THEY SURE ARE loud, those hotheads who view any suggestion that Americans might make an effort to learn something about the rest of the world as a claim that the terrorists had something to teach us. But let’s imagine, for the nonce, that they’re still outnumbered — quietly — by those of us who can’t help but wonder if, say, a foreign policy based on the assumption that ignorance is domestic bliss will prove shortsighted, even self-destructive. Ditto an educational system based on that assumption. Ditto a corporate-run approach to globalism that verges (ironically) on solipsism.

All of which suggests that our salvation as a nation lies in cookbooks. If that sounds flip, it shouldn’t. Our salvation as a nation will some day, if not now, lie in our willingness to unite more fully with the global community. And surely one of the most profound ways for different cultures to engage one another — profound precisely because it’s central to mundane, everyday experience — is through their cuisines. We are what we eat, after all, on a social as well as a personal scale. By extension, we must in some sense become what we cook. So though frequenting ethnic restaurants is a step in the right direction, re-creating their specialties yourself means embarking on a full-fledged journey toward understanding, as you transform your own kitchen, if only for an afternoon, into a Sicilian, Russian, or Afghan one. The following selection of cookbooks — four new releases, four classics — generously affords you that very opportunity.

Madhur Jaffrey’s Step-by-Step Cooking. Madhur Jaffrey (HarperCollins, $37.50).

Madhur Jaffrey thinks of everything. Her latest in a 30-year string of books on Indian and Asian cookery, oversize and splashed with the colors of Eastern silks and spices, is a compendium of loving detail — the kind of book that, over time, becomes a close kitchen companion. The head notes, for instance, never miss an opportunity to recommend substitutes for hard-to-find ingredients or to make smart serving suggestions, in addition to providing a little background. Jaffrey’s catalogues of equipment and techniques, along with her glossary of ingredients, leave nothing to chance. A section on meal planning offers both basic and fancy sample menus for each of the book’s nine featured cuisines. And there are plenty of photographs to illustrate the trickier procedures. As for the recipes, they really go the distance: from easy to laborious, and from old stand-bys — Indian samosas and Japanese tempura, for instance — to genuine surprises, such as savory Korean egg custard and sweet walnut soup from Hong Kong. A must-try: Vietnamese smoky eggplant with pork in lime sauce, which takes 15 minutes at most to prepare, looks luscious, and tastes enormously flavorful.

Tastes and Tales of Norway. Siri Lise Doub (Hippocrene Books, $24.95).

Let’s face it: Norwegian food will never be the Next Big Thing. It literally and figuratively lacks spice, as well as the variety and silk-purse-from-a-sow’s-ear ingenuity of the world’s esteemed cuisines. But the recipes themselves — as part of a cultural study that explores Norway’s strange and romantic history, hardy inhabitants, epic lore, and icy landscape — can be fascinating. Among excerpts from Norse myths and Viking chronicles, snow-filled photos, and travel tips for everything from renting ski cabins to taking fiddle lessons, recipes for such curiosities as sour-cream porridge and herring burgers begin to seem less like actual instructions and more like the colorful artifacts of a race of hunters, seafarers, and fishermen. These were people for whom variety meant fish, meat, or fish — brined, smoked, salted, poached, pickled, boiled, fried, grilled, or baked.

Many of Doub’s recipes are in fact comically, charmingly simple, especially in the chapter on Koldt Bord (Norwegian for " smorgasbord " ), which reads like a professional hostess’s retro dream. There are rarely more than two or three steps — and baby steps at that ( " Spread butter on bread. Place cheese slices on top " ). Nor are there many ingredients; even the national dish, fån i kål, consists of nothing but mutton, cabbage, salt, and pepper. Then again, for ancient concoctions like Warrior’s Mead, Doub warns, " you’ll need a stainless steel pan that holds 44 pints, a 35-pint demijohn with a rubber seal, and a fermentation lock. " Oh, sure — check, check, check. But all told, this is an honest, heartfelt homage to the oddity of Norwegian food.

The Scent of Orange Blossoms. Kitty Morse and Danielle Mamane (Ten Speed Press, $24.95); The Polish Country Kitchen Cookbook. Sophie Hodorowicz Knab (Hippocrene Press, $24.95).

Now that tradition itself, as a concept, has become a thing of the past for most Americans, nostalgia for tradition seems to be thriving. These two new releases make rather moving, vibrant attempts to preserve the memories of tight-knit communities long gone or nearly so. Orange Blossoms is dedicated to the Sephardic Jews who centuries ago escaped Spain to make a new home for themselves in Morocco. It’s a lovely little book, designed to capture the rich hues and intricate decorative style of the ancestral land; the century-old family photographs with which it’s sprinkled are uniquely expressive and inviting. And the recipes, both everyday and holiday, make a Jew from Oklahoma like myself green with envy; somebody owes me some turkey couscous and wheat berries with sweet potatoes, not to mention almond-walnut macaroons.

