Sharing Gifts of Food for Christmas, by the Book : 1988’s Holiday Volumes Address Topics From Cookies to Environmental Toxins

Larousse Gastronomique, edited by Jenifer Harvey Lang (Crown: $50, 1,193 pp., illustrated)

This is the new American edition of the 50-year-old French dictionary that is a must for anyone seriously interested in food. Cookery has undergone dramatic changes since 1961, when Crown published the first American edition, and these are reflected in the new book. Now you can read definitions of sashimi, nuoc-mam (Vietnamese fish sauce), tandoori cooking, tortillas, tacos and even the banana split. The wording in some cases is quaint and the definitions limited and arbitrary. A taco, for instance, is “a cornmeal pancake . . . filled with a thick sauce, or minced (ground) meat seasoned with chile pepper, or black beans, or avocado puree with onion.” That sounds like a definition written for Great Britain, not the United States.

Similarly, the tandoori entry focuses on chicken, ignoring the lamb or mutton that is basic meat in India, and gets the cooking method mixed up (tandoori foods go into the oven on skewers, they don’t sit “on a bed of embers”). The entry acknowledges that fish and galettes can also be cooked in the tandoor. Americans would not refer to tandoori breads as galettes, and the word sounds pompous. A long passage on Nouvelle Cuisine goes beyond explanation to opinion: “Sadly, it is only too easy for the exquisite to become ridiculous,” and “Good cooking must always benefit from the old recipes and the precepts of classic cuisine.”

One improvement is a change in format that sets off the recipes. The former edition incorporated 8,500 recipes. This one has reduced the number to 4,000.