Dear Sarah,

How nice that we both have small daughters named Alice (yes, the nameless 5-year-old of yesterday) and that we have similar, mulish-yet-lazy approaches to cuisine. I have to tell you, though, that this attitude has nothing to do with growing up in a Swanson's home. I come from the other end of the spectrum: My mother was a stymied chemistry major who gave up a great job at Sloan Kettering to have three children about five minutes apart, and she channeled her mighty spirit of scientific inquiry into Julia Child and James Beard, teaching herself to be a gourmet cook. Beard came to visit once--my father worked for the company that published him at the time, or something, and somehow dragged him home as a trophy--and the dog ate the dessert before dinner, and none of the other guests uttered a peep about whether the crown roast of lamb was any good because they were terrified of being wrong. (Finally, as he was heaving himself off to a train the next morning, the Great One praised the dinner and my mother breathed once more.) I ate truly spectacular food every day of my young life, and it seems to have taken me to the same ambivalent spot you occupy.

Learning from my mother gave me a certain confidence in the kitchen--enough that I do improvise, quite a lot--but it's probably unfounded: It's not as if I apply myself to cooking the way she did, and I'm apt to get myself out on limbs this way. Many of my improvisations are in the service of my laziness (commercial chicken stock, as I've already confessed, and herbs scattered willy-nilly rather than tied in sachets); others are a matter of prejudice (I kept wanting to pour some wine into almost everything I cooked from our three books--rarely, I think, a bad instinct). But I swore to myself that I would follow the books as slavishly as I could, in the interests of judicial purity.

You convinced me that I should try the butternut squash soup from the Portale. The word "caramelized" in a recipe always earns my optimism. I love butternut squash soup, and the only one I make follows the traditional bake-it-first pattern. I've been asking myself, in light of your generous experiments with him, why I took against his cookbook so completely. It's partly that it gives off a whiff of Martha--the rigid, managerial scheme of arranging food into 12 "seasons," or chapters, and then into menus; all that shimmering bad prose about the seasons and the feelings they bring and blah blah blah, when really you know that he's dying to get on with the Nurse Ratched parts. ("This book, then, is a chef's-eye view of the relationship between human beings and animals, fruits, and vegetables as the Earth revolves around the sun, taking all of us through our intertwined annual cycle.") He always uses a 10-dollar word where a nickel would do, and it all seemed annoyingly pretentious. I don't want to measure the "vulnerability" of my vegetables, or ponder the "poignant" effect of my side dishes.

And I don't think this is just a tic or a distraction. I thought the food was pretentious too. I might not feel this way if I had a chance to pay a lot for it in a restaurant. But why would I want to make "Bosc Pear Carpaccio With Microgreens, Pecorino Romano, and 25-Year-Old Balsamico Tradizionale" in my own kitchen, when I could just throw together a nice salad made with good lettuce and ripe pears and a fine vinegar and a little cheese? (How would I let my guests know it was supposed to be carpaccio, when even in his version it looks very much like thinly sliced pears? How could I subtly work into the conversation the age of the vinegar? What if my guests didn't notice how very tiny the greens were?) If you can't make something ambrosial out of these ingredients minus the puffery, then you definitely don't have the chops to make most of what's in this book.

Even the easy recipes seem labor-intensive. Take "September: Recipes for Busy Times" (What a Martha chapter title!), which is "devoted to relatively simple and quick dishes for those taxing weeks." Orecchiette With Chicken, Swiss Chard, and Parmigiano-Reggiano, which looks wonderfully like comfort food, involves soaking white beans overnight, browning a chicken, then simmering it in stock (which you have made yourself), taking the chicken apart to cut up the meat, reducing the stock you've cooked it in, cooking the white beans, boiling the pasta separately, and of course washing the chard. It involves washing at least five vessels, by my count, and that's if you soak and cook the beans in the same container, which he doesn't, and don't count the cheese-grater. This is the kind of dish about which chefs like to write brightly (as Portale does) that it's perfectly fine to make it 24 hours ahead of time. I have been falling for this gambit for years now--it has sucked me into untold numbers of complicated cooking projects--and only just figured out that it doesn't help: I never have more time 24 hours earlier. Anyway, I get what I imagine to be a similar comfort and taste amperage out of winging a similar orecchiette dish that a friend made for me once: It uses sausage (you only have to sauté it) and broccoli rabe, though any bitter green would probably do, and Pecorino Romano along with the Parmesan. No beans.

The more I think about it, the more Portale struck me as the epitome of what I don't like about celebrity chefbooks. In the end I don't really care if his recipes are wonderful, or even unprecedented. The world is full of amazing recipes already; what I'm always looking for is a companion who will tell me how, and who won't make it more complicated than he has to, and who will give me good reasons for what I'm doing (reasons better than because I said so!), so that I learn something, too, that I can apply to the rest of my cooking.

Plus, Portale apparently abandoned you with a dilemma that Colicchio solves for us: He says you do brown the skin side of any fish filet you're pan roasting and that if you do it's delicious. I'm ashamed to say I've never tried this--I'm a little timorous on the whole subject of cooking all but a few kinds of fish--but he's most convincing about it. (See Page 39. I meant to try this striped bass recipe, but ended up tossing the fish into the freezer. Maybe tomorrow night.)

Tomorrow I will tell you of my adventures with Jean-Georges, which ranged from the divine--the very best recipe I tried--to the actually wretched. In the mean time, I'm wondering: What cookbooks (aside from these three) do you use and like a lot?

Best,
Marjorie

P.S.: An 18-month-old! You definitely get first dibs on the fainting couch. My other child is a grand old man of 7, and I can actually cook in peace when he's around, or even shop with him, as long as I follow his guidance on dreadful breakfast cereals.