BOOK REVIEWS : ‘Improving’ on...

I have one completely unscientific test for all cookbooks claiming to represent a people’s inheritance. They should convey the following feeling: “This writer’s hands have cooking in them.” The reader should sense the writer’s brain-to-fingertip-trained instincts going back to parents and grandparents and families of hard-to-please food lovers.

When it comes to the realm of current African-American cookbooks, this test is especially useful in telling the genuine from the phony. You don’t have to be authenticity-crazed to notice that some of the books claiming to present “soul food” or “African-American cuisine” are about as believable as the white New York mayoral candidate who traipsed into Harlem some 24 years ago proclaiming, “My heart is as black as yours.”

To get the bad news over with: The well-meaning teams that put together “Our Family Table” and “The Black Family Dinner Quilt Cookbook” are doing very little to carry on the legacy of black cooking.

Yes, there is a historical legacy of black cooking in this country, no matter how white bread things may seem now--the legacy of African slave women who started inventing “Southern cooking” 200 years ago with an elegant, vivid amalgam of African, British and New World elements while sustaining their own families on ingredients that didn’t make it to the Big House. But to look at some of the new cookbooks you’d think their still-loved heritage was fit only to be scrubbed and expurgated.

“Our Family Table,” a children’s book, presents 28 black role models from Arthur Ashe to Los Angeles Councilwoman Rita D. Walters; each contributes a brief autobiographical sketch and a favorite recipe. Sounds like a great idea. But on page 10 we learn that the actual cooking directions “are nutritional renderings of the recipes given by the models.”

What the heck is a “nutritional rendering”? Something’s wrong when writers and editors are so snowed by the word nutritional as to equate it with the dim, anemic cooking given here.

How are kids supposed to know what turned Ashe on to spoon-bread or Judith Jamison to sweet-potato pie or Quincy Jones to boiled greens, from versions missing the original sources of flavor and texture?

Spare me recitals of the supposed nutritional sins of “the black diet,” which we often don’t recognize as the terrible reality of the modern urban-poverty diet. Blacks and whites alike have to be educated to make the most of fresh produce and the old vegetable-protein sources (corn, beans, potatoes). Meanwhile, the way to get children interested in good food is not to push their noses in versions of beloved special dishes that have been doctored by substituting turkey ham for ham hocks or skim milk for cream.

The publisher of “Our Family Table,” a Memphis-based firm named the Wimmer Cos., which seems to have registered the cozy phrase “Recipes & Food Memories” as a commercial trademark, also issued “The Black Family Dinner Quilt Cookbook” (companion to the 1991 “Black Family Reunion Cookbook”). The aim here was a volume of about 230 reduced-fat recipes collected in honor of Dr. Dorothy I. Height--longtime powerhouse of the National Council of Negro Women and a younger associate of its founder, Mary McLeod Bethune--and illustrated with reproductions of quilts made in celebration of African-American achievements.

Once more good purposes are weirdly sidetracked. The first obstacle is the cheap, hard-to-navigate comb-bound format and the tacky black-and-white reproduction of the quilts. On the plus side, there is some attempt to deal with black culinary history and major nutritional issues, and the kinds of dishes that make up the six recipe chapters are what you would look for in a useful all-purpose cookbook. But this brings us to obstacle No. 2: the recipes themselves.

Wimmer, it turns out, produced this book “in corporate partnership with the Crisco Division of Procter & Gamble.” The “health-conscious” aim suggested by the subtitle seems to boil down to getting maximum exposure for Crisco, Butter Flavor Crisco, Crisco Shortening, Duncan Hines cake mixes and such like P&G; products.

When not plugging brand names, the recipe-developers are teaching the sort of substitute-oriented cooking that too many people take for a ticket to health. You won’t find a plain green salad here--the closest thing is “Today’s Poke Salad,” which contains no poke but does have turkey bacon and nonfat Italian dressing. “Cracklin’ Oat Cornbread” has no cracklings. The oatmeal you sprinkle on it is supposed to be just as savory. “Nonfat sour cream alternative” and “fat-free process cheese product” are all over the place.

These aren’t recipes from which people are going to learn the lessons of the old rural-poverty diet--which also could be terrible but at its best had exactly the kind of emphasis now being touted as nutritional chic.

