With Mother's Day fast receding into the rear-view mirror, I thought it would be interesting to look more closely at a phenomenon which seems to be especially noticeable this year:  cookbooks by those whose parents are better-known than they are.

April brought Old-School Comfort Food, by Alex Guarnaschelli - the daughter of Maria Guarnaschelli, the cookbook editor (most famously of the controversial 1997 Joy of Cooking).  Having established herself as an executive chef (restaurants Butter and The Darby) and TV food personality, the younger Guarnaschelli produced a cookbook with none of the flaws of restaurant cookbooks: although the recipes are mostly not new, the book itself is accessible, direct, nicely-produced, and - perhaps unsurprisingly - well-edited.

Also last month came Daphne Oz's Relish: an Adventure in Food, Style, and Everyday Fun.  Oz - the daughter of the famous Dr. Oz - is a cohost of "The Chew" on ABC - is making a bid for lifestyle gurudom.  So her recipes (there aren't that many of them) focus on easy food - pasta, salads, grains - and are interspersed with tips on applying your mascara, developing a fitness routine, and how to tell a "confidant" from an "acquaintance".

Perhaps the most striking of all is the just-published Batali Bros. Cookbook, a slender tome the size of a picture book, written by Mario Batali's Benno (16) and Leo (14).  The latter and greater half of the book are recipes by the big M himself - the abundant, authentic-spirited Italian fare we're used to seeing from him.  The first half, however, is entirely written by the sons, and the recipes are no more than what most might think their teens up to handling: French toast, scrambled eggs, meatballs, pasta.  They're written with charm ("Though the best meatballs are in italy, these will come very close.")- and indeed, that these boys chose to write a cookbook at all is disarming.  But if their father weren't who he is, it's hard to imagine the book would have been published.

With the exception of this last case, children of celebrities generally mention their parents as little as possible, clearly hoping to be judged on their own merits, their recipes, their talents.  (A sentiment I can understand.  When I was an academic book editor, I never wanted anyone to think my position came from my dad's status as an art publisher.  And he never mentioned to anyone that his dad was at one time the premier of China.  In neither case did our fathers have anything to do with launching our careers, other than providing a stable middle-class upbringing.)

Nevertheless, these books provide a fascinating glimpse of how parents' career choices can affect their kids'- and maybe, possibly, down the line, be eclipsed by them.  

You know those "suggested menus" offered by many cookbooks?  Where they tell you what goes with what, from starters to salads to mains to sides to sweets, and what wine you should serve with what?  And often they have a picture to go with it - of the whole beautiful spread, sometimes being elegantly nibbled by an octet of attractive people whose clothes are conspicuously cooking-stain-free? You know, those menus?

Maybe it's just that I'm a cantankerous old mule, but: I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.  Here's an example of a menu in Heather Christo's Generous Table, which was published approximately 5 minutes ago:

• Cauliflower soup
• Asparagus Walnut Pesto Linguini
• Halibut en Papillote
• Lemon Tart with an Almond Shortbread Crust
• Coconut Sorbet 

Now let me be clear - I have nothing against Heather Christo or these really quite-delicious-looking recipes.  I just don't like having someone put them together for me.  When I see a previously-composed menu, I feel:

• Exhausted: Even though I'm not afraid of making multi-course meals, somehow seeing somebody else's menu all tied up in pink ribbons only emphasizes for me the amount of work it's going to take to pull it off, especially because it's usually printed across from some posh-looking table setting which itself took an hour to set up.
• Like a Groupie: I can totally understand worshipping a cookbook author so fervently that I want to cook every recipe in their book.  But do I honestly want to reproduce, bite for bite, the very menu that was served to that author's lucky friends, knowing that even if I pull it off, it can only aspire  to be being as good as the original?
• Resentful : Who has time to plot and plan a five-course meal?! (OK, in point of fact, five course meals- or at any rate, five-dish meals happen pretty regularly when my friends get together.  But we all pitch in, is the point, so that even if half of us are stuck late at soccer practice or drama rehearsal, stuff will get made and shared.)
• Uncreative :  Maybe I want to follow a few recipes to the letter.  But isn't it my job to figure out what goes with what, and what's right for the occasion and my guests and the time of year? With 128,788 recipes at my fingertips, isn't it the least I can do to pick and choose what we're going to eat?

