The homesick Texan's family table Lone Star cooking from my kitchen to yours

COOKBOOKS COME IN ALL sorts. Some offer new twists on old recipes or update a familiar cuisine. Others are lavishly tricked out, with production values worthy of "Masterpiece Theatre." Still others have the brute functionality of car-repair manuals. There are star-vehicle cookbooks, travelogue cookbooks, definitive magnum-opus cookbooks and "I love America" cookbooks, not to mention quasi-religious farm-to-table, vegan and vegetarian manifestoes. Among the current onslaught of cookbooks, there are one or two good ones in most of these categories. The vegetarians continue to conquer vast swaths of the available shelf space in your local bookstore, proving that the meek shall indeed inherit the earth. Along the way, some of the proselytizing tone has abated, and the better examples of the genre rightly accentuate the pleasures of being green. If the vegetable kingdom were high school, kale would have been voted the green least likely to succeed, year after year. Now it enjoys celebrity status, and the glamour may even be rubbing off on its siblings. For evidence, look to BRASSICAS: Cooking the World's Healthiest Vegetables (Ten Speed, $23), Laura B. Russell's impassioned hymn to the less than glamorous tribe that includes kale, but also cauliflower, collard greens, turnips and kohlrabi. These are the good-for-you foods children recoil at, but Russell sees them as "a captivating range of vegetables: leafy greens, verdant stems, flowering heads and pungent roots." Not everyone will jump at the chance to make a kale and spinach smoothie, but her two-fisted stew of sausage, kale and white beans takes full advantage of kale's firm, chewy texture. Charred brussels sprouts with pancetta and a fig glaze knits together sweet, salty and earthy flavors in an ideal cold-weather dish. Brassicas come with lots of flavor, Russell argues, so why take it away? Her cauliflower gratin breaks with the cheese-heavy, gooey gratins of yore by using Greek yogurt rather than cream, judicious amounts of assertive Gruyere and Parmesan cheese, with a topping of chopped almonds for crunch instead of bread crumbs. This horse trading results in a voluptuous dish that goes easy on the calories, just one neat trick among many. Diana Henry, a food columnist for The Sunday Telegraph of London, throws her hat in the (mostly) vegetarian ring with A CHANGE OF APPETITE: Where Healthy Meets Delicious (Mitchell Beazley, $34.99). Like many food lovers who have eaten not wisely but too well, she found herself trying to cut back on meat and sugar, lower her blood pressure and lose a little weight without sacrificing one of the principal sources of pleasure available to the human race: tasty food. "The term 'healthy' does negative things to me (in fact, I struggled with whether to put it on the front of this book)," she writes in her heartening introduction. "It makes me think of miserable, beige food. It also smacks of preciousness." Compass set in the right direction, she began to look for what she calls "accidentally healthy" dishes, the kind of food that tastes good and happens to be good for you. Mission accomplished. Her book, arranged by the seasons, offers light, bright, deeply flavorful food, with a marked bias toward salads and a full-on commitment to Greek yogurt. True to her word, she doesn't include a single recipe that, out of context, would strike anyone as health food. Our good friend kale makes an appearance, tossed with cranberry beans and dressed with anchovy and rosemary sauce. In the summer section, Henry offers an Asian-influenced warm salad of pink grapefruit, shrimp and toasted coconut, with a sweet-sour dressing made from fish sauce, lime juice and brown sugar. Her book is full of bright ideas, as well as one of the most thoughtful directions ever written by a British chef for an American audience, appended to her recipe for salmon grilled in damp newspaper with dill and cucumber sauce. "Directions to use a broadsheet newspaper are because of size, not the content of the newspaper," she writes. "USA Today is a national newspaper that is the right size." Rose Elliot is another name unfamiliar on this side of the Atlantic but well known to British readers for her columns on vegetarian cooking in the weekend magazine of The Guardian. THE BEST OF ROSE ELLIOT: The Ultimate Vegetarian Collection (Hamlyn, $29.99) allows American readers to catch up, with recipes culled from her books "Veggie Chic" and "Vegetarian Supercook." Elliot is a minimalist. Her recipes are simple, flavorful and unfussy. "Preparation 5 minutes" is a not uncommon headnote to many of them, and 15 minutes is the norm. Eggplant Wellington, a Moroccan-spiced answer to the beef version, is as complicated as things get, which is not very. Lima bean salad with an Asian-style sweet chili dressing is more typical - five minutes and you're done. Nina