Hey, Dummies

The dummying of America started with a trickle of computer books. That was understandable. When it comes to computers, aren’t most of us a bit stupid?

From there it spread quickly. Today, no matter what kind of dummy you are, there’s a book for you. From personal finance to fixing your car to cigar appreciation, one of those yellow and black books has your name on it.

The “Dummies” books have been so successful that a competing series has sprung up . . . for idiots. “The Complete Idiot’s Guides” ape the “Dummies” series’ chopped-up, breathless prose, its pun-laden headlines and even its love of cute icons. In fact, going back and forth between books in the two series, you sometimes have to look at the cover to tell which is which.

Eventually, of course, all of this had to end up in food. There are now almost a dozen guides to teach dummies and idiots how to fix dinner, with more on the way.

As in other areas of ignorance, the “Dummies” series started with the basic and grew more specific. “Cooking for Dummies” begat “Gourmet Cooking for Dummies,” “Grilling for Dummies,” “Desserts for Dummies” and even “Lowfat Cooking for Dummies,” all of which led inexorably to the upcoming “Italian Cooking for Dummies.”

The same thing happened in the companion wine series, though it seems to have hit a frustrating bottleneck. After “Wine for Dummies” split into “Red Wine for Dummies” and “White Wine for Dummies,” what was left?

Spend some time with these books and the real question becomes: What kind of dummies do they think we are? Or, to phrase it in a less adversarial way, what is it that we dummies need to learn from a basic cookbook?

The first thing every cook needs to know is how to shop. Given the right ingredients, even the clumsiest amateur can turn out something edible.

What do you have to know to be a good shopper? The first thing is the seasons. Realizing that you don’t buy tomatoes in January will improve your winter pasta sauces and salads 100-fold. You also need to be able to distinguish high-quality ingredients from lesser ones. How do they look, feel, smell?

And you need to know about enough ingredients to be flexible in substituting when necessary. If one kind of lettuce isn’t good for a salad, what are your alternatives? Sirloin is sky-high? What else is good on the grill?

You need to have a good basic selection of tools: a couple of good knives, a couple of saucepans, a skillet or two, a pan for stewing and the assorted invaluable minutiae--cutting boards, wooden spoons, spatulas and stainless steel mixing bowls.

Shopping plays a part in that too. Again, you need to know how to recognize quality and how to care for it. And you have to have a certain financial sensibility. If your kitchen equipment budget is only $300, which would you rather have: knives, skillets and saucepans of decent quality or one expensive food processor?

You can’t shop for techniques, but a kind of thriftiness goes a long way here too. Until you really get bitten by the cooking bug, there are a lot of things you don’t need to know; for instance, how to make mayonnaise. When there are perfectly good commercial versions available, it is simply a waste of time for the beginning cook to make it from scratch.

But everybody should know how to brown a piece of meat, chop a vegetable and turn the combination into a stew. Those three simple things have kept less enthusiastic cooks and their families alive and well fed for countless centuries.

A sense of how to structure your time is invaluable. If dinner is steak and cake, which do you cook first? And what do you do in the intervening hour or two? (Correct answer: Clean up. More than one fledgling cook’s life has been made easier by learning how to wash the used dishes before dirtying more.)

Finally, you need to know how to build not just a dish but an entire meal. A good cook has a sense of balancing simple dishes with more complicated ones to minimize the stress for both the cook and the eater. If, for example, you’re having that stew for a main course, you’re probably fine with a green salad and a piece of cheese beforehand. If it’s the steak and cake menu, on the other hand, maybe something a little more involved is required for an accompaniment.

Of course, guiding a novice cook through all this is a tall order, maybe too tall for any single book. None of the half a dozen or so books for dummies and idiots I inspected was really satisfying. That is not to say they’re bad books; most have something to recommend them. It’s just that each fails in important areas.

What kind of dummies do they think we are? The answer, especially for the minds behind “Dummies,” is that they think we want to create restaurant meals in our home kitchens. This bias, obvious at first glance, goes to the root of the problems with these books.

You need only look at the choice of authors: Charlie Trotter (“Gourmet Cooking for Dummies”) and Bill Yosses (“Desserts for Dummies”) are restaurant chefs, and John Mariani (“Grilling for Dummies”) and Bryan Miller (“Cooking for Dummies”) are restaurant critics. They are quite good at what they do, but their expertise has little relevance to home cooking.

A good example of the difference between home and restaurant cooking is mise en place, a practice that obsesses these authors. If you’ve never heard of mise en place (pronounced meez on PLASS), don’t worry; there’s no reason a home cook should have. Mise en place is having all the ingredients for a dish lined up and ready before you start to cook--garlic chopped, onions sliced, etc.--the way a line cook in a restaurant does.

