Books: Let Them Eat Mezeskalacs

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With food, as with so many other aspects of fashionable living, there comes a time when only the old seems new and the latest appears trite. A reading through this year's crop of cookbooks indicates that time is now. No food seems more tiresome or repetitious than that known as new American or Californian, or the fare of native chefs so young they may need working papers. A "That again?" feeling comes from ubiquitous ingredients like goat cheese--hot and cold--duck sausage, free-range chickens, shiitake mushrooms and the trendy salad green mâche. Far more fresh and exciting are the books dedicated to traditional and foreign foods. Today's regional cookbooks are narrower in focus than those of ten or 15 years ago. Americans used to be interested in knowing everything about a foreign cuisine at once: the food of France, or Italian cooking for all occasions. No longer. Authors must now come in closer on highly specialized dishes or on more obscure corners of the world. Herewith a small but significant shelf:

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David (Viking; $18.95) is a collection of essays with some recipes. The London-based food writer has gathered 35 years of provocative thoughts about French, Italian and other Mediterranean cooking, along with perceptive, literate pieces on English cuisine, all of which have appeared in assorted publications. To those who suggest that food critics spend too much time carping, David answers, "Does a theatre critic offer his readers indiscriminate praise of every play . . . he has seen during the week . . .? To be attacked for declining to say, whether in private or in public, that in the world of gastronomy, French, English, or any other, all was always for the best . . . seemed to me illogical, ignorant and thoroughly Philistine."

David's analyses of meals tasted and flavors recalled are completely democratic. A lyonnaise meal prepared by La Mère Brazier, the legendary cook and restaurant owner, is given no more affectionate regard than the simple lunch that provides the book's title. But when the spirit moves her, the author can drop nostalgia and pick up a skewer. A short piece entitled "Your Perfected Hostess" takes apart dishes that have become instant clichés, like vichyssoise and quiche. Of vichyssoise made with substitute ingredients, she writes, "Those people, however, who won't stoop to tinned soups but still want to be in the swim with their vichyssoise, have taken to using cucumber instead of leeks, and watercress or mint instead of chives . . . The mixture is still thick and rich and cold--and what's, after all, in a name?"

Werewolf en croûte, eye of newt à la Dracula, and a very different sort of Bloody Mary are what readers might expect to find in Paul Kovi's Transylvanian Cuisine (Crown; $15.95). And, in fact, there is a recipe for stuffed bear's foot and another for brain sausages. For the most part, though, Kovi's dishes are more benign: juicy sauerkraut glowing with paprika, subtle tarragon-scented fish soup and mushroom-stuffed carp, crisp roast goose and leg of veal with goose liver, kohlrabi nestled in egg barley and, for a delicate touch, "blushing tomatoes in sour cherry vinegar." Eggplant, cornmeal, strudels and the fragrant honey cake mézeskalács are all included.