The Best of 2000

Cookbook crops vary as much as those for wine or any other agricultural product. Labors in the fields of culinary lore, it seems, are subject to weather, seasons and sunspots, just like anything else.

Although last year’s cookbook vintage seemed heavily weighted toward Europe (six of the Los Angeles Times’ Top 10 cookbooks focused on France, Italy or cooking heavily influenced by them), this year the hot area is more mixed.

If there is a favorite area among the 10 books we have chosen as this year’s best, it is Southeast Asia, which has never had such an onslaught of loving attention. In addition to this year’s best book, “Hot Sour Salty Sweet” by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, the third-best book is “Cracking the Coconut,” by Southern Californian Su-Mei Yu.

But in addition, this year’s Los Angeles Times’ list spotlights books on everything from Mexico to the Greek Islands with stops along the way that include fancy New York restaurants, homey diners and Grandma’s table.

1. “Hot Sour Salty Sweet”

Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

(Artisan, $40)

Once every five years or so there comes along a cookbook that transcends the category and becomes something larger and more important. This is such a work.

Alford and Duguid are culinary explorers of the first order. In their past books, they’ve focused on exotic dishes or ingredients--Central Asian flatbreads and Asian rice dishes. In “Hot,” they look at a region: the areas touched by the Mekong River, from its headwaters in China on the Burmese border, to the fertile delta in Vietnam.

The Mekong is one of the great rivers of the world, giving life to most of Southeast Asia. While many Americans--through sorry history--are somewhat familiar with the parts of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam that the river waters, most of this book will be a revelation, introducing people, places and, yes, foods, we’ve barely imagined.

Alford and Duguid are travelers, not tourists. No hit-and-run surveys of fancy restaurants or whirlwind visits for them. They take to the outback and live among the people they are writing about and photographing. As a result, the pictures and words they bring back have both the grit of authenticity and that unmistakable glow that comes from intimate knowledge of a subject.

2. “Mexico One Plate at a Time”

Rick Bayless

(Scribner, $35)

Every book Bayless has done has been among the best of its type, and every one has been better than the last. That’s a tough standard to maintain, but his newest--an accompaniment to his PBS television series--pulls it off.

Rather than reinventing cuisines the way most chefs do, what Bayless is working at here (no doubt with a little help from uber-editor Maria Guarnaschelli) is a new approach to writing recipes.

Oh, sure, there is still a list of ingredients and then a set of instructions, but in addition you get everything from quality points to look for (just what is it that makes a tortilla soup or taco great?), seasonal tips and serving advice, notes on unfamiliar ingredients, and even sets of questions and answers developed during the testing of the recipes that might help clarify some of the finer points.

So in the end, you get not only the wonderfully flavorful, authentic Mexican dishes we have come to expect from Bayless, but another level of assurance as well. This is especially important in dealing with a cuisine you may not have cooked before.

Especially if you know someone who is coming to Mexican cooking for the first time, there isn’t a better cookbook for them than this one. Of course, the same could be true even for those of us who are a little more experienced.

3. “Cracking the Coconut”

Su-Mei Yu

(William Morrow, $30)

The best cookbooks are both professional and personal. They have to be able to convey the facts of the food, yet without passion they fail to come alive. Yu brings both in ample measure to this book on Thai cooking.

A Thai of Chinese ancestry who now lives in San Diego (she owns Saffron restaurant there), Yu has a formidable background. Educated first at a boarding school founded by the Thai royal court, she went on to become a professor at San Diego State before concentrating on cooking.

This is a lovely book full of both personal experience and scholarly digging. She tells of her experiences traveling in Thailand searching for authentic food and ways of preparing it and then offers many variations and tips on technique and ingredients.

Each chapter is introduced by her translations of poems from 19th-century Thai funeral books--remembrance manuscripts buried with the dead; those for people who loved eating always contained recipes or poems about food. One can only imagine how happy one of those splendid eaters would be with this book.

4. “The Foods of the Greek Islands”

Aglaia Kremezi

(Houghton Mifflin, $35)

One of the puzzles of the modern food age is the way we fixate on one or two places to the exclusion of others that may even be nearby. When someone says “Mediterranean,” the immediate food-world reaction is Italy and southern France. Forget Spain. Forget Morocco. Forget all of the Eastern Mediterranean. And we miss so much good stuff.