Needless to say, feeling pressured by the menus in a cookbook that  I may have received for free in the first place is, as my son would say, a First World Problem. And after all,nothing's stopping me from cherry-picking any recipe I like from anywhere and putting as little or as much effort as I like into it.    But I can't help but wonder if there are better souls than I - less neurotic, more ambitious, less easily distracted - who follow those menus to the letter, never losing their good humor in the process.

If you know one, let me know - and tell me when to show up for dinner.  I'll be there, contributing a bunch of flowers, and nothing else.   

Less than two weeks till Mother's Day, and we're entering the "spring bump" - next to the year-end holidays, it's the second-busiest time of year for cookbook publishing and cookbook sales. (Which is why my developer timed the launch of my cookbook-rating app, CookShelf - just out! - for now.)

And that makes me think...if, like so many people, you're giving someone a cookbook for Mother's Day, what qualities do you look for in that cookbook?

You don't want to it to be a book that says "Go back to the kitchen where you belong and make me some food!" so maybe you don't want a cookbook whose title includes the words "...Cook for a Crowd".   You don't want a book that seems self-serving, like "100 chocolate brownies your family and friends will love".   And you definitely don't want a book that says Mom could stand to lose some weight.  That rules out every diet book there is.  

So what does that leave us?  Well, quite a lot actually:  big, beautiful coffee-table books, cute little books to take to a beach house, books with gorgeous pictures you can almost taste.  By category, here's a few to consider:

Books that are good for reading: Melissa Clark's books are both practical and entertaining to read.  And the chicken romances - The Fresh Egg Cookbook, and Chicken and Egg are irresistible for backyard poultry aspirants.  The Splendid Table's How To Eat Supper is maybe the ultimate browse book, for interesting trivia and quotations and sidebars and anecdotes. And Canal House Cooking is ravishing to look at.

Books that are whimsical: I'm a sucker for cute books, like Sweet Gratitude and The Secret Lives of Baking (although this latter, I have to tell you, is not the best for cooking from).  Kitchen and Co. is whimsical in content, Full of Flavor is graphically  whimsical, and The Silver Palate is awash in whimsy from cover to cover.

Books from far away:  A cookbook can be a virtual voyage to faraway cultures - and so much more affordable than an airline ticket!  The Mediterranean books are especially good right now - send Mom on a culinary journey with The Food of Spain or Jerusalem or Arabesque.  Heading further east, Every Grain of Rice is a tremendous value.

Books that are useful: Authoritative, reference cookbooks are gifts that keep on giving for years - like Grow Cook Eat (for vegetable gardeners) or The Apple Lover's Cookbook (all about apples) or  Veganomicon (tons of vegan recipes).

Books that party:  Sometimes, Mom doesn't feel like cooking at all.  So, pick up Porch Parties and a bag of ice and bring her a cocktail while she's lying in her hammock, reading the extremely entertaining Ginger Bliss and the Violet Fizz, or The Drunken Botanist.

What books do you think make the best gifts - or, to put it another way, which would you most like to receive?

Here's the quote that caused the trouble, from a recent story I wrote about preserved lemons: "Preserved lemons can take a month - certainly not less than two weeks. By that time, I've put aside my North African cookbooks and I'm on to an easy French or Hunan cookbook, or a book that's all about ice cream or pickles." [emphases added].

One commenter took exception.  "Easy? Clearly, this gal has never tackled too many French cookbooks."  This prompted a smile.  Oh, if only she knew how many French cookbooks I've tackled!

But the comment made me think.  Of course, what I had been referring to was the category "easy French", which is a newish one - books like The Little Paris Kitchen and last year's The Bonne Femme Cookbook.  But "easy French" is still a contradiction in terms for much of the cookbook-buying public.  Unlike, say, "easy Italian," "easy French" still seems to protest too much.

So what cuisines do people consider genuinely  easy?  Well, I think Italian qualifies, unless maybe you're making the timpano from Big Night (1996).  Every time you throw together a pasta, you sort of feel like it's Italian, the same way that when you throw together a stir-fry, a lot of the time you sort of feel like it's Chinese.  That makes Italian and Chinese feel like easy cuisines, even though we all know that in a million delicious ways, they can both be really difficult.

