Sometimes Daunting, But Always Instructive

Washington chefs Fabio Trabocchi and Michel Richard know how to create modern dishes that please the palate and flatter the plate. In their two new cookbooks, they successfully collaborated with author Peter Kaminsky to translate their love of food into collections of recipes that have very different missions.

Yet with an exception or two in almost every chapter, Richard's "Happy in the Kitchen" and Trabocchi's "Cucina of Le Marche" pose challenges to home cooks in terms of time or skills or key ingredients or equipment, and sometimes all of those combined.

Will readers remain undaunted by the early mentions of the egg topper and meat slicer employed in Richard's kitchen? Will they take extra steps to find leg of wild boar, almond flour or manteca , the soft lard used to prepare some of Trabocchi's dishes?

Both chefs bet that we're willing to commit. In fact, they have generated more detailed recipe directions than you'll find in the standard crop of today's quick-cook books, because their methods are key to making their food just so.

The cookbooks' individual purposes are evident even in a flip-through. Trabocchi's "Cucina," his first major book, has the look, pacing and format (chapters from appetizers to desserts) of an older cookbook, right down to the photography. It's hardback-fiction size, so recipes don't tend to fit on a single page. The chef's tips are within the text, not pulled out for a quick read; that may underplay how much he tells us and calls for good reader visual memory.

It's fitting that he begins with a recipe for Fried Stuffed Olives Ascolana-Style. The list of 23 ingredients and the required handiwork send an instant message: This is how the food is really made, and don't look for shortcuts or low carbs.

Trabocchi tells lovely, small tales of ingredients and remembrances of family cooking in recipe headnotes that are part travelogue, part language lesson. Most of us won't get the chance to live and eat the way he did: buying delicate, richly flavored veal from a butcher who also gave free tutorials, for example. But we can make the Roasted Veal Chops With Honey, one of the simpler entree recipes, if we come up with acceptable substitutes for Trabocchi's chicken stock and a special Le Marche honey. The book's seafood recipes are especially evocative of the Mediterranean and don't call for hard-to-find ingredients, with the exception of "clean hay" for the Turbot in Smoky Hay.

"Cucina" can instruct home cooks -- if they have the time -- about his region's food akin to the way Trabocchi learned to cook himself, and about the wines of Le Marche.

While Trabocchi's book is quaintly nostalgic, Richard's "Happy in the Kitchen" is cutting-edge modern.

This is Richard's second book, similar in size and style to, and with some of the same team as, Thomas Keller's "The French Laundry Cookbook" and "Bouchon." (Chef Keller has written the foreword for "Happy.") It dazzles in its coffee-table presentation. Lingering over Deborah Jones's beautiful photographs might be the next best thing to eating Richard's food. Thoughts of "I can't do that!" are addressed upfront with a page of careful, teasing prose titled "They're All Secret Ingredients": talk of crisped, cooked carrots, tomatoes that taste like steak tartare. Readers are urged to go for it.

Be advised that the chef's rundown of tools might cause equipment envy, or a rash of purchasing. Dig into his occasional small essays on corn and crunch and chocolate; appreciate them as philosophical lagniappes and resting places.

A considerable amount of awe and trepidation can build up just by perusing the chapter on vegetables: Could anyone make a potato basket as spectacular as his -- even someone who happens to own a turning vegetable slicer attached to a mandoline blade? Would anyone ever find the courage to attempt the 'Shroomwich, with its separate recipes for Mushroom Jus, Mushroom Puree and Brioche?

Thankfully, techniques are often illustrated with a series of pictorial how-to steps. Ingredient lists can be short (Reconstructed Lemon Egg: eggs, sugar, lemon juice, butter), but oh, those directions.

Keep at it. You'll be rewarded with food that is put together in inventive ways, with unlikely flavor combinations. Master his various wrappings and you, too, can make Almost No-Fat Chicken Sausage and other meats, including the pork tenderloin that becomes Figgy Piggy in Sweet Spiced Port Sauce.

The fact that not all the recipes are projects might be "Happy's" most surprising aspect. Sometimes Richard uses a microwave (Happy Kid Pudding is a good example). The stocks, sauces, dressings or doughs of Richard's Basics chapters alone would upgrade a home cook's repertoire.

Or, you could simply pick up the book every now and then, scan its pages and smile.