In a restaurant situation, this is critical. When you have to make 10 servings of the same dish in 15 minutes, you don’t have time to stop and chop parsley.

But that situation rarely arises in the home kitchen. For the home cook, who is usually preparing three or four vastly different dishes in sequence, going to the trouble to chop all the garlic in advance is a waste of time. In the home kitchen, the preparation of dishes is almost always staggered so that there are time gaps when little chores can be attended to.

Beyond that, the two most basic books, “Cooking for Dummies” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cooking Basics,” differ in important ways. They practically take turns with each other at what they do well.

The section in “Dummies” on equipping your kitchen is fairly thorough, and “Idiot’s” gives only the sketchiest advice. The same is true for instruction on basic techniques, though I have a hard time believing that dummies really need to know how to make mayonnaise, hollandaise and souffles.

On the other hand, “Idiot’s” gives a much better guide to choosing ingredients. “Cooking for Dummies” virtually ignores the whole question, aside from some advice on building a pantry. Incidentally, you can tell a lot about the differences between these two books from the pantry sections. Apparently dummies consider sun-dried tomatoes an absolute must while idiots can’t do without popcorn.

Ironically, “Gourmet Cooking for Dummies” probably does a better job on these basic subjects than either “Cooking for Dummies” or “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cooking Basics.” Maybe picking a ripe tomato is a sign of being a gourmet these days.

In “Idiot’s,” the section on “Organizing Your Game Plan” is handy, mainly for settling a lot of those niggling questions beginning cooks always have (how to read a recipe, how to set a table).

Despite that chapter title, though, neither basic cookbook gives more than canned advice about how to structure your time. In fact, there’s a lot of canned advice in most of these books. They read as if they were written in a hurry.

What about the recipes?

In this area, there’s no comparison. Dummies eat much better, more sophisticated food than idiots, who are left with the likes of baked ziti and Quick Three-Bean, No-Meat Chili. Surely there’s some middle ground between these dishes and Beef Braised in Beaujolais from “Dummies.” Even worse, the “Idiot’s “ recipes are tacked on to the end, divorced from whatever techniques or ingredients they were presumably chosen to illustrate.

Even the best recipes, though, fall short in explanations, which are just what you’d think dummies need. Not only are the fine points of the dishes glossed over (What does the mixture look like when it’s cooked correctly? What does it smell like?), but also basic information is omitted. For the “Dummies” Spaghetti With Clam Sauce, for example, no one bothers to tell you how to open clams, no small ordeal even for the unchallenged. Trotter and team do a better job in “Gourmet Cooking,” but the smoked salmon terrine instructions could have made clearer what texture the creamed butter layer is supposed to have.

“Idiot’s” has another fatal flaw. It’s dotted with little sidebar boxes on food science and history by author Ronnie Fein that are almost hallucinatory in their implausibility. My favorite is this blithe announcement: “Pigs are prolific too: Some say that all the pigs in America are the descendants of the thirteen hogs originally brought by the explorer De Soto.” The sheer gall of it takes your breath away. No other immigrant in American history smuggled so much as one porker across the border?

Better is “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Baking,” by Emily Nolan, which covers in patient detail many of the basics of the subject, probably the scariest one to most beginning cooks. But even it is plagued by inexplicable weirdness. Why, for example, does a baking book have a chapter on removing stains?

Much more successful is Yosses’ “Desserts for Dummies,” despite its predilection for restaurant dishes. (What can you say about a basic dessert book that covers lemon verbena sabayon but not brownies?) The rest of the stuff on pies, cakes and ice creams more than makes up for that foolishness. Speaking as a sometimes still-intimidated baker, I think this is probably the one book of both series that I would turn to again.

All of which leads to the ultimate question: Are these books worth having? The answer probably depends on who is doing the buying. If you have taken some cooking classes and are fairly comfortable in the kitchen but want to expand your repertoire, “Desserts for Dummies” and “Gourmet Cooking for Dummies” are worth a glance, depending on your predilections.

On the other hand, if you’re a real cooking dummy and you’re looking for a good, all-around kitchen manual that will teach you the basics you need to know to cook for yourself and your friends, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere. But that’s another story for another day.

SPAGHETTI WITH CLAM SAUCE

18 cherrystone clams or 3 (6 1/2-ounce) cans minced clams

Salt

Water

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic

5 plum tomatoes, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Freshly ground pepper

1/2 pound spaghetti

1/2 cup coarsely chopped basil leaves or Italian parsley

Freshly grated Romano or Parmesan cheese, optional

From “Cooking for Dummies” by Bryan Miller and Marie Rama (IDG Books, 1996).