Kremezi is one of the few authors--along with Paula Wolfert--who is constantly banging the drum for these neglected areas, nagging us about our tunnel vision. Kremezi’s special passion is her Greek homeland, and in her latest book she gets even more specific, focusing on the Greek islands that her family comes from.

If all you know about Greek food is moussaka and gyros, this book will be an introduction to a wonderful new world of simple, vibrant food, full of fresh fish, simply cooked vegetables, lemons, olives and wild herbs.

5. “1,000 Jewish Recipes”

Faye Levy

(IDG Books, $35)

There is a natural tendency to scoff whenever any book is described as being the “definitive” cookbook on a subject. In this case, it is certainly justified.

That Levy has accomplished this with Jewish cooking is even more astonishing. Not only does the category span countries, cultures, even continents (imagine trying a similar book for Christian cooking!), but there is also the thicket of kosher laws to contend with.

That Levy is able to balance all these demands so gracefully is remarkable. That she is able to do it with such delicious-sounding recipes is astonishing. And, hey, you’ve gotta love a cookbook that has six different recipes for matzo balls.

6. “Artisan Baking Across America”

Maggie Glezer

(Artisan, $40)

Bread bakers are a special breed of cooks--obsessively detail-oriented, with an almost fanatical passion for process. Artisanal bread bakers are even more so; they’ll argue all day about the best type of bricks for their wood-fired ovens! So to say that Glezer has written a book with enough detail to satisfy even the most fanatical baker is high praise--at least to other bread bakers.

This is one of those remarkable books that takes what is essentially a fairly simple recipe (little more than flour, water, yeast and salt) and explores it in such depth that there are no questions left. Want to know how to tell if your flour is enzymatically balanced? Want to know the difference between high-extraction flour and high-gluten flour?

There are plenty of color photographs too. But they are not the usual eye candy; they are technical illustrations. Not clear about the difference between a very soft, soft and firm doughs? What does a gluten window look like?

Finally, there are profiles of a few leading artisanal bakers and a whole lot of recipes for great breads, graded according to difficulty.

7. “Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery”

(Villard, $35)

It’s interesting to compare this with Silverton’s first book on sweets, “Desserts,” published in 1986. Although that book was enormously influential among pastry chefs, this one will surely find a ready home on the bookshelves of many more home cooks. Not only are the dishes less fussy (no three- and four-sub-recipe constructions here), they are downright homey--stuff like brownies and cookies, coffee cakes and tarts. Beyond that, the recipes themselves are full of the kinds of telling details that make the difference between acceptable and spectacular results. This is a cookbook that may rival Lindsey Shere’s wonderful “Chez Panisse Desserts” (Random House, 1985) for bringing restaurant baking into the home kitchen.

8. “Think Like a Chef”

Tom Colicchio

(Clarkson Potter, $37.50)

We’ll resist any mean-spirited jokes the title might suggest and cut right to the praise. Colicchio (chef at Manhattan’s wonderful Gramercy Tavern) has rethought what a chef’s cookbook can be. Rather than giving a bunch of glossy pictures of uncookable dishes, he is actually trying to teach the creative process. What’s most remarkable is the degree to which he succeeds.

Colicchio takes a handful of standard preparations--roasted tomatoes, mushrooms and braised artichokes--or groups of ingredients--asparagus, ramps and morels, lobster, peas and pasta, and duck, root vegetables and apples--and treats them in different ways to illustrate how the same flavor can be used to widely varied effects (the tomatoes, for example, wind up in lasagna, clam ragout and in a vinaigrette).

Along the way you get all kinds of tips and ideas for further improvisations, along with a bunch of straightforward, fairly unfussy recipes. He may think like a chef, but he writes like a cook.

9. “Diner Desserts”

Tish Boyle

(Chronicle Books, $18.95)

Don’t be put off by the title or the design. This book is nothing less than a celebration of American sweets by a top-notch recipe writer. There’s nothing fancy here and no fussy reimaginings, just good old-fashioned cheesecakes, pies, puddings, cakes and cookies done to a very high standard.

10. “At Grandmother’s Table”

edited by Ellen Perry Berkeley

(Fairview Press, $24.95)

This is not your typical cookbook, though it does contain recipes. Rather, it is a bittersweet collection of women’s short stories, photographs, poems and remembrances about their grandmothers. And while the recipes sound great, in that homey “receipt” kind of way, its point is more about the connections that are forged--or not--at the table and at other places where families meet.