Annual Cookbook Issue : Too Much <i> Abbondanza</i> ? : Publishing: Years ago, everyone wanted to go to France and write a cookbook. These days, just about every aspiring Julia Child is heading for Italy.

Here’s a modest proposal: The next time someone wants to publish an Italian cookbook, the editor involved has to carry a stack of the previous year’s Italian cookbooks around the block before she can say yes.

Over the last three years, there have been three times as many Italian entries as Chinese or French in the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals’ cookbook competition. In the latest “Books in Print,” there are more than 160 Italian cookbooks listed. And that, of course, doesn’t include the books from even last year that didn’t do well enough to stay in print. Even the Frug himself, cookbook schlockmeister Jeff Smith, has chipped in, with one of this season’s big sellers, “The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Italian.”

“I sometimes wonder how there’s any room for Italians in Italy--there are so many food writers there,” says Carol Field, a San Francisco-based cookbook author who has, herself, published three Italian cookbooks in the past eight years, including this season’s “Italy in Small Bites” (Morrow: $20).

“I keep asking myself whether we’re in danger of a burnout and look what happens,” she says. “I’m as guilty of it as the next person, but there seems to be such variety in Italian food and it tastes so good.”

“Do we have too many Italian cookbooks?” asks Giuliano Bugialli, the Florence-based author of four Italian cookbooks. “I cannot answer that. Two years ago I was asking such questions, but in the last two years, the number of students in my classes has increased so much. Now I just say I don’t know. But I am wondering what’s going to happen.”

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Marcella Hazan, the godmother of Italian cooking in America, has written four cookbooks in the past 20 years, including last year’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” (Knopf: $30), which is a revision of her first two books. She sees no slacking-off of interest in Italian cooking. But that’s probably predictable. She just jumped to Harper/Collins for a whopping $650,000 advance for her next book, on the cooking of Italy’s small towns.

“Italy always amazes me,” she says. “Whenever I start doing research, I find so many things I’ve never heard about before. Italy is not a very large country, but it is a mixture of many little countries. Every region is something different. And if you don’t stay there, if you don’t eat there, if you don’t talk to the people, you don’t realize how many dishes, how many things there are that you’ve never known about. The more you go around, the more you talk to people, the more you eat, the more you find.”

Yet in another way, that very accessibility can work against Italian food. Because there is so little contrivance and manipulation of the ingredients, Italian recipes may seem much easier to write than those of other cuisines. Yet with dishes so simple, balance and the quality of ingredients have to be perfect. And to get that right takes either a perfect palate or a real understanding of the area that can only come with visiting people in their homes, where the real cooking is going on.

“Everybody who goes to Italy thinks they can write a cookbook!” says Anna Tasca Lanza, countess of the Sicilian estate Regaleali and author of “The Heart of Sicily,” (Clarkson Potter: $40). “You know, some of them don’t even speak Italian. How can you find the soul in the cuisine if you don’t speak the language? Because we’re not like the French--in Italy there is a soul to the cuisine.”

What frequently happens is a kind of drop-in recipe writing. “A lot of people do the easy thing and that is to go to restaurants,” says Field. “That’s one very good way to eat, but not necessarily the best way to write a cookbook. You wouldn’t know what real American food is if you only went to restaurants and I think the same is true in Italy. You can find fabulous food in just a couple of trips, but you’re not really dealing with what is authentic and what isn’t.”

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Bugialli is more blunt. “The idea of taking recipes from restaurants is the worst,” he says. “Not even one restaurant is going to do the classic recipes. I don’t care how many panzanella recipes are found, some of them are just the invention of that moment and they don’t stay together.

“Why do a recipe for panzanella with balsamic vinegar? I have nothing against balsamic vinegar, but please , not in panzanella-- if he eats that, a person from Tuscany is gonna die. And if you don’t have Tuscan bread, forget it, don’t make it. The result is completely opposite. Don’t say toast the bread, don’t say deep-fry the bread, it’s not the same. You can’t make apple pie without apples and when you make panzanella , the starting point is Tuscan bread.”

Another fault, he says, is people piggybacking on other people’s research. “I’m surprised because most of the time, I can see these books repeating old stuff. We’re getting much more specific now, but once one region is already explored, why put out five more books on the same region with all the same recipes?

“I don’t say you have to stop talking about one region, but you do have to have something that nobody has published before. When you’re just taking the same old recipes and changing a few ingredients, it’s really depressing.”

And another thing, says Bugialli, warming to the subject: Know when to leave well enough alone.

“Some of these people are trying to destroy the sense of the cuisine,” he says. “They are trying to destroy the linearity of the cuisine. It’s not baroque. If you start adding one ingredient after another because these ingredients are fashionable, you destroy the idea of the dish. It is so offensive to the cuisine.

“Why do you want to bastardize everything? We used to complain 20 years ago that Italian cuisine was only tomato, onions and garlic. Now we’re on the opposite extreme and it’s just as bad.”

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Susan Friedland, the Harper/Collins editor who signed Hazan, agrees. “I think a lot of what is out there is not worth publishing. But it’s all worth it if you come up with a Carol Field. And, of course, I am excited about Marcella’s new book. It’s an event when somebody who really knows their stuff comes out with a new book.”

As Bantam Books cookbook editor Fran McCullough points out, “The strange thing is, all of (these Italian cookbooks) are doing pretty well. Some pasta books are going to kill each other off, obviously, but people just love Italian food.”

And what about French food?

“Anything with French in the title is dead,” says Patricia Wells, ardent Francophile and author of “Bistro Cooking,” “The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris” and “Simply French.” This year even she looked south with “Patricia Wells’ Trattoria” (William Morrow: $25).

“To me, the biggest difference between doing a French and an Italian cookbook,” she says, “was that I could make a weekend trip to Italy and come back with 25 great recipes. Good food is just so much easier to find there, and then the recipes are so much easier to write than with the French. It’s not so complicated.”

“It’s funny, people consider Italian cooking really easy,” Harper/Collins’ Friedland says. Maybe it’s because the Italians do not laugh at you . . . or at least Americans don’t perceive Italians laughing at them.

“They tend to feel very warmly about the Italian cuisine, unlike the French, which is now a very hard sell. Most people’s experience of France is Paris, where the people are like New Yorkers. They’re really very nice people, but they just don’t have a lot of time.”

“People know Italy, even if they don’t know Italy,” says Field. “People think that the way the Italians eat is more and more the way we eat, or should eat or want to eat. In some ways, people no longer feel that Italian is a foreign cuisine. It’s easier to feel familiar with Italian food. And these days, even the words seem easier to say.”