At Elizabeth David's table Classic recipes and timeless kitchen wisdom

THE lamb shakes rain from his wool, pea tendrils rise from the earth and a new yield of cookbooks arrives on bookstore shelves, ready for the fire. I worked with more than a dozen this spring, cooking like a summertime madman and considering sentences beautiful and lame. I read fantasy and prepared truth, imagined myself cooking in England and France, Mumbai and California, Italy, Spain, North Carolina, Georgia, Vancouver, Seoul. I made beautiful meals and terrible ones, found myself well instructed, poorly instructed, often coddled, sometimes lied to, perpetually amused. Cookbooks aren't really about cooking, and haven't been since the advent of color photography and food stylists. They're mostly lifestyle catalogs, aspirational instruction manuals for lives we'd like to live. Prose used to have to do the heavy lifting in this regard. No more. Now images implore us to cook, and it can take a toll on the reading. This is true even if the prose is excellent, as in the case of AT ELIZABETH DAVID'S TABLE: Classic Recipes and Timeless Kitchen Wisdom (Ecco/HarperCollins, $37.50). A collection of dozens and dozens of David's simple, beautiful and bullet-proof recipes, tied together with a few essays and top-notes, it was compiled by Jill Norman and photographed by David Loftus. Anyone who has spent time thumbing through the thin, smudged pages of a paperback edition of one of David's books, looking for instruction and finding joy, will be shocked by the result. Absent are the spare pages gone yellow with age, the words ticking by beneath covers showing only a watercolor image, solid advice from this sensible, writerly woman, who died in 1992 at the age of 78. Gone is the experience of reading a description of a dish and then creating it yourself, with no physical model, no expectation that it must look like this or that: her marvelous pork in milk, for instance, or shoulder of lamb. Here instead is the food rendered in blooming center-focus color, the images as soft at the edges as a dream, instantly recognizable to all those who have seen Loftus's photographs before, in Jamie Oliver's cookbooks. It is weird, and disconcerting, for those who know the source material. The feeling is similar to the one that can arise when lush movies are made from favorite books. But for those who have never heard of David, who have never experienced the joy of her chicken baked with green pepper and cinnamon butter? This title serves as a good introduction - to be followed by trips to the used-book store for the originals, best consumed with an omelet and a glass of wine. Oliver's influence can be found up and down the cookbook piles this season. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the puckish seasonal-cooking advocate and champion of British food television, has turned directly toward Oliver's aesthetic in his RIVER COTTAGE EVERY DAY (Ten Speed Press, $32.50). With marvelous (Loftus-like!) photographs by Simon Wheeler, and a layout that owes something to 2008's "Jamie at Home," this book is more readerfriendly and useful than some of Fearnley-Whittingstall's past River Cottage offerings, and the food is ace. Start with the chicken and mushroom casserole with cider for dinner, or a celery root Waldorf salad for lunch. There aren't many days that can't be served by the rest. A reissue of Richard Olney's 1970 classic, THE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK (Ten Speed Press, paper, $22), is emphatically not for everyday use, as its Dickensian subtitle may attest: "The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season - in Beautifully Composed Menus for American Dining and Entertaining by an American Living in Paris and Provence." But there are some excellent recipes in here all the same, for poached eggs and beef stew, stuffed artichoke bottoms and roast saddle of lamb, saffron rice with tomatoes, a pure and simple sauce ivoire. From the simple (peaches in red wine!) to the complex business of stuffing calves' ears for service with béarnaise sauce, this is a project book, best for cooks seeking intermediate badges or ju=nior-pilot wings. More accessible for the new cook and the exhausted, overworked experienced one alike is FRENCH CLASSICS MADE EASY (Workman, paper, $16.95), by Richard Grausman. Also a reissue, from a 1988 original, it combines smart advice for streamlined versions of timeless French dishes with a simple, reader-friendly and Workman-specific layout and type style that will be familiar to anyone who has cooked from the Silver Palate cookbooks. Here's a top-notch blanquette de veau darkened (to the good!) with morels, as well as fine instruction on making a truffled roast chicken, fast soufflés, aU the great French egg-yolk sauces, an onion tart and crêpes suzette. For those interested in, if slightly intimidated by, the intricacies of French cuisine, this book will be a balm. Jonathan