Cookbook

AMANDA HESSER had her doubts. Six years ago, when the sprightly New York Times food columnist, author and cofounder of food52.com signed on to distill 150 years of Times recipes into one cookbook, she wasn't sure she was up to the task. The breadth of the project intimidated even this seasoned writer. "I worried about doing a good job," she said. "The time period was so vast. I felt I needed some guidance. " Hesser, who was food editor of the Sunday magazine when she left the Times for digital ventures in 2008, put out a call to readers to send her their crumpled, stained, most-loved recipes.

Steven Spielberg likes his fried matzo made with half-and-half. Baseball great Rich Ashburn rates the heat of his chili "two-alarm. " These and other culinary tidbits are to be found in an eclectic recipe collection from the famous and not-so-famous - one tasteful way in which a local independent school is raising money. Though cookbooks have long been considered money-makers for schools and organizations, Plymouth Meeting Friends School took the idea a step further by having its students gather some of the material for Cooking With Friends.

They dipped tiny strawberries, one by one, into thick yellow cream, feeding them to each other as they sat at the high window and watched, melancholy, as the sun set over Paris, over their last night together. Dessert doesn't get much more romantic than that: American poet Langston Hughes feeding fraises de bois to Anne Marie Coussey at his garret window, beneath them the City of Light. Even if she did end up returning to England and her waiting fiance. But there's more than one recipe for literary passion, and Jacqueline Deval serves those recipes up voluptuously in her book, Reckless Appetites: A Culinary Romance (Ecco Press, $21)

Old cookbooks can be great fun to read for lots of reasons. The recipes may seem hopelessly troublesome or dated. The copy makes it clear who's doing the cooking for "the man of the house. " The quaint illustrations show aproned housewives - always smiling, never harried - wielding wooden spoons like scepters. "The Philadelphia Cook Book of Town and Country" by Anna Wetherill Reed (Bramhall House), which I borrowed from the library of Deux Cheminees owner Fritz Blank, is one of those step-back-in-time books.

You want to eat more fish. Ironically for the conscientious consumer, that has become more difficult to do, thanks to a wave of confusing information. Modern seafood cookbooks must explain and enlighten as well as offer accessible recipes; some have risen to this challenge better than others. Barton Seaver has hit the right notes with his first cookbook For Cod and Country (Sterling Epicure, $30; 175 recipes). For the Washington, D.C. chef, preparing seafood remains a personal enterprise.

Six-year-old Katie Harr has a flair for creativity, whether it's making artwork, baking treats with her mother, or mixing a science concoction. Four years ago, on Christmas Eve in 2002, the Montgomery Township resident was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a childhood cancer, a month before her third birthday. Near the end of Katie's 26 months of daily chemotherapy, her parents asked her how she wanted to celebrate the milestone, and she replied, "I want to make a cookbook that we can sell, and I want to give the money to other kids with cancer to help them get better.

For 55 years The Silver Spoon cookbook was printed only in Italian. Periodically updated and expanded, the 1,200-page classic never went out of print or lost its appeal. No surprise then that when an English-language edition was finally released on Nov. 8, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, the first printing of 200,000 copies (at $39.95 each from Phaidon Press) sold out before Christmas. Now in its fourth printing, The Silver Spoon is turning out to be the blockbuster of all cookbooks.

"When Americans think about Sicily, it's not usually about food. " Over dinner at Monte Carlo Living Room on South Street this month, Sicilian cookbook author Giovanna Tornabene had, not surprisingly, suggested that it was time we shifted our national gaze from the island's infamous "family. " "You don't think of us as eating. You think of us as women dressed in black and men with guns. It is what you see in the pictures," Tornabene said as her mother and coauthor, Wanda Tornabene (who speaks no English)

Veronica Jane O'Mara and Fionnuala O'Reilly are Dubliners who know their food and their Irish literature. O'Mara admits to having an abiding love for secondhand-book shops, puns and rather long lunches. O'Reilly has supplemented her passion for food with her love of Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks. Together, they were the perfect match to write an Irish literary cookbook, a marriage of letters and ladyfingers that allows the reader to cook and eat in the company of giants of literature.

And now, the top 10 reasons Dave's Mom has written a cookbook: The Number 10 reason: Pocket Books was paying her to go to Philadelphia. There they were, looking every bit the senior-citizen couple from Indianapolis: Dave's Mom, Dorothy, and her husband, Hans. That's "Dave" as in David Letterman of CBS's The Late Show, "Mom" as in Mother and "Dorothy" as in - more on that later. Dave's Mom, a trim 75-year-old in a white print dress and sensible shoes, was in town last month to host a Book and the Cook dinner at Circa on Walnut Street.