Planck, an American farmer's daughter who opened several farmers' markets in London and, for a contentious few months, ran the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan, spreads the gospel of real food in her latest cookbook, THE REAL FOOD COOKBOOK: Traditional Dishes for Modern Cooks (Bloomsbury, $32). The idea is simple. Whether it's animal or vegetable, high-fat or low-fat, if it comes from a farm run on traditional lines, eat it. The point is to use high-integrity ingredients, put them together in pleasing combinations and let the flavors shine. Planck doesn't care for fad foods. She's suspicious of innovation, especially when it comes to vegetables. "Sexy and original combinations do not emerge from my kitchen, and my repertoire has not grown noticeably more sophisticated in 20 years of cooking," she writes. "Where vegetables are concerned, I'm not a subtle person." That's all right. Case in point: her recipe for sweet-onion custard, rich and amazingly versatile. She proposes variants that incorporate capers, chopped olives or diced shrimp. It can even be rolled out on puff pastry, cut into squares and served with drinks. Jennifer McGruther, author of THE NOURISHED KITCHEN: Farm-to-Table Recipes for the Traditional Foods Lifestyle (Ten Speed, paper, $27.99), marches in step with Planck. Her recipes are arranged by source - garden, field, pasture, range and so on, with essays along the way that explain, for example, why it's a bad idea to put hens on a vegetarian diet. She has a thing for beans. Two of her most appealing recipes are marrow beans baked with molasses and zinged with mustard seeds, and fat, mellow cannellini beans charged up with preserved lemon, rosemary and smoked paprika. It's not all beans, greens and mush- rooms. From the wild and the range come elk, venison and rabbit. McGruther even throws in a beef tongue for good measure and, on the sweet side, an archaic anomaly: a dense Portugal cake, made with almond flour and flavored with sweet sherry and rosewater. As every diner knows, it can get a little lonely on the tofu trail. From time to time, an atavistic hunger arises and demands, with a roar, food that flips the middle finger to the health police. That's where Texas comes in. Dean Fearing, who pioneered new Southwestern cuisine at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, has taken his sweet time to write a cookbook, but THE TEXAS FOOD BIBLE: From Legendary Dishes to New Classics (Grand Central, $30), written with Judith Choate and Eric Dreyer, hits it out of the park. Fearing opens strong, with a long list of killer sauces and salsas like poblano cream gravy, Tabasco butter sauce, pungent smoked-bacon gastrique and watermelon pico de gallo. Chiles, bacon and Shiner Bock beer loom large in his culinary universe, a wonderland of vibrant flavors and tingling spices. The idea that full-on Tex-Mex cuisine ever required a sales job seems laughable, but it's true. In his introduction, Fearing recalls his produce supplier's puzzled response - "What's that?" - when he tried to order cilantro in 1979. Here is God's plenty: bacon-jalapeño biscuits, corn and poblano chowder with shrimp hush puppies, pork tenderloin with a watermelon-jalapeño glaze, crab Benedict with cilantro hollandaise. Who can argue with any of that, although one might quibble with "Texas surf and turf," a kitchen collision of chicken-fried lobster, spiced beef tenderloin, spinach enchiladas and whipped potatoes in smoked tomato gravy. Also, it must be said that Fearing's nachos seem awfully fussy: individually curated triangles topped artistically with smoked chicken breasts, guacamole, cheese and jalapeños. But in his defense, this is how nachos used to be made. He may well be reacting to some pretty scary-sounding versions encountered on his travels, including sauerkraut nachos in Germany. Texas is a big state with a lot of food, which leaves plenty of room for THE HOMESICK TEXAN'S FAMILY TABLE: Lone Star Cooking From My Kitchen to Yours (Ten Speed, $29.99), Lisa Fain's fondly assembled compilation of gut-level favorites. This is potluck, church social, picnic food. The dishes are simple, easy to make and pretty irresistible. If you don't have access to jalapeño peppers or chipotles, don't even bother opening the book. Those who think Fearing gives them just about all the Texas they can handle can simply turn to Fain's first recipe, bacon-molasses breakfast sausage. She goes on in that vein, with recipes for pigs in a Texas-style jalapeño-cheddar blanket with jalapeño dipping sauce, bacon and chipotle corn pudding, the truly Ur-Texan chicken spaghetti, and molasses and spiced-pecan ice cream. Her "crazy nachos" are the rude, renegade answer to Fearing's recipe, a fabulous mess thrown together in a skillet. There is an America outside Texas. Tune it in with THE AMERICAN COOKBOOK: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes (DK, $25), Elena Rosemond-Hoerr and Caroline Bretherton's ode to the glories of American cuisine, from sea to shining sea. They make an odd couple. Rosemond-Hoerr, a North Carolina native, runs the blog Biscuits & Such. Bretherton is, it must be confessed, British. No matter. Together they have come up with some very clever recipes that honor the American spirit while taking old favorites in unexpected directions. Sloppy Joes made with curried lamb and served on chewy naan bread gives a sense of their expanded vocabulary. The twist can come with the main recipe or in suggested variants arranged along the margin: tomato and ricotta for mac 'n' cheese, for example. Or they suggest that you roll the leftover mac 'n' cheese into balls, coat them with Parmesan bread crumbs and fry them. BOLD: A Cookbook of Big Flavors (Workman, paper, $19.95), by Susanna Hoffman and Victoria Wise, also wraps the United States in a big, warm hug. The authors, both involved with Chez Panisse from its earliest days, survey the landscape and note with approval the "splendiferous mishmash" on view, an ethnic mingling and cross-fertilization that give them license to roam the Mediterranean and Asia for new flavors. The Americanness is more evident than the boldness, despite the book's title. "American rarebit," made with bourbon and pickled shallots, sounds a characteristic national note, as do the recipes for risotto with elk summer sausage and edamame, and corn, pecan and mint fritters. The interspersed historical mini-essays come in two varieties: strangely pointless (the story of Buffalo Bill) or genuinely fascinating (the Dominque, America's first chicken breed). Michael Ruhlman takes readers back to first principles in EGG: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient (Little, Brown, $40). The subtitle is no exaggeration, and Ruhlman, with great panache, proves it on page after page of his master class, which examines the egg whole and separated, cooked in the shell and out, and all subsets of the above, with recipes providing the demonstration. Ruhlman, who must have been a whiz at sentence diagraming in grade school, takes a rigorous, schematic view of his subject, reflected in the foldout flow chart inside the book's back cover. If you sign on for the course, which Ruhlman teaches brilliantly - "Flour and liquid make dough; flour and egg make cake" is one of his lapidary formulations - you'll never see eggs in the same way again. James Peterson has useful information to impart too. Anyone who has dithered over salmon on the grill or a roasting leg of lamb, fearful that medium-rare is sneakily becoming medium, will appreciate DONE, a Cook's Guide to Knowing When Food Is Perfectly Cooked (Chronicle, $27.50). The premise couldn't be simpler. With a profusion of photographs, Peterson shows all sorts of ingredients and preparations as they progress from underdone to just right to overdone, with explanatory essays off to the side. You might already feel confident about steaks and chops, but how often do you make roux? And can you tell when blond becomes brown, when brown becomes dark brown, and when you have gone too far and burned the darned thing? Peterson will hold your hand and guide you through. David Sterling's YUCATÁN: Recipes From a Culinary Expedition (University of Texas, $60) is a big book in every way. The author, who runs Los Dos Cooking School in Mérida, Mexico, has produced an authoritative account of a cuisine he has been immersed in for decades. Lavishly produced, with hundreds of photographs, "Yucatán" is part travelogue, part history, part encyclopedia, written in an unexpectedly casual, engaging style. This is the Yucatán from A to Z. Sterling starts with the ingredients, then lays out the territory: the Maya heartland, the farms, the coast. He travels from town to town, village to village, explaining local specialties, classics like panuchos, papadzules and salbutes, and the taste structure of the cuisine, a layering of Mayan staples, Spanish imports (Seville oranges play a big role) and, through its ports, exotica like Lebanese kibis and Dutch Edam cheese, sometimes served melted in sweet wafer flutes. The recipes can present challenges for the American cook, since quite a few depend on strictly local Mexican ingredients, especially the herb and spice mixtures, known as recados, which are to the Yucatán what moles are to Oaxaca. Sterling also includes homey dishes like black beans with pork and Motul-style eggs, well within reach of an American kitchen. If it's from the Yucatán, it's in there, either to marvel at or to make. ONLINE Don't mind heat and can't bear to get out of the kitchen? For a quick look at over a dozen more cookbooks, including some from contributors to The Times, visit nytimes.com/books. WILLIAM GRIMES, a former restaurant critic for The Times, is the author, most recently, of "Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York."