Waxman's ITALIAN, MY WAY (Simon & Schuster, $32), seeks to do something similar for Italian cuisine. The book is slightly slap-dash, with recipes that can at times seem padded (two pages on arugula salad with olive oil and shaved Parmesan!) and black-and-white printing that does no justice to the legendary Christopher Hirsheimer's photographs. But if you can overlook the filler (recipes for peas with pancetta and mint, or smashed new potatoes) and the steep price tag, Waxman does have some excellent ideas for pork ribs, chicken and a seven-hour braise of lamb. And the instruction on how to make his salsa verde is worth a peek. Better value, though, can be found in THE FOOD OF SPAIN (Ecco/HarperCollins, $39.99), by Claudia Roden, a sweeping and tightly edited overview of the varied cuisines of the Iberian Peninsula. After a series of fascinating essays on the historical forces that led to the creation of various Spanish cuisines (among others: Celts and Jews, Frenchmen, monks, peasants and royals), Roden slips into the kitchen to deliver the goods. Here are basic dressings and sauces, simple tapas, complicated empanadas, ways to cook fish. Start with baked rice with an egg crust: a casserole of browned spare ribs, chicken, sausages and chickpeas, bound by arborio rice, flavored with paprika and served below a duvet of scrambled egg. Then run with the bulls. Those who thrill to Roden's work are not the audience for MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family and Togetherness (Grand Central Life & Style, $30), by the actress, professional famous person and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow. This is a beginner's book, appropriate to first-apartment dwellers who have found sophistication in wardrobe and employment but not yet in the kitchen. But it isn't bad for that, if you can keep the snark about a stick-thin celebrity who used to be a vegan writing a book on what she learned about cooking from her wealthy television-producer father at bay (which is, let me tell you, difficult). Paltrow's recipe for rotisserie-style roast chicken, pulled in equal measure from the chef Joël Robuchon and the Brentwood Country Mart in Los Angeles, helps a great deal. If Paltrow's book is aimed squarely at a particular subset of the young female population, Esquire's EAT LIKE A MAN: The Only Cookbook a Man Will Ever Need (Chronicle, $30), edited by Ryan D'Agostino, shoots for the fellows who try to hook up with them at parties, and who are unlikely ever to read this far into a critical roundup of summer cookbooks. (It's a gift book, then!) The subtitle is of course a lie: there is not a single recipe for salad in the book, and only a few for vegetables, and a man is eventually going to need some of those. But this handsome, chef-ish collection still provides a decent foundation for dudes trying to better their kitchen game without being doctrinaire about it. An excellent roasted chicken from the Manhattan chef Jimmy Bradley makes an appearance, along with a fine Coca-Cola-brined fried one from John Currence in Oxford, Miss. Ted Allen, the television cooking-show host, offers a solid primer on how to entertain. I found a good treatment for potatoes fried in duck fat and another for Sunday gravy. That's not nothing, bro. James Oseland, the editor of Saveur, also has a magazine cookbook out: SAVEUR. THE NEW COMFORT FOOD: Home Cooking From Around the World (Chronicle, $35). Wide-ranging and beautifully photographed, it makes for marvelous visual grazing. Here is an amazing view of the smoked pork and sauerkraut stew known as bigos, made by a scion of the Bobak supermarket family in Chicago, and another of the spoonbread served at Boone Tavern in central Kentucky. A cook wok-fries Beijing noodles on one page, while on the next a fisherman stands by the shore in Tanzania, posing with a day's catch. "The New Comfort Food" is a book for dreaming, and for the ignition of appetite. The magazine's Achilles' heel remains exposed, however: the book's too-brief, too-simple recipes are not nearly as strong as the photographs. (Red food coloring for the chicken tikka masala? Corn starch in the filet mignon with mushroom sauce? Only a dozen sentences on how to make Korean fried chicken?) This is saddening. These are recipes that can leave home cooks far from home, in a rough position, with no cellphone service. Little such short-cutting is to be found in Sanjeev Kapoor's exhaustive and unillustrated 600-page manual, HOW TO COOK INDIAN: More Than 500 Classic Recipes for the Modern Kitchen (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $29.95). Kapoor, a huge television star in Asia, where his cooking show, "Khana Khazana," has run for almost two decades, is relatively unknown in the United States. "How to Cook Indian" marks an attempt to change that state of affairs. To a large degree, the book works. Clarity of instruction is paramount to the recipes, which range all