In ``The Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook'' (Little, Brown, $27.95), Kimball presents authentic and close-to-authentic recipes for the kind of simple New England cooking for which nostalgics hunger.
With chapters on ``Covered Dish Suppers,'' ``Noodles and Macaroni'' and ``The Soup Pot,'' he concentrates on home-cooked basics, many of which were culled from 40- and 50-year-old cookbooks and recipe pamphlets, then updated. For example, Blueberry Boy-Bait was the second-prize winner in the 1954 Pillsbury Recipe & Baking Contest.
In ``How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food'' (Macmillan, $25), Bittman, a kitchen bolshevik, gives classic Americana an international spin in an astounding 1,500 recipes, most of which he says can be made in 60 minutes or less.
Chicken cutlets grilled in sweet soy marinade become chicken teriyaki. Cook the cutlets with basil and tomato and you've gone Italian. Use lime and cilantro and you've gone south of the border. All spinoffs of the same, basic recipe.
The encylopedic book is marketed to beginner cooks, a '90s version, Bittman says, of the original ``Joy of Cooking,'' that, unlike the latest edition, was written by one person.
Bittman, who pens the weekly Minimalist column in the New York Times Food section, breaks rules and thrives on shortcuts - ``I think any way you do a recipe that works for you is fine.'' But, like Kimball, his mission is to nudge neophytes into culinary exploration at home.
Despite recent death knells for home-cooked meals in the media, these two self-taught cooks believe in home-based kitchen duty.
``Part of my role is to make sure people don't only use home replacement meals,'' said Bittman, 48, from his home in Woodbridge, Conn. ``I want them to realize that learning to cook is rewarding, fun and easier than they probably thought it was going to be.''
