I Cook, Therefore I Am

By Mimi Sheraton

When home economists ran the kitchen, recipes read like laboratory reports, and human voices could rarely be discerned above the instructions for tsp. and tbsp. But that was a generation ago. Today cooking has become a prime medium for self-expression, television has made superstars of once anonymous chefs, and the voices of food writers resound through their works.

Betty Fussell's I Hear America Cooking (Viking; $24.95), for example, carries the sonorous subtitle "A Journey of Discovery from Alaska to Florida -- the Cooks, the Recipes, and the Unique Flavors of Our National Cuisine." The problem is, her self-imposed "time frame" forces her to bypass the major immigrant groups of the late 19th and 20th centuries, among them Italians, Portuguese, Irish, Poles, Hungarians and Russians. What she really hears is a part of America cooking, and that is less than the title promises. And she goes on at great length with quotes from too many old American cookbooks, long in the public domain and too well known to bear repeating.

Fussell's strength is her energy. On her cross-country trek the author covers scores of local cuisines and the locals who make them: "In Greensboro they were talking rice and gravy but I didn't know it because in the Carolinas nobody calls rice 'rice.' Down in Charleston they call it 'perlew' and up in Greensboro they call it 'pie-low' and cook books spell it 'pilau,' to mean 'rice pilaf.' " In Wisconsin, she finds that orange whitefish roe is dyed black and processed into caviar primarily for the Japanese market. She gives us a glimpse of Indian salmon ceremonies in the Northwest that include a song beginning "Thank you Swimmer, you Supernatural One, that you have come to save our lives."

Back at the stove, Fussell provides wise and workable recipes for items as various as cornfield peas and coconut rice, Owendaw hominy bread, chocolate crunch cookies and sweet and sour Christmas fish. And she provides enough lore to divert the amateur; if history is your dish, this is your book.

Jane and Michael Stern, young, humorous and well-educated Easterners, have become the self-styled clowns of American cooking. Where other critics travel haute, they take the low road to diners, cafeterias, luncheonettes and truck stops. Their first cookbook, Square Meals, was a paean to the Dark Ages of American cooking. The authors took culinary pratfalls advocating recipes for molded salads, casseroles based on canned soups and tuna fish, etc. Their new offering, Real American Food (Knopf; $19.95), is another, far more appetizing collection of recipes gathered from assorted low-down eateries. They include few recipes from fancy restaurants because they did not want the book to be a "duded-up fantasy of American cookery." Typical are such humble classics as the original Chicago deep-dish pizza, Buffalo chicken wings and the soothing and improbable scramble of spinach, eggs and beef from New Joe's bar and grill in San Francisco.

. For loyal readers who suspect the Sterns of going straight, a few pie-in- the-face recipes are thrown in, including seafoam lime Jell-O mold with marshmallows and Mary Bobo's carrot casserole, a concoction made with Ritz crackers and melted cheese. It should be noted that the Sterns and Fussell give quite different recipes for New Orleans red beans and rice, yet both are credited to Buster Holmes, operator of the famous French Quarter greasy spoon. Quite possibly the old master cook never makes that dish the same way twice, which is why there probably cannot be, as the Sterns suggest, a last word on the subject.

Duded-Up Fantasy American Cookery could have been the title of the book by Jeremiah Tower, the over-celebrated chef and co-owner of both the Santa Fe Bar and Grill in Berkeley and Stars in San Francisco. But with no false modesty, he chose to call it New American Classics (Harper & Row; $25). Translation: the bizarre California-style dishes Tower created for his trendy restaurants. There is a windy self-congratulatory text, a double-page spread reproducing the author's signature and some superfluous vista photographs a la Falcon Crest. Inevitably, there are many of the California cliches -- hot goat cheese, cold pasta and dangerously raw salmon. Nevertheless, this erratic chef has a talent for simple dishes, among them lobster gazpacho, warm duck salad with turnip pancake, chopped lamb steak au poivre, T-bone steak cowboy style, a luscious warm vegetable stew and a fragrant polenta pound cake with Madeira cream.

Modesty -- in short supply this year -- is the enticing ingredient of three new cookbooks. The authors have all received wide recognition as cooking teachers, and their recipes are both delicious and reliable. Marcella's Italian Kitchen (Knopf; $22.95) is the third book by the redoubtable Marcella Hazan, a no-nonsense instructor who has conducted classes in New York City, Bologna and now in Venice. As before, she advocates the one right way to do a particular task or dish, usually with her old reliable utensils. "If I had to choose, I would sooner give up my food processor, because what the food mill does, no processor or blender can." But she relents, giving instructions for both hand and machine methods on many tasks.

The author always manages to find delectable Italian dishes and variations that seem new, and she can still entice the most indifferent reader to the kitchen. There, in the tradition of Julia Child and other thoughtful instructors, she will instruct how much of a dish can be made in advance, a great boon to anyone entertaining dinner guests. Among the many excellent recipes, a few that were irresistible in the testing were a risotto with squid, shrimp and clams, and a rosemary-and-sage-scented shoulder of veal, encrusted with bread crumbs and Parmesan after being braised. Pears simmered in red wine and accented with bay leaves proved to be the properly restorative dessert, and a scoop of Hazan's lemon ice cream added to the pear did no harm at all.