“Sylvia’s Soul Food,” on the other hand, is an African-American cookbook with food prepared for the sake of pleasure rather than earnest make-over. I would happily welcome this work--if it conveyed more about either Sylvia’s, the 30-year-old Harlem hot spot run by Sylvia Woods, or soul food.

Not having eaten at the restaurant, I can’t say how close the versions here are to the originals. But I get the feeling that this is a kind of restaurant cooking that doesn’t translate well into recipes. You won’t come away with the key to a famous establishment’s secrets--in fact, you may wonder just what magic you’re missing.

Again and again the formulas on the page seem neatly worked out but don’t give the aura of a real person standing at the stove making it all happen. The kitchen at Sylvia’s must have some pretty emphatic preferences, judging by proportions like a tablespoon of vanilla extract to three egg whites in a meringue topping or at least three times the usual amount of liquid in pie pastry. With so little sense of what’s at the center of this cooking style, such things come off sounding more peculiar than individual.

Directions can be annoyingly unclear (how much pork fat and skin do you need for the one cup of cracklings called for in “Cracklin’ Corn Bread”?). The selection of dishes covers the bases (ham in many guises, different greens, ribs, peach cobbler, biscuits with cane syrup), but is not huge. In fact, the roughly 100 recipes include bits of padding like the four pages taken up with two practically identical pot roasts. All things considered, “Sylvia’s Soul Food” may be a fair-to-middling souvenir for people who already know the restaurant, but it’s not an insight-filled guide to soul cooking.

Coming to the good news, Sheila Ferguson’s “Soul Food” is the only one of these works to get across the feeling of a real cook connecting with anyone. The book comes from one of those writing-in-exile situations that have a way of producing memorable cookbooks. Exile in this case is the London moorings where the author decided she didn’t like to see her twin daughters “growing up estranged from their heritage.” Armed with intelligence and endless chutzpah, Ferguson simply rolled up her sleeves and tackled, not the “Classic Cuisine From the Deep South” of the subtitle, but a certified soulful account of how her own family ate and eats in both North and South.

Here’s one sophisticate who puts great stock in very simple things and writes recipes like the cook in the old “Joy of Cooking” anecdote who threw herself into her hash. “It’s the rising and falling of the frying noise that tells you when to turn over the pieces,” she announces while leading the neophyte through the frying of chicken in Proustian detail.

“Making good coleslaw is not an exact science,” she allows, but by the time she’s through telling you about it you can see that, as she says, “every little change is a major event in that dressing.”

Her instructions for preparing chitlins for cooking: “Put them in your sink and scrub them like you would a pair of socks. No, I’m not joking.”

What about the way she cooks? Her way with flavorings is certainly lighter and more nuanced than the fare in “Sylvia’s Soul Food.” But she isn’t about to encourage the vision of black folks creating Edenic food out of the pastoral landscape that won such a following for Edna Lewis’s 1976 “The Taste of Country Cooking” (Knopf: $16.95). People in the Ferguson clan regularly reach for the onion powder or the marshmallows, and the author sings the praises of a jellied ginger ale and fruit salad that was all the rage in Fannie Farmer and “The Settlement Cook Book” 60 years ago. Those who disdain such things won’t get the point of her recipes, with their fusion of Southern-country past and in-your-face modern Americana.

The Ferguson idea of “soul food” is elastic and irreverent without being shapeless. She admits such unlikely candidates as “United States Senatorial bean soup” (which she jazzes up with sorrel). Closer to the heart of the matter are things such as smothered pork chops, five-threat gumbo (ham, chicken, giblets, shrimp, crab), mashed lima bean cakes, eggplant-tomato casserole, and cherry fritters. Or brains, which she doesn’t eat herself but knows how to handle before scrambling them with eggs:

“ Now what do you think you do with the poor things? You place them in a colander and pour boiling water over them to rid any traces of blood and membrane that remain. (You want to sort of clear the mind, so to speak.) “

American readers had better prepare for the weird experience of reading an American-as-grits text through the eyes of Ferguson’s British editors. Grove Press in this country hasn’t bothered to translate terms such as “salad cream” (or even fix the page references for a whole slew of photographs that apparently were dropped from the U.S. edition). It’s a little like the subtitles for the bad dudes’ dialogue in the movie “Airplane.” Luckily, Ferguson has the powers of communication to barge past anything. You can imagine laughing or crying with this woman, passing her the sugar, arguing your head off with her over history or recipes, saying “Cool it, would you” when she starts hyperventilating on jive talk--but never being bored by her.