Banquet of books

The cookbooks keep coming: Beautiful, glossy, exotic cooking/travelogues; secrets and shortcuts from Food Network stars; impossibly perplexing recipes from über-chefs; quick and easy dinners for busy parents; and, of course, the many treatises on following the song of the season, shopping, cooking and eating local.

There are plenty of stories in the current crop of books: the chef who took a break from his day job at Chez Panisse and moved to Paris; recovering the lost recipes of New Orleans; a journey through Turkey that produced gorgeous photographs and, surprisingly, useful recipes.

More and more of us love to linger over these books - as evidenced by the explosion of cookbook publishing over the years - if only to dream of the elaborate feast, or to swear at the insanity of pressed quail, liver and pastirma terrine with spiced almond butter, or, the most rewarding of all, to actually be inspired to put pan to stove to create something new.

Here is the holiday roundup of this year's cookbook offerings:

Cooking Up a Storm
Chronicle Books. $24.95

One unexpected casualty of Hurricane Katrina, an especially cruel blow to food-obsessed New Orleanians: An entire city's worth of family recipe boxes and newspaper clippings had been washed away by the flood.

The Times-Picayune newspaper undertook the task of reassembling its readers' favorite dishes in a column called "Exchange Alley," republishing the most-requested hits from editions past, as well as new offerings from chefs and home cooks. Assembled into a new book by Times-Picayune food editor Judy Walker and legendary food writer Marcelle Bienvenu, it's like rediscovering a treasure once thought lost, a stellar trove of 225 Creole and Cajun recipes that bring the flavors of pre-storm New Orleans vividly back to life.

There is a full complement of well-wrought classics, from jambalaya to red beans and myriad variations on gumbo, that make a fine primer on the NOLA essentials. But there are also dozens of lesser-known local gems, from Austin Leslie's "Creole soul" mirliton gumbo to Drago's grilled oysters and white chocolate bread pudding from the Palace Cafe, enabling any New Orleanian still "abroad" to truly conjure a taste of home. There are even recipes for classic cocktails like the Sazerac and Ramos Gin Fizz to celebrate those meals with a proper French Quarter toast.

- Craig LaBan

Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics
By Ina Garten.
Clarkson Potter. $35