COOKBOOK WATCH

The publication of Sue Spitler’s “1,001 Low-Fat Vegetarian Recipes” (Surrey Books, $19.95) is one more sign that the mega-cookbook, like the concurrent tiny-cookbook trend, isn’t going away. It could also be a bit of one-upmanship: Last year’s mega-vegetarian book, “1,000 Vegetarian Recipes” by Carol Gelles (Macmillan), this year won a James Beard Award and a Julia Child Cookbook Award, but was criticized by some for its incluson of high-fat recipes.

Spitler specializes in low-fat cooking--she wrote several of the “Skinny” series of cookbooks from Surrey Books and was editor of the earlier “1,001 Low-Fat Recipes” (Surrey Books, 1995). In her latest--with the help of nutritionist Linda R. Yoakam--she’s shown that there are more than a thousand things to cook without meat or fish and without a ton of fat.

Can you trust every recipe in all these large books? That’s hard to say. But vegetarians can take heart that publishers are trying to give them lots of recipes.