Food Writer

Take a bow, Book and Cook organizers. The five-day event concluded its ninth year on Sunday with some impressive numbers: 12,400 people attended more than 50 restaurant events, spent $443,000 on food and bought approximately $50,000 worth of cookbooks. Judy Faye, whose City Celebrations company produces The Book and The Cook for the city of Philadelphia and the Center City Proprietors Foundation, said another 12,200 people attended the two-day Book and Cook Fair. "My feeling, personally, is that this was an antidote to cabin fever," said the tireless Faye, who popped in at 40 of the events.

The Book and the Cook, the food fest that brings chef-authors from around the country to Philadelphia every spring, will return March 24-28. Over those five days, more than 50 authors will take part in 68 events that include lunches, dinners, beer and wine tastings, autograph sessions, buffets and cooking demonstrations. The events are open to the public; prices range from $15 to $75 a person. Some of the best-known names in the cooking world will be here. They include longtime New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne; TV chefs Pierre Franey, Graham Kerr and Nathalie Dupree; Chez Panisse proprietor Alice Waters; Patricia Wells, restaurant critic for The International Herald Tribune; New York Times food writer Molly O'Neill and beer expert Michael Jackson.

QUOTE It's hard being famous. Had I known, I would have opted for just rich and powerful. - Delta Burke TIPPER'S WARY OF A BAD RAP TAPES INTERVIEW TO CHECK QUOTES The Gore Kids Listen to Rap! Says Mom Who's Wrapped Too Tight. This revelation came yesterday from Tipper Gore in what AP writer Dana Kennedy called a "tense interview. " Clutching a tape recorder on her lap, apparently for fear of being misquoted, Miz Gore "was often on the defensive," Kennedy writes.

It happens every spring. Philadelphia's favorite toque show, The Book and The Cook, returns next month. Now in its seventh year, the popular four-day celebration of recipes and repasts will run from Thursday, April 11, to Sunday, April 14. The event, sponsored by the city Representative's Office, matches Philadelphia restaurants with well-known cookbook authors, TV chefs and food writers for a series of brunches, lunches, dinners, teas, tastings,...

Craig Claiborne, the venerated New York Times food writer, has planned a bash worthy of Malcolm Forbes to celebrate his 70th birthday Labor Day weekend. Although guests must pay their own freight to the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, Claiborne will see to it that 100 of his closest will get three days' worth of free lodging, meals and entertainment. The Mumm champagne people and the hotel will pick up most of the tab. Among the lucky invited are fellow food maven Gael Greene, columnists William Safire and Russell Baker, composer Stephen Sondheim, authors Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, actress Lauren Bacall and filmmaker Alan Pakula.

In The New American Kitchen (Simon & Schuster, $24.95), Michael McLaughlin takes some old-fashioned food and gives it a newfangled look. His use of international ingredients and cooking nuances also makes the new kitchen a cosmopolitan one. McLaughlin - chef, restaurateur and food writer - sees us as slightly exhausted by the myriad culinary advances of the 1980s, but better informed and decisive about what and how we want to eat. "These are...

Teaming a food-and-wine writer with a prize-winning sommelier has produced an innovative cookbook-wine guide that combines more than 50 inventive recipes with practical wine information. The premise of Red Wine With Fish: The New Art of Matching Wine With Food (Simon & Schuster, $19.95) is that while the rules for mixing and matching wines are not written in stone, some wines pair better than others with certain foods. Matching foods and wines is an age-old mystery. Sometimes the perfect match is a personal preference, but other times it involves good sense.

Ellen Brown, the critically acclaimed food writer, describes her new cookbook, The Gourmet Gazelle Cookbook (Bantam, $19.95), as the result of one woman's lifelong battle with her hips. During the course of that war, Brown discovered that her need to eat more healthfully had to be reconciled with her demands that the food be intellectually and emotionally satisfying. The Gourmet Gazelle Cookbook reflects that thinking. Although it is not a diet book, it presents a health-awareness approach to eating.

Now there is a cookbook designed to help busy folk zip through the supermarket and put together a creative meal quickly once the shopping bags are unpacked. It's Eight Items or Less (Sasquatch Books, $11.95), and it lives up to its name. To its author, food writer Ann Lovejoy, a meal in a hurry is not accomplished with an electric can opener. Her approach is centered on snippets of vegetables, fresh dressings, herbs, spices, fruity oils and a vast array of fresh foods in general.

Food writer Leslie Land said "no" when first asked to come to Philadelphia for the Book and the Cook culinary caper. Later, she changed her mind and said, "OK. " Then somebody said "caterer," which prompted her to change her "OK" back to "no. " Temporarily. The author of Reading Between the Recipes had been a restaurant chef, a job she didn't like. After that, she was a caterer, which she didn't like even more. But the more she learned about the annual foodfest in Philadelphia, the more intrigued she became.