Collective Soul

Food & Wine's Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes

by Drew Lazor

If you logged on to Amazon purchased each and every one of the tomes on Food & Wine's latest top-25 cookbooks list at full price, you'd be out something like 825 bucks. I'm thankful, then, that the glossy's editors realize we would rather spend our ducats on hard-shell crabs than hardcover books, and convey that they know as much by organizing what I consider to be the most useful annual release on the market for the casual cookbook consumer.

Now in its 12th edition, the always-anticipated Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes (Food & Wine Books, $29.95) is something of a NOW! That's What I Call Music for patient people, bringing together recipes from the 25 best releases of the year.

Instructions and ingredient lists are reproduced exactly as they should appear, meaning there are no meddlesome middlemen watering down the what you'd get if you paid for the original text. There are, however, blessedly succinct intros and scattered editor's notes that provide good background info for the unfamiliar, and helpful insights into the recipe-testing process that led to the formation of the top 25 in the first place. (On top of that, every author has submitted a bonus recipe, most of which have not been published anywhere else.)

This year's edition, which came out last week, will be a doozy for food TV fans — try your hand at Giada De Laurentiis' tagliatelle or Bobby Flay's grilled salmon with tzatziki. But there are plenty of restaurant chefs to contend with here, too, from current The Next Iron Chef hotshot Nate Appleman and Chicago icon Charlie Trotter to Emperor Palpatine of haute cuisine Joël Robuchon, whose recipe for roast beef in an herbed salt crust sounds as challenging as it does delicious.

The sweet side of things is well-represented, with highlights including Baking for All Occasions author Flo Braker's butterscotch spiral coffee cake and Southern cook Martha Hall Foose's buttermilk bacon pralines (!). And, of course, since this is a Food & Wine production, the culled photography is sexy — and altogether infuriating if you're super hungry.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)