Cookbook

Editor's note: Here are two recipe excerpts from The Essential New York Times Cookbook , including the lively commentary and recipe history from author Amanda Hesser that make this book both a joy and an education to read. Purple Plum Torte is both the most often published and the most requested recipe in the Times archives. By my count, Marian Burros (who was given the recipe by Lois Levine, with whom Burros wrote Elegant but Easy ) ran the recipe in the paper twelve times.

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.

Joan Nathan is the thinking person's cookbook author, known for bringing the past into the present and telling the stories of ordinary people whose histories remind us why food matters. Primarily associated with Jewish cooking in the United States and Israel, Nathan was in town recently to speak about her latest book: Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, (Knopf Books, 2010). France? The country where women don't get fat? To many, Jewish and French cooking styles seem mutually exclusive.

Author and Food Network star Ina Garten has a new cookbook, her seventh, out this fall, titled Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That? (Clarkson Potter). She chatted over the phone from her "barn" in East Hampton, N.Y., about her life, her new book, and a few of the recipes. Question: Is there really a need for one more cookbook? Answer: If I had been asked that question, never having written one, I would have said no. But now, having done it, I have a very clear vision of what I want a book to be: I want a very edited group of recipes, not 500; I want a gorgeous photo of what each one looks like done that looks delicious; and I want recipes that read like, "I could actually do that.

Allegra Goodman's enchanting and sensuous new novel, "The Cookbook Collector" (Dial Press, $26), operates in pairs and opposites. Two sisters, one of them with two suitors. Two worlds, separate, even as they coalesce. Goodman has written a romance that dissects ambition with a jeweler's precision as well as a culinary novel with a collection of rare cookbooks at its core. She also has produced a novel of ideas peopled by full-blooded characters. This taxonomy of dot-com ambition is a narrative about the turning of the wheel of fortune, the one that the ancients and medievals believed in, not the one co-opted by television.

At first, Jeannine Ginsburg just intended to put a few recipes in writing - favorite dishes her husband, Steve, could cook for their young sons. The year was 2008, and Ginsburg's breast cancer was back with a vengeance, metastasizing throughout her body. She began making a "bucket list" of things to do. Ginsburg, now 53, knew the dishes her family loved: her bean, barley, and mushroom soup; her leek, mushroom, and sweet potato quiche. She wanted Steve to know how to make those for their boys.

Jonathan Adams is in the upstairs kitchen at Pub & Kitchen, the gastropub at 20th and Lombard, fiddling with his second batch of practice crepes. The first batch had come out like pancakes, not a good look for Crepes Marcelle, plump with cognac pastry cream. It is 12:23 p.m., and he is alone, save the wail of the Stones' '70s classic Sticky Fingers . As a hip, cutting-edge chef (at Salt and Snackbar) Adams, 32, was better known as "Jonny Mac," a master of methylcellulose and edgy molecular gastronomy.

Uber-chef Thomas Keller takes on American comfort food, with 350 pages of lush photos and laborious recipes for classics like fried chicken and split pea soup - and trust us, Paula Deen it's not. Moosewood Restaurant dishes out another vegetarian cookbook, this time with less cheese, more whole grains, even more vegetables - and some very tasty recipes - in its charming no-frills design. And the Lee Brothers give us another gem: quick and easy Southern dishes updated from the long-simmered and the deep-fried, presented along with charming food memories from the South.

Every well-used kitchen has at least one favorite cookbook, its pages spattered with oil and stuck together by the mortar of long-risen dough. Like a song that resonates in time, reminding us of where we were when we first heard it played, a treasured recipe book brings us back to a delicious memory. Whether it was mastering a dish to impress a prospective suitor, or experimenting with exotic ingredients in the world of ethnic cuisine, the sense of exhilarating accomplishment and discovery rushes back every time we take the book off the shelf.

Sheila Lukins, who inspired a generation of home cooks with her 1982 The Silver Palate Cookbook, died Sunday at 66. She was diagnosed with brain cancer three months ago. The Silver Palate is one of the top-selling cookbooks of all time. Lukins wrote it with her business partner, Julee Rosso, after they opened the Silver Palate, a gourmet market, in New York. Two years ago, in advance of the publication of a 25th-anniversary edition of the cookbook, Inquirer Food Editor Maureen Fitzgerald offered her reminiscences about favorite recipes and spoke with Lukins about her cookbook.