But there are a few other nationalities that are making the big bid for "easy" these days.  "Easy Thai," for example.  With the widespread availability of Thai curry pastes, a lot of cooks are willing to buy into to the idea that Thai food can be a 30-minutes in-a-hurry on-a-weeknight kind of meal.  Then there's "Easy Mexican," which has historically been a harder sell than "Easy Tex-Mex".  Just look at Rick Bayless's books.  Whereas Rick Bayless' Mexican Kitchen was a tribute to authenticity--chiles roasted and soaked and ground in a stone mortar and all--his later books have gone from cooking one plate at a time to cooking with teens to cooking weeknights to just plain partying with dips and cocktails.  And "Easy Indian"! I guess as soon as McCormick started marketing garam masala, that was a foregone conclusion.

There's even a sort of easy Persian cookbook coming up, I've noticed.  There's a cuisine whose cookbooks have been the opposite of easy for many years.  (As usual, I blame it on the grandmothers.  Any country whose grandmothers cook harder than Iron Chef - I'm looking at you, France! and Burma! and Venezuela! - is not an automatic contender for the "easy" category)

What is it that drives a cuisine in the "easy" direction rather than the "authentic" direction (the way regional Italian cookbooks were in the 80's, the way Southern books were a decade ago, the way Japanese cookbooks seem to be going now)?  Maybe it's the mood of the country (or its cooks).  Maybe it's the accessibility of the ingredients?  I don't know - and I wouldn't want to have to choose between "easy" and "authentic".  As far as I'm concerned, it's a big world, and it takes all kinds, both the Easy and the Not So.

In the days before I had my own vegetable garden, I could hardly wait for the farmstands to fill up with local color and variety each year.  What's better than a fresh carrot?  A purple carrot grown five miles away.  What's better than a cool new radish?  a bunch of Easter Egg radishes, ovoid and pastel.  What's better than a crisp just-picked apple?  A crisp, just-picked Westfield Seek-no-further, grown in its native orchard just to the south.

In theory, local produce sounds great, and it is. Especially on those rare occasions when it manages to also be both organic or heirloom or open-pollinated, and affordable.  But it's one thing to cook local, and another thing to publish a local cookbook.  For example, consider The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen, a gorgeous new production from Matt and Ted Lee, who are among my favorite Southern authors.

Every page is a testament to Lowcountry foodways, and many are doable in any part of the country, so long as there's a well-stocked supermarket nearby.  But of course the most mouthwatering recipes are the ones that are the hardest to source.  Where am I going to get live she-crabs with their roe?  or red field peas? or chainey briar ("the tender shoots of the smilax vine")? Who carries mako shark around here?  I can't even get salsify, and fresh peaches are around for only 5 minutes in July.

I had a similar problem with Deborah Madison's inspiring and beautiful Local Flavors in 2002.    It covers the whole country, so it's not seasonally limited.  But the recipes call out specifically for opal basil and Freckles lettuce or sugar loaf chicory or lovage leaves or Romanesco broccoli.  Even when the author considerately assures you you can substitute something else, it's somehow not satisfying to have to.  Because isn't that sense of the artisanal and specific part of what made you fall in love with the book?  And if it was just a recipe for plain old beets, not golden ones or stripey Chioggias, would it be worth the trouble of springing for a cookbook?

Personally, I like cookbooks that have a strong, consistent sense of geographic season (so nobody's going to be asking you to prepare something that has both apples and asparagus when one or the other of them is going to have to come from South America).  But I get frustrated with books which drive me toward hyper-local ingredients I can practically never get, or which, if I get them, will be seriously compromised in quality compared to what's in the book.  I don't fault the publishers, or the authors.  But it's one of those cases where it pays (in book sales!) to be aware of what a cook can realistically source, and to go overboard helping out with sourcing or substitution if it's going to be tricky.

What's your local "threshold"?  Will you set aside a recipe if it's got 1 ingredient you can't source? 2 or 3?  Will you avoid buying a cookbook that clearly caters to a locale very different from your own?

When I was first learning to cook, the 80's had just swept past, leaving in their big-haired, big-shouldered wake a trove of newly-popularized ingredients that had once been exotic: raspberry and balsamic vinegars, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes. And because shiitakes were becoming affordable and mainstream, it was now possible to make recipes with "wild mushrooms" any night you wanted to without springing for chanterelles or morels costing as much as a good bottle of wine.

So gradually that you might not have noticed till a decade or two had passed, the ensuing years have mainstreamed more and more ingredients.  Who would have thought you'd be able to find pomegranate juice in every city's corner deli?  And pomegranate molasses in many supermarkets?  Who would've thought recipes would start calling for lemongrass as casually as they did for ginger?  When did sherry vinegar replace white wine vinegar?  When did all the kids start eating edamame?  And when did pork belly leave the commodity markets and appear in the butcher case?

