Feeding what appears to be an appetite for plenty of instruction and lots of recipes, the stack of recent high-profile cookbooks includes some weighty wonders.

BASIC INSTINCTS
In all their detail, big, new cookbooks aim to be deliciously useful

LIKE EVERYTHING else produced for the open market, cookbooks are subject to the vagaries of fashion. For a long time, it seemed that small, single-subject cookbooks were taking over the cooking sections of our bookstores. But in recent months, great big cookbooks have been all the rage.

With at least a thousand recipes and more than a thousand pages each, "The Gourmet Cookbook," edited by Ruth Reichl, "The New Best Recipe," from the editors of Cook's Illustrated, and a series of "1,000 Recipes" books from Wiley Publishing could be measured by the pound as well as the page. Why are these new books so big?

"Our goal," Reichl states on the cover of "The Gourmet Cookbook," "was to give you a book with every recipe you would ever want." Once, that was the presumed goal of every cookbook. During the late 19th century, when cookbooks for every homemaker first came into vogue, the field was small and composed of a fairly uniform crop of sturdy tomes devoted to those "receipts" considered essential to every homemaker.

These books, like "Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management," originally published in 1861, were more than collections of recipes, though; they were guides to living. (The original Mrs. Samuel Orchart (Isabella) Beeton was, according to Kathryn Hughes who wrote the introduction to a 1,112-page facsimile edition published in 2000, only 21 years old when she started work on the project at the behest of her husband/publisher. Sadly, she died in 1865 at the age of 29, before she could see the phenomenal success of her project. By 1868, the book had sold 2 million copies and become the benchmark for other books in the genre.)

Throughout the Victorian era, cookbooks offered advice on everything from how to remove white spots from furniture to how to handle the help.

"Remember they are human beings and treat them as such," advised Marion Harland in "Common Sense in the Household," published in 1871. "Rub over them with alcohol" (the piano keys, not the servants), advised Fannie Merritt Farmer in the 1896 edition of "The Boston Cooking School Cookbook."

But the recipes, hundreds and hundreds of them, constituted these books' raison d'être. In the early 20th century, the field of cookbooks became crowded with hastily assembled collections published by food manufacturers and women's auxiliary groups. Short on editorial and long on recipes, most of these books focused on recipes that had a common ingredient — typically one produced by the books' publishers. Consider "Economy in Cooking," published in 1934 by The Grand Union Tea Co.; a typical 5-by-8-inch page contains five or six recipes.

By contrast, the big new cookbooks afford each recipe its own luxurious page or two. Presumably, the editors think modern cooks possess fewer basic kitchen skills and require more hand-holding off the page.

By the last quarter of the 20th century, it might have seemed that publishers had given up on comprehensive collections altogether. With a few exceptions — most notably "The Joy of Cooking," which underwent a showy remake under the auspices of über-editor Maria Guarnaschelli — cookbooks were devoted to single subjects.

Author Irena Chalmers virtually gave birth to the single-subject cookbook in the mid-1970s. "My friend, David Grimes, ran a little cooking store in Greensborough, N.C., called Potpourri," she recalls, "and he wanted to sell fondue pots, so I proposed that I write a little book of fondue recipes to be sold beside the pots. I did the writing, and he paid to have it published. Neither one of us thought of hiring an editor, so the book is rife with spelling errors." Nevertheless, the book sold phenomenally well, and so did the pots, at stores all over North America. Soon came volumes on ice cream, crepes, soufflés and other dishes, all written with particular cooking vessels in mind.

"I think we've come about as far as we can go with this," surmises Chalmers, "but that's not to say this is the end of it. Jesse Cool recently put out a book on toast!"

In spite of her claim to have given us one book with every recipe we would ever want, Gourmet's Reichl agrees. "I don't think the age of the single-subject cookbook is over," she confided in a recent e-mail. "I think there's room for both all-inclusive cookbooks and really good tightly focused ones as well. The thing is that the market for cookbooks is a constantly growing one. More people are cooking than ever before, and they want and need help."

Want to try Pistachio Turkey Ballotine with Madeira Sauce? Even a novice with a sharp knife should be able to manage with the exacting instructions in "The Gourmet Cookbook." The smart and reasonably detailed "1,000 Italian Recipes" by Michele Scicolone invites us to consider a Rolled Stuffed Turkey Breast with prosciutto and rosemary. With about two recipes per page, Scicolone walks through procedures in her book with an admirable balance of brevity and clarity. Want a detailed recipe for the more straightforward Roast Stuffed Turkey? With more than 1,000 words of introductory text in "The New Best Recipe," you should be able to manage.

In fact, armed with one of the big new books, a cook who wanted to make just about anything would be able to manage. Contrary to the constant lament that home cooking is a thing of the past, books like these indicate that we are in fact in a Golden Age of home cooking, an age that shows no signs of coming to an end anytime soon.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.