Shuck fresh clams and reserve brine or juice; there should be about 1 cup juice. Coarsely chop clam meat and set aside. If using canned clams, strain clams from juice, reserving both juice and clams.

Bring 5 to 6 quarts lightly salted water to boil in large, covered pot over high heat.

Meanwhile, heat oil in large saucepan over medium heat. When hot, add garlic and cook, stirring, about 1 minute. Do not let garlic brown. Add tomatoes, lemon juice, red pepper flakes, pepper and reserved clam juice. Simmer, stirring, until reduced to about 2 cups, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from heat.

When water boils, add spaghetti and stir. Cook uncovered in boiling water until pasta is still a bit firm, about 6 minutes. Pasta will finish cooking in sauce.

Drain pasta in colander. Add to tomato mixture in saucepan and bring to simmer over medium heat. Cook until spaghetti is tender but still firm to bite, stirring often, 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in clams and basil and cook 1 to 2 minutes. Do not let mixture boil. Serve immediately, garnished with Romano or Parmesan if desired.

4 servings. Each serving:

357 calories; 132 mg sodium; 31 mg cholesterol; 9 grams fat; 50 grams carbohydrates; 19 grams protein; 0.63 gram fiber.

SMOKED SALMON TERRINE WITH LEMON-HORSERADISH VINAIGRETTE

LEMON-HORSERADISH VINAIGRETTE

3 tablespoons lemon juice

1 1/2 tablespoons freshly ground horseradish

1 tablespoon minced shallots

1/2 cup olive oil

1 tablespoon chopped chives

Salt, pepper

SMOKED SALMON TERRINE

1 1/2 pounds smoked salmon, thinly sliced

6 tablespoons butter, at room temperature

1 1/2 shallots, finely minced

1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 1/2 tablespoons finely chopped lemon zest

Freshly ground pepper

In this recipe, the sharp horseradish and the tart lemon in the vinaigrette cut through the richness of the smoked salmon, while allowing its flavors to shine through. From “Gourmet Cooking for Dummies,” by Charlie Trotter, Judi Carle and Sari Zernich (IDG Books, 1997).

The Test Kitchen made the Horseradish Potato Salad that is supposed to accompany the terrine--twice. Maybe we are dummies but we couldn’t make it edible; the flavors did not come together right and it was just too bitter.

LEMON-HORSERADISH VINAIGRETTE

Combine lemon juice, horseradish and shallots in small bowl. Slowly whisk in olive oil. Fold in chives and season to taste with salt and pepper.

SMOKED SALMON TERRINE

Cut salmon to fit width of 6x3 1/2-inch terrine mold.

Beat butter, shallots, lemon juice and lemon zest in small bowl until smooth and creamy.

Line terrine mold with plastic wrap. Arrange layer of smoked salmon in bottom of mold and spread with very thin layer of lemon butter. Continue layering salmon and butter until all salmon is used. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate 2 hours.

Cut terrine into 1/4-inch slices. Place 2 pieces overlapping in center of each plate. Spoon Lemon-Horseradish Vinaigrette over terrine and around plate. Top with freshly ground pepper.

8 to 12 servings. Each of 12 servings:

202 calories; 1,214 mg sodium; 29 mg cholesterol; 17 grams fat; 2 grams carbohydrates; 11 grams protein; 0.06 gram fiber.

BANANA CREAM PIE

1/4 cup cornstarch

2/3 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 cups milk, warmed

3 egg yolks

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 bananas, sliced

1 (9-inch) baked pie shell

Sweetened whipped cream

From “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Baking” by Emily Nolan and Flo Braker (Macmillan, 1997).

Combine cornstarch, sugar and salt in top of double boiler. Gradually whisk in milk. Cook over simmering water, whisking constantly, until mixture thickens, about 10 minutes. Mixture must boil to thicken.

Lightly beat egg yolks in small bowl. Slowly add about 1/4 cup hot mixture to egg yolks and mix well. Stir egg yolks back into milk mixture in double boiler and cook 5 minutes. Let cool slightly, then stir in butter and vanilla until butter melts. Add banana slices. Pour into cooled baked pie shell and chill until set, about 1 1/2 hours. Top with sweetened whipped cream.

6 servings. Each serving:

519 calories; 282 mg sodium; 153 mg cholesterol; 26 grams fat; 66 grams carbohydrates; 8 grams protein; 0.38 gram fiber.