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In the Gand household circa 1965, when Gale was growing up in Deerfield, Ill., butter was the fifth food group. Whole categories of foods were seen as vehicles for butter: muffins, bagels, vegetables, bread, biscuits. Like many schoolchildren, Gale churned butter for the first time in history class, not a dairy barn, but she took to it right away. Soon she was making large batches at home, mixing it with sugar, and hiding the resulting paste in the back of the cupboard to eat by spoonfuls. No wonder she became a pastry chef!

The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook By Julie V. Hansen and Suzanne Porter Simon & Schuster, 127 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Butter Sugar Flour Eggs By Gale Gand, Rick Tramonto and Julia Moskin Clarkson Potter Publishers, 288 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Cooking Contest Cookbook By Joyce Compagna and Don Compagna Simon & Schuster; 288 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

On the other hand, some of the writing you should just bleep over. The chapter introductions in this book are a total waste of time -- rapturous, overwritten space-fillers. ("Young cheese is a placid and contented milkmaid, soothing and comforting everyone with her strong, milky-white arms.") So are the suggestions at the end of each recipe for what to drink with it. ("The warm flavor of butterscotch calls for an iced earthy, full-bodied coffee like Indonesian Java. To contrast the creaminess of the pudding, drink it black -- maybe even with coffee ice cubes so it stays extra-strong.") And the book has oddly unattractive photography; perhaps the stylists were aiming for an "anyone can make this" feeling. The cover photo shows some berries piled up on a meringue layer in such a way that you know the berries will spill and smash the minute you try to cut the cake. But we don't buy cookbooks for the photography, now do we?

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"One thing people don't understand about cooking," says my daughter, "is that just because you can add butterscotch chips or caramel doesn't mean you should." She was studying a recipe in Cooking Contest Cookbook: a macadamia fudge torte with a pear, chocolate-chip and macadamia-nut filling and a sauce consisting of "one jar butterscotch caramel fudge ice cream topping" mixed with milk. The thing is, the recipe won the $1 million grand prize in the 37th Pillsbury Bake-Off, so I guess my daughter and I are wrong.

We are also wrong about white chocolate strawberry dream pie, in which you combine strawberry ice cream and almond liquor, pour them into a "purchased butter-flavored" pie shell and top them with a white-chocolate mousse. You'd think this would have achieved more sweetness, blandness and fattiness than any one dessert could sustain, but no. "I sometimes make it even more decadent by serving" -- yes! -- "caramel sauce with it," confides the pie's creator, Edwina Gadsby of Great Falls, Mont. And again, she must know what she's talking about: The pie won first place in the Darigold Quick Fixin's with Mix-Ins Contest.

I never make cooking-contest recipes, but they're just about my favorite thing to read, and "Cooking Contest Cookbook" has almost everything that makes this genre great. First, there's the piling-on of ingredient after ingredient, which is hardly confined to desserts. See, for instance, Rozanne Chan's Thai'd-and-true strawberry and pasta toss ("toss" is a big word in contests), which combines strawberries, cabbage, bean sprouts, spinach leaves, radishes, angel hair pasta, cilantro, peanut butter, lemongrass, mashed strawberries and "chopped roasted peanuts and scallion brushes" as a garnish. A garnish on a salad -- that's true cooking-contest spirit.

And then there's the inspired use of brand-name products. By "inspired" I mean "dragged in in the most outlandish way, just to make the recipe qualify for the contest." Grilled salmon steaks with ginger-chive sauce are perfected with the addition of "one packet Butter Buds, undiluted." (Guess who sponsored the contest?) Garlic-crusted Tuscany burgers would be fine, or at least OK, as is; the addition of "1/2 cup Kretschmer Original Toasted Wheat Germ" makes them, I guess, magnificent, just as that cup of Fiber One cereal makes all the difference to Edwina Gadsby's pork chops Cubano.

Yes, that's the same Edwina Gadsby who sometimes puts caramel sauce on her white chocolate strawberry dream pie -- which brings me to my only complaint about "Cooking Contest Cookbook": Why aren't there headnotes to describe every contestant? Why do we meet Gloria Pleasants -- "It may be that her training as a pharmacist prepared her to understand what makes a delicious recipe" -- and not Fran Yuhas, who came up with the name "Grecian skillet rib-eyes"? I still cherish the memory of a Weight Watchers cooking contestant who had "written 900 poems, some of them published." If this book had more headnotes like that, I'd never read anything else again.
salon.com | April 7, 2000

Ann Hodgman's column on cookbooks runs every month, alternating on Fridays with Melanie Rehak on poetry, Polly Shulman on science fiction and fantasy and Jacqueline Carey on mysteries.

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