Let's not even start with all the non-wheat grains the gluten-free revolution has made available.  I thought quinoa was a flash in the pan 15 years ago.  Now it's here to stay, and I'm sorry to say I still don't like it.

It's still hard to find some of the Asian spices (though the Demystified series is a big help, and I'm sure an app can't be long in coming.)  

All of this begs the question: what will be next?  What have you been seeing more and more of when you cook?  

Personally, I'm hoping the next thing will be sumac (hard for me to find except from my contacts in New York) and Persian dried limes and Indonesian dua belibis hot sauce (hard for me to find except from my contacts in California).  But I'm not going to even try to make a prediction (though I did see pork belly coming from 10 years away).  I'll just hope it's something tasty.

Let's talk for a moment about "branding," a term one hears a great deal of in cookbook publishing these days.  Everybody does it: The TV chef who sells a line of cookware, the market gardener who starts a blog, the Barefoot Contessa, the Naked Chef, Chris Kimball with his bowtie.  Even me, with my cookbook-rating app.

"Branding," with respect to a personality makes sense somehow.  But in recent years something that's been happening more and more often is the branding of place.  (I'm setting aside the blog book and the TV tie-in for now - they deserve attention of their own.)

There's always been food establishments with the savvy to publish a book (in the case of a little catering storefront called The Silver Palate, the book became the tail that wagged the dog).  The more distinctive the establishment, the more powerful the book - e.g., the Moosewood cookbooks.  Today, though, it's everybody -  from the destination restaurant with the modernist kitchen to the bakery around the corner.

It used to be that you'd buy such a cookbook simply so you could reproduce the kind of food you found at the restaurant, at home.  But something else is at work now. What are some of the reasons we buy restaurant - and increasingly, bakery - cookbooks? 

• Souvenirs - if you've come from far away and had something divine to eat at Tartine or Noma or Momofuku, chances are that half an hour after you walk out the door, your meal is nothing but a memory (and a line on your credit card statement).  If that morsel was a transformative experience - as food so often is- you might want something to remember it by.  
• Curiosity - if there is little chance of your ever going to eat at El Bullí (and now that it's closed, that chance has dwindled to zero), you might want to partake just a little in the experience of a restaurant that changed the way people thought of food.
• Inspiration - if you hear that somebody's working magic with vegetables, or burgers, or muffins, and you feel your own vegetable, burger, or muffin repertoire could use a little goosing?  That's a reason right there - especially if the book has a winning design.
• Branding ourselves.   Celebrities aren't the only ones with branded identities.  We all think of ourselves that way sometimes.  For example, I'm not a cake pop person. This happens to be true - I'm a frosted-cookie person - and it's a way I brand myself to myself.  It causes me to keep every Julia Usher book I see, even though they are full of overlapping recipes, and give away all the books with "pop" in the title.  If you catch yourself saying I'm a salad person or I'm not a dessert kind of person or I'm the grillmeister in this family!, that's self-branding, and it has an effect on what you like in cookbooks. 

None of this is to disparage branding, though I dare say none of us wants our kitchen, or our bookshelf, to look like the pace car at the Indy 500.  Maybe we all long for a more perfect vision of our lives, and that's what a branded cookbook is: a perfected vision. But in real life, I suspect, we're good enough - possibly even better than we think.  And maybe a little imperfection could be just what we need.

As I might have mentioned a while back, I'm in the middle of developing this cookbook-rating app, which means that I've been going through the backlist and re-examining cookbooks from about the last 12 years (as well as some up-to-the-minute ones).

One of the many criteria I tabulate is the size of the print, because although - as we all know - the size of the print has no bearing on the quality of the recipes, the fact is that a book with teeny-tiny print oftentimes gets mysteriously set aside and eventually forgotten.  It's just too much work.

Over the years it's seemed as though the print's been shrinking, but I thought it was my imagination until I spent the last two weeks neck-deep in books.  Yes! the print is actually, really getting smaller.  If you look at the 1997 Joy of Cooking, which has small serif type, you can see that it's still bigger than the 2006 75th anniversary Joy (tiny, sans-serif).

This last week I received a batch of Anness series cookbooks (Recipes from my .... Kitchen).  Adorable!  I thought.  Then I opened them, to discover a dizzying miniature world of print in which each individual character was smaller than a grain of raw couscous - I actually checked.

