Cookbooks

Restaurants get a bad rap for serving gargantuan portions of food and contributing to Americans' expanding waistlines. But what if something in your home were equally guilty? Something as innocent as . . . "Joy of Cooking"? The classic cookbook, first published in 1931, has done some girth-expanding of its own, a study has found. Published as a letter Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the report examined 18 classic recipes found in seven editions of the book from 1936 to 2006.

Anna Thomas, a few canvas bags hanging on one arm, wanders the rows of the Ventura farmers market just eight hours before her guests are to sit around the table in the soaring great room of her home in Ojai. She chooses yellow onions and prune plums, leeks and walnuts as an ocean breeze cools the shoppers on one of the hottest days of the season. Though she's hardly a familiar name today, Thomas is the one who in the early 1970s lured many a hungry idealist rebelling against a meat-and-potatoes childhood into the kitchen with "The Vegetarian Epicure," a seminal book that came out of nowhere to sell more than 1 million copies.

When the London restaurant Moro opened in 1997, I remember reading that to research Muslim Mediterranean cuisine, the chef-couple -- Samuel and Samantha Clark -- spent some months traveling around Spain and Morocco in an old camper van. They simply drove around and went to markets and cooked with people they met along the way. I loved the idea of such a direct experience of the cuisine. So when I happened to see "Moro: The Cookbook" at the Spanish Table store in Seattle a few years ago, I grabbed a copy.

The culinary tag "Southeast Asian" has cachet in American foodie circles even though it has not yet achieved the all-purpose buzzword status of "Mediterranean" (though I seem to recall that someone has invented a "Southeast Asian turkey burger"). Books about the food of this vast and complex region are multiplying fast. And as with Mediterranean, surveys that encompass at least a few locales somehow get cooks grasping principles faster than ones focused on the food of one place.