Here are some suggestions for enhancing the cookbook libraries of those on your gift list - and your own:
Alice Waters, credited with bringing "fresh and local" to the fore in American cooking, has her say in The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (Clarkson Potter). She starts with how to stock and equip your kitchen and proceeds to her favorite recipes, from a simple vinaigrette to a six-part Provençal-Style Fish Soup with Rouille.
A reissue of the 1974 classic, Beard on Food: The Best Recipes and Kitchen Wisdom from the Dean of American Cooking (Bloomsbury), brings James Beard's essays and recipes to a new generation.
Meanwhile, home diva Martha Stewart offers a dual perspective in The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics (revised and updated) and The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics (Clarkson Potter).
For basics, consider the revised Good Housekeeping Cookbook (Hearst), a primer for new homemakers since 1903. And Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison (Broadway Books), the 10th anniversary edition, which brings us to one of the year's significant food subjects - vegetarian cooking.
Vegetarian/vegan fare has entered the American mainstream thanks to Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food (John Wiley & Sons). The author, who says he's cut his consumption of meat 60 percent to 70 percent, provides basic cooking techniques, charts, tips, illustrated how-to guides, and 2,000-plus recipes to satisfy strict vegans and flexitarians (i.e. occasional omnivores).
For purists, there's Dreena Burton's Eat, Drink & Be Vegan (Arsenal) and Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero (Marlowe).
