COOKBOOK WATCH

The end of our cooking civilization did not occur when Rozanne Gold’s 1996 cookbook “Recipes 1-2-3” was published. Yes, the idea of a cookbook devoted to recipes with just three ingredients seems like yet another symptom of the demise of home cooking, a takeover by the quick-and-easy crowd of real food. But Gold is a good cook, not just a good marketing person. She mined the long tradition of simple cooking in Mediterranean countries, carefully chose her convenience products and took advantage of the greater availability of once-exotic ingredients to come up with recipes that have little resemblance to the can-of-this/box-of-that school of cooking. Indeed, her book certainly encouraged people who’d previously given up on cooking to get back in the kitchen.

In her newest “Recipes 1-2-3 Menu Cookbook” (Little, Brown; $25), Gold takes on people’s fear of menu planning. Many people are afraid to invite friends for dinner because they think they need to prepare complex, restaurant-worthy dishes. Gold’s menus should set many at ease. Of course, some of the recipes “cheat” by calling for ingredients from other recipes, some of the recipes are simpler than they need to be and it’s annoying that salt and pepper are not listed in the ingredients because it would ruin the look of the recipe’s strict three-ingredient layout. But these are mostly faults of the format. For the most part, Gold sticks to an Albert Einstein quote she cites at the beginning of the book: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”