A Holiday Library for Cooks

Our selection of the most interesting new cookbooks

“The Family Baker: 150 Never-Let-You-Down Basic Recipes” by Susan G. Purdy (Broadway, $25).

We all remember standing at Mother’s elbow as she stirred cookie dough. But now as parents, are we making baked goods ourselves--or teaching our kids? Here are the recipes you know--Raisin Bran Muffins, Old-Fashioned Sugar Cookies, Lemon Meringue Pie, Banana Crumb Cake--in clear, direct language. If you’ve barely dabbled in the kitchen or haven’t been there in awhile, grab your child by one hand and this book in the other, and start baking.

Purdy, who won a Julia Child book award with “Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too,” offers nice tips broken apart from each recipe, such as how to melt chocolate, and in chapters such as “Easy Decorating Ideas” and “About Bake Sales.” Just what a family should know. If there’s one thing the book could use it’s more photos. (The back cover looks so promising with a child mugging before plates of cookies.) Life’s demands already keep many from the kitchen; good photos in a nice cookbook can help lure them back.

“Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies” (Warner Books, $21.95)

There are a lot of little cookie books out there. But if Alice Medrich says these are good cookies, then these are good cookies. An award-winning author, Medrich has collected the cookie recipes she serves again and again into a slim book. (And horrors, many of them are chocolate!)

No more scrambling through cookbook pages for the perfect or different cookie. They’re here: apricot-lemon bars. Chocolate biscotti. Almond macaroons. Macadamia and white chocolate chunk cookies. And, glory be, there are a good number of pictures. Medrich also includes help on making cookies tender, mixing ingredients and softening butter. As she says, “Let the cookie celebration begin.”