Now much of this can be easily explained.  It's expensive to print books in a world that gets its content online.  The bigger the typeface, the more pages you use, the more expensive the book.  Fair enough.  But often what we see is tiny print on a sea of white in a little slender book with no more than 75 recipes: say, The Gourmet Cookie Book.  My point is, that's a style choice.

Production departments, take heed!  Read the customer reviews!  I thank my stars for the publishers who still appreciate a restful page of text - Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Harvard Common Press, Clarkson Potter, just to pick a few examples.   The demise of print may be imminent, but let's not hasten matters, shall we?

A funny thing is going on at Marketing Department, c/o Cookbook Publisher, Industry St., Anytown USA.  I was just perusing the titles of cookbooks published in the last 30 days, and it seemed to me (I stress the unscientific nature of this impression) that practically half the titles contained either the word "kitchen" or the word "table".  Here are a few examples:  

• At my Grandmother's Table: Heartwarming Stories and Cherished Recipes from South
• The New Jewish Table: Modern Seasonal Recipes for Traditional Dishes
• Mormon Mama Italian Cookbook: From my Nona Rosa's Table to Yours
• The Fresh Table: Cooking in Louisiana All Year Round

And a few more:

• Recipes from a Turkish Kitchen
• In the Kitchen with the Pike Place Fish Guys
• The Longevity Kitchen
• The Gaza Kitchen
• The Little Paris Kitchen

 Maybe it's my imagination, but it feels like "Table" books are trying to disarm and personalize; to think about what it really means to break bread together; to focus on the host - guest relationship, why a cook cooks, and all the themes of love and nature a cook brings to the. . . table.

The "Kitchen" books seem intent on opening up a space for exploration - a way of traveling from one country to another through magically connecting kitchens.  A kitchen, these titles seem to say, is a place to learn new things, to be educated, to try something new.  It's about the how's of cooking, rather than the why's.

I'm probably over-reading the situation.  But still, it's fun to speculate.  Why "Kitchen"?  Why "Table"?   Why not "Cook"? or "Pot"? or "Stove"? or "Knife"?!  I have my theories, or course.  Regardless, those two remain the words to conjure with these days.

Correction: Since this post was published, ATK has contacted me to clarify that some cookbooks (like Slow Cooker Revolution) consist of brand-new content, and others (like Cooking for Two) use database recipes as only a starting point.  So the answer is perhaps not as simple as I thought!  My point, however, stands: a database remains a critical element in a publishing company's ability to generate content in a fast-moving world.

If you're like me, maybe you've wondered how it is that America's Test Kitchen seems to produce 2 or 3 cookbooks a month.  The answer is simple: the database.  Over the years, ATK (whose print arm includes Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines, and the Best Recipe books) has amassed an enormous quantity of in-house-tested recipes.  Those recipes represent a serious investment on the part of the company, so they continue to be put to work alongside the new recipes ATK develops .

Other magazines have taken a similar route.  Look at Bon Appétit and Gourmet.  Gourmet the magazine, of course, is no more, and much-lamented. But it lives on not only in the big signature cookbooks it produced in the mid-2000's, but in little one-offs like Gourmet Italian, Gourmet Weekday, and The Gourmet Cookie Book.  All made possible by the Condé Nast recipe database (familiar to all of us from Epicurious.com), which draws from both Gourmet and Bon Appétit.  It's a way of rescuing the content when an old business model dies.

I'm pretty sure other organizations rely on database publishing, too - Martha Stewart, say, or Weight Watchers - whether or not they derived originally from a magazine model.

The books that result are examples of what I call the "all in one place" argument; i.e., these may not be new recipes, but it's nice to have them all in one place; i.e., "it's nice to have all the pasta recipes collected together for me".  There are two powerful arguments for buying an "all in one place" cookbook (rather than, say, subscribing to the source database itself as you can do on cooksillustrated.com):  1) you don't have a better way of searching for your recipes by subject; and 2) the books make a nice gift you don't have to think about too hard ("Aunt Heather loves pasta! and this book is cute and reasonably priced!").

It's hard to imagine the first argument will hold up much longer, now that powerful tools like Eat Your Books and Google Recipe Search are available.  The second, though, is pretty timeless.

How about you? Do you buy database-published books?  For yourself?  For others? Do you think they're a good value? Or do you see it as just re-packaging?