Down-Home Around the World

By Mimi Sheraton

The meatloaf-and-mashed-potatoes theme so fashionable at many trendy restaurants has apparently sparked a hunger for nostalgia in America's home cooks. At least that is the impression one gets from the season's crop of cookbooks. Their titles and dust-jacket blurbs are cozy with words like down- home, traditional, family and old-time, as in "Give me that old-time culinary religion."

Several of the more valuable works are devoted to the food of the American South, a region that provides the nation's richest and most colorful local cuisine. The best entry is Southern Food, by John Egerton (Knopf; 408 pages; $24.95). More a social study than a mere cookbook, it includes the history and lore of dishes and Southern manners, a lengthy bibliography and suggested restaurants where travelers can sample typical fare. Although ingredients are not listed separately, recipes are clearly presented and range from simple coleslaw and iced tea, to elegant oysters Bienville and planked shad.

Egerton's book is a tough act to follow, even for Craig Claiborne and Paul Prudhomme. Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking (Times Books; 364 pages; $19.95) is engaging and low key. The New York Times food editor was born in Mississippi, where his mother ran a boardinghouse. Many of these recipes were hers; others were suggested by Claiborne's friends and colleagues. Dishes range from soul to stylish Creole. Among them are such classics as fried chicken and beaten biscuits, as well as what Claiborne bills as "nouveau Southern," charcoal-grilled stuffed quail. Too bad he couldn't resist cliched crowd pleasers like blackened redfish.

Recipes described in Prudhomme's cookbooks usually read better than they taste in his New Orleans restaurant, K-Paul's. The Prudhomme Family Cookbook (Morrow; 446 pages; $19.95) dishes up "old-time Louisiana recipes by the eleven Prudhomme brothers and sisters." This richly fragrant fare, based on lusty ingredients and strong Cajun seasonings, is not for dieters or the faint-palated. Jambalayas, boudins and gumbos abound. Prudhomme not only contributed his blackened-redfish recipe to Claiborne's book but also repeats it here, along with far more appropriate recipes for blackening chicken, hamburgers and pork chops, a technique that relies on spices and an almost white-hot iron skillet.

Those who like to entertain with "slightly different" dishes should be pleased by Gene Hovis's Uptown Down Home Cookbook (Little, Brown; 235 pages; $17.95). This culinary memoir is built around the foods of the author's North Carolina childhood, but it also encompasses recipes that Hovis developed in a career as a New York City food stylist and caterer -- chicken breasts in orange-cognac sauce, or a watercress, cucumber and avocado soup.

Traveling southwest, we come to Dallas and the elegant hotel the Mansion on Turtle Creek, whose chef, Dean Fearing, offers The Mansion on Turtle Creek Cookbook (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 287 pages; $25). Fearing has adapted the spicy Indian-Mexican-Spanish influences of the region to fashionable nouvelle creations like lobster taco with yellow-tomato salsa and jicama salad. His intricate arrangements and subtle desert colors make his creations as intriguing to the eye as to the palate, although nearly impossible for the average home cook to duplicate.

New England boasts the nation's second richest regional kitchen. The L.L. Bean Book of New New England Cookery, by Judith and Evan Jones (Random House; 669 pages; $22.50), informs us that it continues to expand. Judging by some of the newer dishes, that is not always for the better. This huge, handsome compendium, written for the Maine-based mail-order outfitter, is at its best with traditional specialties: rhubarb cakes and cobblers; codfish in chowders, cakes and Portuguese stews; and all the lobster, salmon and blueberry treats so rarely found elsewhere in the country. But the italicized new is the operative word, and interesting as the creations of young New England restaurant chefs may be, they water down the regional impact of the book. Judith Jones, one of the country's most respected cookbook editors, provides recipes that are explicit and complete. Her husband Evan, an accomplished writer on American food, makes the travel and history narratives equally tempting.

Down-home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the theme of The White House Family Cookbook, by Henry Haller (Random House; 441 pages; $19.95). Executive chef at that august address for 21 years, the Swiss-born Haller retired in October, just as this reverential book was coming off the presses. Most of the recipes are for hearty, homey family favorites that reflect the regional backgrounds of Presidents from Lyndon Johnson (who favored Texas-style chili con carne, lamb hash and deer sausage), through Gerald Ford (lusty, German-influenced fare like sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage, apple pancakes and a revolting curried tuna casserole), to Ronald Reagan (hamburger soup, roast-beef hash and, in more sophisticated moments, the Italian veal-shank dish called osso buco). Haller presents some macabre juxtapositions of historic events with personal reminiscences. To get through his difficult final hours in the White House, Richard Nixon requested a breakfast more substantial than his usual wheat germ and coffee. Haller rustled up corned-beef hash with a poached egg. Nixon ate it in his favorite Lincoln Sitting Room, then signed the resignation handed to him by Alexander Haig.

