Books: New Menus for All Seasonings

Volumes for cooks without time to shop and chop

If music be the food of love, cookbooks are the love of food. At their frequent best, the cook's companions are a fine if rarefied form of literature.

The harmonious balancing of a menu is perhaps more important to Italian cuisine than to any other this side of China. This can be a twice-a-day exercise, since most Italians still favor the three-course midday repast. Italian Cooking in the Grand Tradition (Dial; $24.95), by Jo Bettoja and Anna Maria Cornetto, addresses itself primarily to seasonal family meals and honors the year's special occasions. The two fare ladies, Bettoja from Millen, Ga., and Cornetto from Rome, are former models who run a celebrated Roman cooking school called Lo Scaldavivande (the covered dish). Jo married into an old Roman family, Cornetto comes from one, and together they have scoured the regions and wrung the memories of old retainers for recipes that have rarely seen print.

The menus, both aristocratic and earthy, exude all the warmth and good humor of la cucina Italiana at its best. For the primo piatto, traditionally pasta or a rice dish or soup, recipes go from the outrageously calorific, like a macaroni concoction with both cream and meat sauces, to simple ricotta croquettes (the ricotta in Rome is made from sheep's milk). To shock the neighbors, there is a fashion able pasta with vodka and red-pepper flakes.

For the second course, Grand Tradition runs naturally to veal. Most notable are a classic Sicilian stuffed breast and a roast, vitello tartufato, with truffle sauce, and damn the expense. Holiday favorites include Christmas turkey, which the Italians devoured long before the Pilgrims, and is served here with hot fruits; and milk-fed baby lamb, traditionally tendered at Easter, accompanied by egg and lemon sauce. A savory pork roast in pizza dough was invented by Bettoja's husband Angelo, who also prescribed the wines throughout. There are surprisingly few game dishes, but Angelo did contribute a rustic pheasant pate. Desserts include a chocolate and amaretti pie from Parma and one lavish sweet, Sicilian cassata: lemon cake lopped with a heady mixture of rum, chocolate and ricotta. The baking of this elaborately decorated cassata is so distracting a labor that in 1575 the Roman Catholic Church forbade nuns to make it during Holy Week.

American cooks, with even less time for complex dishes than Sicilian nuns, are fast learning the value of whole menus that can be cooked in advance. Ready When You Are (Crown; $15.95), by Elizabeth Schneider Colchie, consists entirely of what its author felicitously calls fetes accomplies. Her book presents dishes that need "no last-minute fussing. Turning on the oven and setting a tinier, heating a soup, tossing a salad are tolerable tasks." Laboring over a hot stove in party finery is out. New Yorker Colchie arranges her 32 menus by seasons but appends a number of ad hoc niceties like a Sensuous Birthday Dinner, the Last Outdoor Supper and a Valentine Weekend for Two, including love feast buns and amuse-bouche (tease the mouth) canapes.