The diversity of Chinese cookery has always been an astonishment, especially for its virtually limitless variations on noodles, dumplings and breads. Those stimulating creations are the subject of Florence Lin's Complete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings and Breads (Morrow; $19.95). Lin has taught cooking at the China Institute in America in New York City for years, and her patience with students mastering the intricate hand operation of Chinese cooking is evident throughout. There is meticulous information on ingredients and techniques -- buying the correct flours, handling rolling pins and cutters and sealing edges so that dumplings do not steam apart. Cold noodle salad with sesame, peanut butter and chili sauce is a lovely accompaniment to barbecued meats and perfect on an outdoor buffet. The fried Beijing-style dumplings guo tie would be just right with a steaming borscht and a nice change from piroshki. Small fried won tons are a refreshingly different finger food, and the gently sweet miniature split-pea cakes favored by the Empress Dowager Ci Xi would be welcome with ice cream and after-dinner coffee.

John Clancy is not only a teacher and a chef with his own restaurant, he is also a born explainer. He has an extremely catholic taste, an attribute immediately apparent in John Clancy's Favorite Recipes -- A Personal Cookbook (Atheneum; $21.95). In a book well suited to the relatively inexperienced cook, he includes such simple, solid fare as hamburgers, braised shoulder of lamb, German vegetable beef soup and French crullers. He gives meat loaf some style by way of jalapeno peppers, tenderizes and flavors broiled duck with a ginger-and-wine-vinegar marinade and imparts a herbaceous Provence fragrance to the lowly blowfish. Clams in black bean sauce, beef stew in a pumpkin, and mousse of sea scallops are among the showier offerings. Seafood cookery and baking are his specialties; the first is the feature of his own restaurant in ^ Greenwich Village, and the second is the way he originally earned his high reputation.

Anne Rosenzweig, the inventive and talented chef who is part owner of the Manhattan restaurant Arcadia, is shy and diffident in the dining room, but given the consistent excellence of her food, she must have an iron will in the kitchen. The new American dishes served at her small and sophisticated restaurant are at once surprising yet comfortably familiar in taste. Now she and the artist Paul Davis, who painted the impressionistic seasonal mural that wraps around the walls of the restaurant, have put together a tiny, precise and endearing conceit: The Arcadia Seasonal Mural and Cookbook (Abrams; $14.95). This may be the gift cookbook of the year -- 28 pages opening out in a gatefold reproduction of the glowing Davis mural. Under the panels for each season are a few of Rosenzweig's most popular dishes for that time of year. Among her best: corn cakes with creme fraiche and caviars, chimney-smoked lobster, roast quail with savoy cabbage and kasha, wild mushroom tarts and such knockout desserts as macadamia nut tarts, lemon curd mousse and chocolate bread pudding. It would be a pity to cook by this book, thereby soiling pages with dabs of butter and egg yolk. Better photocopy recipes and keep the book on the coffee table, where it belongs.

Totally self-effacing in the interests of her material, Elizabeth Schneider has written what may be the timeliest and most truly helpful book of the year. Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables (Harper & Row; $25) covers in detail all the exotic fruits and vegetables now appearing in produce departments across the country. In words and pictures she tells readers how to identify, buy, store, clean and prepare jicama, atemoya, daikon, nopales and calabaza, among dozens of others. Although some of the fruits and vegetables in this compendium are hardly uncommon to old-world chefs (celeriac, parsley root, arugula, broccoli rab and gooseberries, for example), they can be flora incognito to many new chefs. Not after this.

Near-amateur enthusiasts can provide valuable books on aspects of food dearest to their hearts and palates. Two cases in point: Linda Merinoff's The Glorious Noodle -- A Culinary Tour Around the World (Poseidon; $16.95) and Margaret Leibenstein's The Edible Mushroom -- A Gourmet Cook's Guide (Fawcett Columbine; $14.95). Merinoff, a journalist and caterer, is obviously beguiled by all things pasta -- Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Israeli, African, Alsatian or Asian. Her work brims with tempting dumplings, noodles in mild and spicy sauces, one-dish soups and stews bolstered with some form of wheat-, bean- or rice-flour noodles. Lore is easygoing, and recipes are explicit.

With so many strange new mushrooms popping up on produce counters, the Leibenstein book is a welcome little treatise. It covers buying, storing, cleaning and cooking all types of edible fungi from boletes to shiitakes, and the recipes range from appetizers through main courses. Most welcome of all is her promise that the book will not send readers scurrying to forests in search of wild mushrooms. The farthest destination is their local vegetable store, where the only thing paralyzing will be the prices.

Obviously personality has become a major ingredient of contemporary cuisine. These ten cookbooks prove how piquant that ingredient can be.