Down-home, of course, is a locale that can be found anywhere in the world. Patience Gray, a well-known food writer in England, tells us, "In the last 20 years I have shared the fortunes of a stone carver . . . Marble determined where, how and among whom we lived; always in primitive conditions." Thus did they feast and fast in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. Honey from a Weed (Harper & Row; 374 pages; $25) is a rich and idiosyncratic ramble through those festivals and harvests, and it makes perhaps the most enticing book of the year. There are detailed recipes for such local delicacies as grapes in syrup from Greece and an Italian fried chicken in walnut sauce. There are tantalizing myths about ingredients and observations about subjects like the olive field: "Like the pains of child-birth, one quickly forgets the olive-picking pains." Forced to work with primitive utensils and sparse ingredients, Gray notes that "good cooking is the result of a balance struck between frugality and liberality."

The rich tradition of European peasant cooking is the scope of The Old World Kitchen, by Elisabeth Luard (Bantam; 538 pages; $22.50). History, lore and reasonably complete recipes are presented entertainingly and informatively. Luard ranges from Ireland, with its potato dishes and soda bread, to Turkey, where pilaf and pita are favorites, and from Scandinavia, with its herring, to Spain, with its varieties of olives and rich paellas.

Peter Grunauer and Andreas Kisler present a "new approach" to Austrian cooking in Viennese Cuisine (Doubleday; 230 pages; $24.95). The nockerln and goulash soup, the schnitzels and Schlagobers desserts, the braised game and hearty boiled beef all date back to the Habsburgs. What is new is the stylish lightness of presentation without sacrifice of classic flavor -- features that made Manhattan's Vienna Park and Vienna '79 the extraordinary restaurants they were when Grunauer owned them and Kisler was his chef.

Exotically esoteric but nonetheless appealing is the food described in Lebanese Mountain Cookery, by Mary Laird Hamady (Godine; 278 pages; $19.95). Here are all the yogurts and fresh pickles, the simple grills and whole-grain delicacies, the sesame oils and seeds, and the dried fruits that health-food advocates sound off about but rarely deliver in palatable form. This is a sensuous food world that is rarely well represented in restaurants outside its homeland: pungent sumac, sweet lemons and pomegranate seeds, mellow kabobs and oily stuffed vine leaves, palate-whetting maza, or appetizers, and flaky honey-gilded phyllo pastries. The instructions are brief, but experienced cooks should have no trouble.

The south of almost anyplace, including Italy, seems In this year. Too long has that region's savory fare been dubbed declasse by snobbish restaurateurs. The Food of Southern Italy, by Carlo Middione (Morrow; 330 pages; $25), is virtually an ode to it. The subtle recipes provided by Middione, a San Francisco delicatessen owner, refutes the accusation of heaviness so often leveled against this cuisine because of poor preparation in cheap eateries. As described here, the food, whose origins range from Lazio and Abruzzi down to Sicily and over to Sardinia, sparkles with freshness and lightness, especially the fish and shellfish dishes, the many pasta and vegetable combinations and the yeasty breads and pizzas. Middione includes menu and wine suggestions for each dish, and his recipes are detailed -- the instructive paragraphs too much so, and hence a bit hard to follow.

And what could be more southern than the Southern Hemisphere, specifically Australia? It is the subject of The Down Under Cookbook: An Authentic Guide to Australian Cooking and Eating Traditions, by Graeme Newman (Harrow & Heston; 168 pages; $8.95). Recipes may be a little hard to reproduce, especially when they call for witchety grubs and tiger snake, but the book provides amusing insight into a culture Americans are beginning to explore ever more avidly.

There is not much that is down-home about microwave cooking. In fact, that odorless, near instant preparation may take all the romance out of the kitchen entirely, obviating as it does the appreciation of a dish that cooks long and slowly, filling the house with its perfume as the ingredients develop. Nevertheless, Microwave Gourmet, by Barbara Kafka (Morrow; 575 pages; $19.95), should help those who have bought these electronic miracles and now wonder why. A restaurant consultant and food columnist, Kafka stresses cooking in a microwave, not heating. She emphasizes dishes made from scratch, many of them traditional in origin if not in execution. However, one might argue with her overwrought prose and with many of her food preferences (mayonnaise on gefilte fish, garlic in Manhattan clam chowder, bottled spaghetti sauce). Kafka suggests the microwave for ridiculous purposes, such as preparing white sauce and melting butter. A more serious caveat: manufacturers, concerned about the danger of burns, disagree with Kafka's recommendation to deep fry in a microwave.

A few other attractive if less ambitious down-home cooking candidates deserve passing notice. Certainly, bread baking has strong nostalgic appeal. Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads (Simon & Schuster; 748 pages; $24.95) is a revised and expanded version of his previous, standard work. He explains new equipment and techniques with improved yeasts and flours. Onion- triticale bread and a cheese bread ring are two of the more intriguing additions. It is doubtful that one could think of a single type of bread not represented here in at least six variations.

Finally, no sampling of cookbooks would be complete without one of the genre's inevitable celebrity offerings. A typically vacuous entry this season is The Jill St. John Cookbook (Random House; 259 pages; $19.95), a bit of fluff that begins with the actress's expression of gratitude to Eastman Kodak for providing film and processing. "Thanks, Kodak!" she says, and well she might, for the collection of glistening photographs, mostly of the monthly food columnist herself, are this volume's main, albeit limited, attraction.