Cooked Any Good Books Lately?

It took Lynne Rossetto Kasper 10 years to write “The Splendid Table: Recipes From Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food” (William Morrow) but they paid off Saturday night when it was named the best cookbook of the year in the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals Julia Child Cookbook Awards--and also the best first cookbook (the Julia Child Award proper). Oddly, it did not win the international category, in which it was also entered, trailing Barbara Tropp’s “China Moon Cookbook” (Workman). Betty Fussell’s “A Book of Corn” won the Jane Grigson Award for outstanding scholarship. Other winners: American: “New York Cookbook,” Molly O’Neill (Workman); Bread, Other Baking and Sweets: “Home for the Holidays: Festive Baking With Whole Grains,” Ken Haedrich (Bantam); Food Reference/Technical: “The Encyclopedia of Herbs, Spices and Flavorings,” Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz (Dorling Kindersley); General: “Back to Square One: Old-World Food in a New World Kitchen,” Joyce Goldstein (Morrow); Health and Diet: “Graham Kerr’s Minimax Cookbook” (Doubleday); Illustrated/Photography: “France: A Culinary Journey” (Collins Publishers); Literary Food Writing: “Outlaw Cook,” John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Single Subject: “A Glorious Harvest,” Henrietta Green (Sedgewood Press); Wine, Beer or Spirits: “The Wine Atlas of Spain,” Hubrecht Duijker (Simon & Schuster).