruit survival cake and a whole-wheat yogurt date-nut gingerbread from Central Europe. One minor coup is the secret of the nut crescents for which the Austrian embassy in Washington, D.C., is renowned. Other fairly easy to make entries include Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' chocolate cookies, chocolate pepper pretzels, Joe froggers cookies (named for the inhabitants of a Marblehead, Mass., frog pond) and an inviting array of souffles and mousses, notably a sour lime mousse with strawberries. Frozen desserts vary from San Francisco ice-cream pie to a delectable grapefruit ice. As for the confection she labels "the Best Damn Lemon Cake" . . . it may just be that.

For the best lemon tart, cognoscenti should head for Jane Grigson 's Fruit Book (Atheneum; $19.95). Here are disquisitions on 46 different fruits, with recipes for virtually every single one, from apples, the world's first fruit, to watermelon, one of the last to arrive in the author's native England.

Many of Grigson's recipes are offbeat, like grouse with wild raspberries (both tend to inhabit the same territory), Russian beef braised with quince and, from Araby, lamb and apricot polo. But most are eminently practical: Austrian fruit dumplings, French strawberry fritters, red quince compote, lime-spice Senega lese yassa of chicken or lamb, Hungarian cherry soup. Cooking with fruit, in the au thor's view, is an attempt at "recovering the original flavor of Eden." Her alluring book might have been written by Eve.

Both for literary and culinary satisfaction, one of the most rewarding volumes in years is Jean Anderson Cooks (Morrow; $19.95). Even the advice on shopping, storage and cooking techniques is larded with wisdom. The recipes are culled and adapted from dishes the author has sam pled the world over in 25 years as a food editor and writer (her nine previous cook books include The Doubleday Cookbook).

Jean Anderson Cooks has sensible comments on just about everything gastronomic, from the "classic causes of failures in cakes and breads" to the low-calorie, high-protein virtues of chicken, "a nutritional heavyweight," and selections of vegetables ("truly fresh artichokes squeak when you squeeze them"), with formulations for such neglected worthies as Swiss chard, okra, parsnips and Brussels sprouts.

Scottish by descent, Anderson obliges her thrifty instincts with formulas for sprucing up shanks of lamb, beef and veal. But she goes easy on the parsimony. An Anderson menu might start with snail soup from the Black Forest or a corn-and-scallion chowder with salt pork, proceed to Sicilian swordfish croquettes with sultanas and pine nuts, and continue with Canadian beef-and-beer pie or ajiaco, the incomparable stew from Colombia made with chicken, avocado, capers and at least four different kinds of potato.

Jean Anderson is particularly deft with desserts. Take pepparkaka, the Swedish spice cake, or Grenadian fresh nutmeg ice cream, or chocolate-raspberry torte made (with three kinds of chocolate) by Fauchon's regal patisserie on Paris' Place Madeleine. One bite of this would have a Weight Watcher condemned to a bread-and-water menu.

Chef Anderson, and all her cookbook colleagues, could probably make even that taste good.

--By Michael Demurest

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