Orange Blossoms may be the most delicate book reviewed here, but Polish Country Kitchen is probably the most ponderous, being as much an extensively researched history of Polish cookery, foodstuffs, and traditions as it is a cookbook. Diagrams of butter churns, photographs of stone root cellars, catalogues of barnyard superstitions, and the scientific names of local mushrooms all compete for space with the recipes — many of which are more intellectually than literally appetizing (I’m thinking here of duck’s-blood soup and jellied pig’s feet). On the other hand, recipes for such baked goods as sweet cheese pirogi and placek — a simple yet rich streusel-topped bread — are real saving graces. As a painstaking account of daily life on the farms and in the kitchens of bygone Polish peasants, Knab’s tome makes poignant and serious reading for dabblers in the subject.

Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey through Southeast Asia. Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan, $45).

What the title doesn’t mention says it all: Hot Sour Salty Sweet is a paean to the striking detail, the nuance, the little things that quietly make the big things what they are. Whys and wherefores are relegated to the subtitle. Such emphasis on the evocative over the explanatory is precisely what makes this cookbook so special — well, that and the sumptuous full-page photographs, which, combined with a black-and-wasabi-green color scheme and shimmery gold endpapers, take it well beyond the coffee table to the pedestal.

It’s narrative, then — that of the authors’ trip down the Mekong River — that serves as the organizing principle here, not theory. We’re offered impressionistic sketches rather than didactic accounts of Southern China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the foods thereof, so that the whole feels more like a learning experience than a lesson. The very first chapter’s devotion to sauces, chili pastes, and salsas confirms the emphasis on capturing flavor. A case in point is the exuberant Cambodian pomelo salad, at once citrus-sour, coconut-sweet, bird-chili-hot, and peanut-salty, which practically makes itself. Another is the chapter titled " Snacks and Street Food " : with its leaf wraps and Saigon subs, it provides literal slices of bustling village and city life in a way that the " main " chapters consisting of entrées cannot. In keeping with this book’s sly nature, then, let’s give it the oxymoronic label of " new classic. "

The Book of Latin American Cooking. Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz (HarperCollins, $16).

Even a cursory glance through this collection of recipes registers the mind-boggling bounty of the Americas. Take soup as an example: Ortiz provides recipes for avocado, squash blossom, green plantain, peanut, sweet potato, Jerusalem artichoke, corn, chayote, lime, chickpea, black bean — and still more. Or check out the glossary of ingredients: the list of pepper species runs four pages. From a culinary standpoint, the continent could hardly have gone wrong — nor did it. Between its roots in the foods of the indigenous peoples (including the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas) and the growth spurts brought on by the influences of conquistadors and immigrants alike, Ortiz explains, Latin American cuisine has flowered in every direction. Her mission is to follow them all, so she includes, for instance, six variations on a single recipe as it has developed from country to country. She offers a glimpse of such Latin exotica as Peruvian potatoes and eggs in pigeon-and-walnut sauce or Guatemalan radish-and-fried-pork-rind salad. She also illustrates the enormous range of cuisines whose reputation has come to rest, unfairly, on meat, beans, corn, and lard for deep-frying. Those elements are present, of course, but so are lighter ones, such as the use of citrus as a cooking liquid and plantain leaves for steaming. That said, however, the ultra-rich Brazilian dish known as Vatapá de Camarão e Peixe is one of this book’s culinary triumphs. Enrobing shrimp in a sauce of cashews, almonds, breadcrumbs, and coconut milk, it’s practically narcotic.

Mediterranean Cooking. Paula Wolfert (HarperPerennial, $20); The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. Claudia Roden (Alfred A. Knopf, $35).

You probably can’t use the words " ethnic " and " classic " in the same sentence without also mentioning either Paula Wolfert or Claudia Roden.

Actually, you probably can’t mention either of them without mentioning both, so closely do their niches overlap. Which means that, inevitably, you’re going to be comparing the one to the other, choosing a favorite. So here are a few words on their respective styles, to give your decision a head start.

Roughly speaking, Roden paints food history in broad, bright, lively strokes, whereas Wolfert is a pointillist who aims to pinpoint sources and connect the dots. In fact, that goal seems almost an obsession in Mediterranean Cooking, which is filled with passages documenting every conceivable use for this or that ingredient from every corner of the region — she names 18 different preparations involving olives, for instance, and at least 20 combinations of garlic and olive oil. Actually, Wolfert devotes each chapter to a different ingredient — one to cheese, one to nuts, and so on; the foodie in you will find the unusual grouping " in terms of key flavors " illuminating, although the cook in you will be relieved to find an index that arranges the recipes by type. Wolfert also has a nose for the exotic, sniffing out such conversation pieces as Tunisian lamb-brain-and-egg turnovers, French olive-and-lemon mousse, and Italian hot fried figs and black-grape ice. As for me, the Lebanese fattoush — a simple herb-and-pita salad — has become a bracingly aromatic and refreshing favorite.

I’ve got a crush on one of Roden’s Lebanese recipes as well — lamb meatballs with pine nuts and tomato sauce, punched up with cinnamon and raisins (and it’s easy to make, too; notice a theme here?). As a whole, furthermore, this has got to be one of the sexiest cookbooks around. It’s not just the gorgeous photographs in which everything fairly glistens in olive oil or honey, and suggestive shapes take center stage; it’s also the slew of recipes laden with luscious produce, from lamb stew with creamy eggplant sauce to almond-and-rosewater-stuffed dates to just about anything with kumquats. And Roden’s own passion for her subject suffuses her smart commentary. This one is a keeper.

Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthiet@bu.edu.

Issue Date: November 29 - December 7, 2001

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