over the subcontinent in taste and technique while remaining rooted in simple, declarative sentences. I found a wild though uncomplicated recipe for clam curry from the Malvanis of western India, and another for Tamil fried chicken, sour, peppery and addictive. Roasted eggplant with mustard seeds? Parsi vegetable stew? These are worth making more than once. Those interested in expanding upon their collection of (brilliant, essential, important) books from Madhur Jaffrey, or of adding a reference work to accompany Suvir Saran's terrific "Indian Home Cooking," may do well to make Kapoor's acquaintance. That said, it would be hard to imagine a warmer, more easygoing introduction to Indian cuisine in North America than the one put together by the Vancouver restaurateurs Meeru Dhalwala and Vikfam Vij in their VIJ'S AT HOME: Relax, Honey (Douglas & Mclntyre, paper, $35). "Ours is a whimsical, loud and very social cuisine that practically begs for you to share it with as many people as possible," the couple write. "Its aromas will go through your entire home, the floor of your apartment building or your entire neighborhood block." True, as it happens! The book is hardly encyclopedic or even authentic to anything other than Dhalwala and Vij's heartfelt desire for families to eat together from the larder they use at their excellent restaurant on Vancouver's West Side. But they will eat well for that: spicy cauliflower "steaks" with rice; mung beans in coconut curry; the restaurant's justly celebrated fiery lamb "popsicles." No such exoticism will be found in SARA FOSTER'S SOUTHERN KITCHEN (Random House, $35). Foster, the proprietor of the Foster's Market cafes and prepared-food stores in Durham and Chapel Hill, N.C., offers a paean to her Tennessee roots and a love letter to the matter-of-fact cooking of her forebears: "Fresh, local ingredients, simple preparations, and a deep appreciation for pork." Lavishly illustrated and approximately the weight of a small country ham, as befits something very likely destined for kitchen shelves in coastal weekend homes and rentals from Montauk to Hilton Head, the book (written with Tema Larter) mostly succeeds, if sleepily. The recipes are neither surprising nor problematic - "Crispy Chicken Cutlets With a Heap of Spring Salad" is exactly that - but they're good enough for holiday work and, just as important, can all be made with some combination of farm-stand produce and standard supermarket ingrethents. They're not going to change your life. HUNT, GATHER, COOK: Finding the Forgotten Feast (Rodale, $25.99), by Hank Shaw, very well could, and is worth reading even if you suspect that it won't. Shaw, a self-described omnivore who has solved his dilemma, is a former newspaperman who has become a blogger, a hunter, a fisherman, a gardener, a forager and a cook. In "Hunt, Gather, Cook," he makes a powerful argument for joining him in a few of those pursuits, if only to become aware of the great bounty that surrounds us in the natural world, even when we live in urban environments - and perhaps particularly then. So here is a splendid introduction to the world of wild greens - dandelions and chicories; lamb's quarters; nettles; wild mustards - all of it generally more nutritious than anything available for retail sale, and just as delicious as when Euell Gibbons first started hustling this line during the hippie years. There are suggestions about where to find and what to do with wild berries and fruits, with the fat hips that come off the rugosa roses you see in the sandy dunes of Rockaway Beach, with black walnuts and acorns and sassafras root. There are good fishing tips and better fish recipes, and a long treatise on the (few) joys of eating oyster toads. And there is, too, a smart and level-headed primer on the hard and sometimes horrifying business of hunting animals for food - "the primary pursuit of humans," Shaw writes, "for more than a million years." Sensitive to the emotions and politics of those who might thrill to foraging mushrooms but express revulsion at the idea of taking the life of a deer or a duck or a bear, he writes clearly and with passion about what really happens when a person kills an animal to eat. The speechifying can get in the way of the recipes. (If you have 75 pounds of deer to cook next winter, Shaw's one recipe for venison medallions is going to get old.) But "Hunt, Gather, Cook" is not really meant for old-timers with elk in the freezer alongside the duck breasts and the whole pheasant, looking for something new to do with the meat. It is instead a book that provides a glimpse of the inevitable byproduct of life spent at the farmer's market railing at the evils of industrial agriculture while spending huge amounts on organic food. Eventually, some are going to take up arms. ONLINE Still hungry? Consult the capsule descriptions of 25 more new cookbooks at nytimes.com/books. Sam Sifton is the restaurant critic for The Times.