Cookbooks of the Season

What with writing and testing and editing and photographing, it takes at least a year to publish a cookbook. If you are speedy.

That is why cookbooks are seldom about the food fad of the moment, but instead reflect the kinds of foods we really want to cook and eat. And this season that still means Mediterranean food, American food, low-calorie fruits and vegetables and high-calorie sweets.

“Cooking for All Seasons; Flavorful Cooking With Ingredients at Their Peak” (MacMillan: $24.95) is by Jimmy Schmidt, chef-owner of Detroit’s Rattlesnake Club and Tres Vite.

It is an oddly unapproachable book, with space given to charts of seasonal produce and gathered foods with recipes buried in the seasonal format. Readers have to look for chicken hash with artichokes in the spring section and squab with dried cranberries in the fall section. All very well for those who cook with only local fresh food, but beside the point for those of us who use whatever fresh food we can get and supplement it with frozen.

Basically, it is a restaurant chef’s book, with many dishes requiring hard-to-find ingredients and hard-to-do techniques. (I know I’ll never make duck-and-pheasant ravioli.) And Schmidt uses more butter and cream than many home cooks like. But the book is worth looking at, both for the ideas and for the occasional easy-to-make recipe that turns out to be magic, such as asparagus soup served with a nugget of melting pistachio butter.

To prepare for writing “The Farm Market Cookbook” (Doubleday: $25), Judith Olney visited farmers’ markets throughout the United States, collecting recipes from vendors, including many regional dishes worth preserving. Where else would you find barbecued lima beans from Amish country? Cracker pudding and egg cheese (a non-sweet custard) from the Pennsylvania Dutch? Or Tabasco cucumber salad and fried dough from Texas?

Photographer Lois Ellen Frank took a different trip for her book “Native American Cooking: Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations” (Potter: $27.50). Frank, who is part Kiowa, spent four years visiting reservations to learn traditional recipes. She took them to John Sedlar, chef of California’s St. Estephe restaurant, who adapted them to modern kitchens and modern palates.

Their photos of gloriously plated food are intimidating, but the cuisine is interesting as the forerunner of the popular Southwestern cooking. I’ll never make the prickly-pear ice or the cactus-pad salad, but I can make pumpkin-corn soup, garbanzo-beef stew or a savory bread pudding layered with mild Cheddar cheese.

The same corn and beans, squash and berries, modified by 200 years of European cooks, make the framework for “Miss Ruby’s Cornucopia: The Best Recipes From America’s Natural Harvest” by Ruth Adams Bronz (HarperCollins: $22.50).

Bronz does not claim her food is historically authentic. She says Indian pudding couldn’t have been an Indian dish because it’s made with molasses, which arrived with the English rum trade. Then she gives a very plain, but not too plain, recipe for Indian pudding and suggests topping it with caramelized apple slices. A lovely idea for those of us who find Indian pudding too austere to count as dessert.

Her pot roast with cranberries, inspired by Indian venison stews, contains a surprising half-pound of fat and two-thirds cup of sugar, an excess that may be just what makes it American. Regretfully, I turned the page and instead made grilled salmon with a nice cranberry and red-wine sauce.

“Cuisine Nicoise: Recipes From a Mediterranean Kitchen” by Jacques Medecin (Penguin: $8.95) is another rediscovered classic. Where but in France would a mayor and member of parliament write a cookbook? And such a good cookbook, too, on the food of Nice, where Medecin was mayor. This cuisine, far simpler than the rich food of Normandy and Burgundy, is what we now love, with its fish, vegetables and sun-ripened fruits. And while Americans may balk at recipes that call for rabbit with its blood and liver or for stockfish and stockfish guts, the book also has recipes for chicken stuffed with rice and figs, and pork chops cooked with baby artichokes and gherkins. The recipes are simply written in the British, or Elizabeth David, style, which takes for granted a certain amount of cooking experience.

It is a short culinary step from Nice to Providence, R.I., where Johanne Killeen and George Germon run Lucky’s and Al Forno restaurants. Their “Cucina Simpatica; Robust Trattoria Cooking” (HarperCollins: $25) is a mixture of Mediterranean and New England foods. Killeen and Germon dress a tomato-and-corn salad with oil and balsamic vinegar as though it were a Florentine bread salad. They make grilled polenta, but also corn fritters, turnip soup with apple puree and a bread pudding so pure it’s made only of country bread, cream, eggs and sugar.

Like Schmidt, Killeen and Germon often use more cream than we do at home, putting three-quarters of a cup of whipping heavy cream in a frittata, a lot even though it is designed to be cut into thin slivers for an antipasto plate. But the book has plenty of leaner recipes, and because of its emphasis on grilling, it’s a perfect choice for summer. Think of grilled squid salad, grilled onion salad with Parmesan cheese, grilled and braised osso buco and-their trademark--grilled pizza.

“Lean or Lavish” by Judith Pacht (Warner: $12.95) must have seemed a great idea. Why not print high-calorie and low-calorie versions of the same dish so the reader can choose between them? But come on--will you make the lavish version when the lean is sitting there accusing you? When you can see that, even though you know fish and squash are diet foods, the lavish version of fish and squash chowder has 418 calories and the lean has only 248? My guess is that readers will ignore the lavish recipes and turn to the excellent lean ones, such as the warm potato salad made with frozen yogurt and dill or the amazingly easy lean frozen yogurt.

Even though we are obsessed with calories, baking books keep appearing. In “Sweet Miniatures: The Art of Making Bite-Size Desserts” (Morrow: $25), Flo Braker again teaches us how to bake perfectly. This time her subject is tiny tarts and miniature cookies, inch-square florentines and macaroons the size of Ping-Pong balls, the elegant dots that come with coffee at expensive restaurants. I can’t imagine having the patience to fill tiny tarts or glaze petits fours, but anyone who does will find this book a superb guide.

I am more likely to reach for “Sweet Times: Simple Desserts for Every Occasion” by Dorie Greenspan (Morrow: $19.95). Simple, in this case, means homey scones, cranberry upside down cake, peanut butter and oatmeal cookies. And you can’t get much simpler than Greenspan’s 15-minute chocolate torte, a thin, fudgy cake made by mixing microwave-melted chocolate with processor-pulverized almonds and macaroons.

I love “Leftovers” by Kathy Gunst (HarperCollins: $12.95). Not only are the 50 basic recipes good, the leftover recipes are easy, casual, just what I want to cook and eat. Who wouldn’t want gingered fried rice and peanuts made with leftover poultry? Fried spaghetti omelet made with leftover pasta? Pate made with leftover smoked fish? And she’s terrific on what to do with the food you take home from a Chinese restaurant. Forget the microwave. Instead, take home all the rice you’re entitled to, fry it in a wok and add all the other dishes for a splendid fried rice.