On the heels of her best-selling debut, The Homesick Texan Cookbook, popular food blogger Fain (homesicktexan.com) offers a new collection of comfort foods with unique Texas twists. She updates traditional macaroni salad by adding cumin, chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, and homemade sorghum mustard pickles and reimagines banana pudding as a scratch-made jarred dessert with crumbled peanut butter oatmeal cookies and vanilla custard. The author claims she's cooked these recipes in her tiny New York kitchen and assures readers they can also prepare them with minimal space and equipment. VERDICT Fain enlivens popular dishes with cheese, chiles, bacon, cilantro, lime, and other bold ingredients. Highly recommended. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Introduction There's this recurring dream that I have. I'm in a field--my great-grandma's Texas cornfield to be exact. A long table loaded with dishes, bowls, and platters full of good food stretches through the green stalks, and surrounding the table is most everyone I've ever known, both family and friends. My great-grandmother is there, and she waves me over. "Mighty fine food and mighty fine people to eat it!" she says as I take a seat. I then begin to eat a most memorable meal. It's been said that if you ask a Texan about their most memorable meal, they won't tell you about a coveted reservation at a five-star temple of dining, or an exotic feast served after an airplane flight halfway across the world. Nope, most Texans will say that their most memorable meal was home-cooked, shared at the family table. At least it's that way for me. But to be honest--despite my recurring dream--I hadn't really pondered the question until some New York friends and I were having dinner at my apartment. Now, before I continue, let me say I'm a seventh-generation Texan who happens to live in New York, and one of my favorite pastimes is to share the joys of my home state with my non-Texan friends. That particular evening was Tex-Mex night. As we sat around dipping tortilla chips into salsas and quesos, my friends talked about elaborate meals from fine establishments located in places such as Napa Valley or Spain. But when it was my turn to answer the question, even though I've enjoyed eating in a fair share of fancy restaurants, I realized my most memorable meal was the potluck we had for my grandparents' fiftieth anniversary. "A potluck?" said my friends. "Yes, a family potluck," I said. Then I told them about the meal. It was early July, and while Texas is notorious for being hotter than heck during the summer, that day was blessed with a gentle breeze. The party was held at my grandparents' North Texas farm--a beautiful spread of green pastures, rolling hills, and a pond--which has been continuously owned by my family since the 1840s. Through the course of the party, more than one hundred people came by to pay their respects--a lively gathering of folks young and old. I had recently moved to New York, so for me, a visit to the peaceful farm was a much-needed tonic from the craziness of city life. But beyond seeing the beautiful land, it was a treat to visit with dear family and friends, many of whom I hadn't seen in years. The food at the anniversary party was typical mid-summer Texan fare--cold salads, hot rolls, chicken, cake, and pies. The food was good, as it was all made with love. But what made the meal truly special were the connections made with family and friends, old and new. Whether it was getting to hug cousins I hadn't seen since we were kids, hearing stories about my grandparents' wedding from guests who had been there that day, or eating homemade pies rolled out with a pin that had been a hand-carved wedding gift fifty years earlier--the meal made me smile. It was a most memorable meal. And that's what The Homesick Texan's Family Table is all about--making memories at the table with those whom we love. No matter if they are memories of sitting together for a simple weeknight dinner or jostling for space during a large holiday gathering, some of my fondest moments have occurred at the family table. Perhaps you feel the same way. Sure, Texans spend time at the table for the major milestones such as births, weddings, anniversaries, and deaths. But we're also inclined to break bread together just because it's a clear evening, and our friend's back porch has a spectacular view of the sunset, or it's a Sunday afternoon in spring, and we want to toast the arrival of our state flower, the bluebonnet. No special occasion is ever really needed: Texans gather at the table simply to reconnect with our family and friends. This is not to say that food isn't also important. On the contrary, we love to eat and we love to eat well. And what we eat plays such an important role in our lives, if you're a homesick Texan such as myself, you'll find that cooking and eating certain dishes will instantly take you back home. For instance, on cold winter nights I'll brighten people's spirits with ranch-style beans and jalapeño cheese enchiladas. Or to commemorate Texas Independence Day, I might offer bowls of chili and slices of pecan pie. Fiery wings, peppery ribs, and choriqueso are always welcome before the big game. And when the world begins to awaken in spring, thick slices of balsamic-tarragon glazed ham along with strawberry shortcakes are a fine way to celebrate the world in bloom. The recipes I'm sharing with you are inspired by old favorites that I culled from recipe cards, dinners, and conversations with family and friends across the state, dishes that are as wide and varied as Texas itself. Whether it's seafood from the Coastal Bend, beef dishes from the arid west, Mexican-influenced dishes from the Rio Grande Valley, or traditionally Southern dishes from the east--Texas's food reflects the diversity of its regions and people. If you're familiar with my first book and my blog, you might be aware that I have been known to take certain liberties with Texas cuisine. For instance, I tend to eschew processed and packaged ingredients in favor of their fresh equivalents. I also try to cook with fruits and vegetables that are in season as much as possible. Simply put, my approach to cooking is to make each dish as flavorful as possible. This can be achieved, for example, by using fresh ingredients, by adding an extra squeeze of lime juice, or by throwing in a jalapeño slice or two. But while I may tweak the classics and create new dishes from old standards, their spirit and soul is always Texan. But enough about the book--let's get cooking. Please pull up a chair and join me at the table, where's there's plenty of mighty fine food, and mighty fine people to eat it. Excerpted from The Homesick Texan's Family Table: Lone Star Cooking from My Kitchen to Yours by Lisa Fain All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.