BOOK REVIEW : In Praise of Common Foods : Chicken Dinners, <i> By Lorraine Bodger (Harmony Books: $19; 166 pp.)</i> : A Passion for Potatoes, <i> By Lydie Marshall (HarperCollins: $13; 248 pp.)</i>

He looked at me suspiciously, his knife and fork poised over a crimson slab of rare prime rib.

“I don’t trust anybody,” he snarled, carnivorously, “who doesn’t eat meat.”

Such old-fashioned hostility. Anyone who can count cholesterol or multiply grams of fat knows that red meat belongs to that pantheon of things we used to love until we found out they weren’t supposed to be good for us, along with larded refried beans and premium ice cream. It isn’t even good for the planet, as it turns out, since environmentalists swear we could save the rain forests simply by turning away from the consumption of grazing animals.

Chicken, in contrast, is cool: Low in fat and cholesterol, if you can forgo that deliciously crisp skin, and so far innocent of any ecological crimes. The only question is what to do with it, since chicken, unlike its healthful mates, fish and seafood, comes in only one flavor. The easy, all-American answer used to be to deep-fry the bird, since almost anything tastes great when it’s wearing a crunchy half-inch cloak of seasoned breading. But that won’t do any more. Even the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain has started using the initials KFC in its advertising and on its new signs, rather than spell out the dreaded “F” word.

Lorraine Bodger has the answer--24 of them, in fact, in the form of complete seasonal menus designed around chicken entrees. Bodger is one of those take-care-of-business cooks, the kind who leaves nothing, neither the appetizers nor the after-dinner drinks, to chance, and she understands that there is no point in teaching readers how to make Middle Eastern yogurt-baked chicken legs in a vacuum. We need the proper companion dishes, which she provides along with mix-and-match suggestions.

With just a little bit of planning (unless you’re the type who normally stocks a global pantry), the home cook can turn those biweekly chicken dinners into a gustatory travelogue--Italy one night, China the next. These are not wildly complicated recipes: What magic there is comes from tasty combinations of ingredients, not from sophisticated technique.

Simple skillet chicken with lemon and thyme is classic Bodger. It requires only one pan, into which the chicken can be put to brown while you assemble an assortment of mixed dried fruits, some lemon slices and juice, and powdered thyme, which then get tossed into the skillet with the chicken. It cooks itself into one fragrant mass--sweet, tart and woodsy all at once--in about a half-hour, at which point you drape the lemon slices around the platter (to dress up the presentation) and eat. (Jewish cooks will undoubtedly recall Passover tzimmes , a more robust version of this dish made with brisket, dried fruits and carrots, but chicken always goes well with a small side of self-sacrifice.)

Bodger’s recipe for chicken legs in foil is so easy it’s embarrassing, since it is based, essentially, on two big sheets of foil and two hours of benign neglect. I tossed it in the oven one morning when working mother’s guilt got in the way of yet another Pollo Loco lunch, and the results were as remarkably tender as Bodger promised--even if the steam-roasted skin was a little too gummy to be enticing.

If the cold chicken with spicy sesame noodles takes a bit longer to assemble, it has an advantage for the weekend cook. The sauce keeps nicely for a day; for that matter, the chicken breasts can be poached on Sunday and then shredded and served with the sauce and noodles on a harried Monday.

The recipes are as enticing to the working cook as they are to the fowl fancier. If there is a criticism to be made of Bodger’s efforts, it is only that she tries harder than necessary to make the chicken everybody’s pal. The sauce for the cold chicken turns out to be sweeter and oilier than it need be, as though she feared people would not try the dish without the familiar compensation of sugar and fat. On a second try, I halved the amounts of vegetable oil and sugar that were called for and got what seemed, to me, to be a more flavorful sauce.

Single-food specialty cookbooks are, of course, a contrivance, since anyone who owns a half-dozen general cookbooks has access to at least 24 chicken recipes, many of which (such as Marcella Hazan’s Italian recipes) offer detailed suggestions about what to serve alongside the bird. What Bodger offers is efficient one-stop shopping--and no risk, for the faint of heart, of stumbling across a mouth-watering bollito misto along the way.

Potatoes have been trying to re-establish themselves as good-for-you food after too many years of being associated with sour cream, butter, bacon bits and other nutritional lowlifes, so it would seem that a potatoes-only cookbook would be all the rage. But Lydie Marshall, author of “A Passion for Potatoes,” is a Frenchwoman, and she tempts us with the anti-spud, a seductive tuber swathed in enough cream and butter to make a cardiologist tremble with delight. These are potatoes from the land where people believe that foie gras and red wine make you live longer.

Which is to say that everything tastes pretty good and would best be eaten while trudging along on a Nordictrack cross-country machine. There is a recipe for a nonfat mashed potato, but I chose compromise instead and tried the garlic mashed potatoes in olive oil, the no-cholesterol answer to the other recipes in the mashed potato section, which called for everything from a stick of butter to a cup of sour cream. The recipe was easy as boiling water, into which went two pounds of potatoes and eight unpeeled garlic cloves. A half-hour later, they were ready to be mashed with some of the cooking water and then doused with warm olive oil for a wonderfully pungent alternative to the usually sweet, rich mass of buttered mashed potatoes.

Most of Marshall’s recipes are straightforward; the most difficult aspect of them, for some cooks, will be finding a market that offers the varieties of potato that she calls for. Yukon Golds, those rich, deep yellow potatoes, have become as common a fixture as Russets in many stores, but the Red Pontiac and Ruby Crescent might be hard to find. Still, this is a cookbook that is fun to read, even if your limitations as a cook, or a consumer, preclude trying every dish. She offers a useful introduction to all sections, which explain the techniques required to deep-fry or mash or turn a potato into a dumpling, as well as historical notes about various dishes.

And lest you wonder just how far you can go with a potato, Marshall includes what might seem, at first glance, to be a superfluous section on potato-based desserts. Having existed quite happily for years on tart crusts that did not have potatoes in them, I decided to try Marshall’s galette dough for this household’s first potato-pear tart. It was ridiculously simple to make, meltingly good, and an assortment of unsuspecting visitors wolfed down slices without complaint--which may be an advertisement for potato-based desserts, or it may be more proof that anything tastes good slathered with butter and sugar and baked.

Perhaps the nicest thing about Marshall’s obsession is that it encourages the reader to take a chance. If potatoes make a good chocolate cake, then surely they make a decent pizza: The galette dough, made with leftover garlic mashed potatoes, no sugar and topped with pesto, disappeared even more quickly than its sweet sibling had.