WRITTEN BY GREG ATKINSON

	COURTESY OF CLARKSON POTTER/PUBLISHERS
	Speedy and simple — just the way Americans like it — Cha-Cha's Citrus Chicken is a recipe from a string of "Floribbean" bistros on the Gulf Coast. Brightened with a sauté of tropical fruit, the dish reflects the American inclination to play with the cuisines of other cultures.

Sure, they had heard of these foods. "I told my Mama we should try pie," said one girl when she tasted her first bite of homemade banana cream pie with a butter crust. "It's good."
 
"I've never had real food before," said a boy, "but I think I like it."

Chocolate pudding, the old-fashioned kind made with real milk and eggs, was baffling to these kids. "This is not pudding," insisted one child. "Pudding comes in little plastic cups, and it doesn't taste anything like this."

The other cooks and I tweaked the menus until we hit on a series of dishes that resonated with most of the kids most of the time. "Build Your Own Burrito Night" was a winner; so was "Teriyaki Night." And best of all was "Pizza Night." Mexican, Pan-Asian and Italian foods answered the call of what's familiar to American kids. Oddly, what these kids wanted was not home cooking at all but restaurant fare.

Two years later, as a judge in the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Cookbook Awards, I was poring over a mile-high stack of new cookbooks, contenders in the Best American Cookbook division. Most of these books were regional cookbooks like "The Gift of Southern Cooking" or "The Cape Cod Table," featuring the foods of some specific geographical area. Others were compilations of recipes purported to exemplify what we Americans eat: "A Return to Sunday Dinner" or "Cooking for Comfort."
 

	Cha-Cha's Citrus Chicken Recent recipes in Pacific Northwest Macrina Orzo Salad Spring Salad with Chopped Bacon

David Rosengarten put together a big, fat collection of some 400 recipes called "It's All American Food." I had some trouble with this. As far as I'm concerned, we can eat it all we want but Korean bibimbap is still Korean, quiche is French and ravioli is Italian; we can't simply appropriate these things and call them American food. These foods retain enough of their original characteristics to be recognizably what they are. So, while Rosengarten's book is a fine collection of recipes, it didn't speak to me as truly American home cooking. To me it was more like a collection of dishes one might find at a random sampling of American restaurants.

Interestingly, the judges who gave the comparable James Beard award for Cooking of the Americas felt differently and gave it top honors. And, in retrospect, I probably should have scored the book more points, because these days, restaurant cooks have far more influence over home cooking than home cooks do over restaurant food.

At IACP, the "Best American" award went to a cookbook called "Gulf Coast Kitchens" by Constance Snow (Clarkson Potter, $32.50). Having tested at least three recipes from each of the semifinalists, I have to say, this is one great cookbook. Like the foods profiled in "It's All American Food," many of the dishes in this book have roots in the cuisines of other places. But none of the dishes belongs distinctly to any of those places anymore. Each is new, tailored to American tastes and unique to American cooks.

What spoke to the kids who came to IslandWood, and what increasingly defines American food in general, is a style of cooking based not on our own indigenous ingredients or even on our traditional family recipes. Rather, American food is defined by our restless American spirit and our distinctly American penchant for continually pursuing novelty, flavor and fun. I imagine that there will always be room on the table for barbecue ribs, New England clam chowders and California Cobb salads unique to our regional kitchens. But only one thing about American food is absolutely certain: As long as there are Americans in the kitchen, what America eats will continue to change.