'White House Chef'

The dishy bits were doled out in the media months before Walter Scheib's "White House Chef" (Wiley, 2007, $24.95) arrived in stores in January, and the chef has been making the rounds on television.

Never mind the gossip. We read this memoir-cookboook for the food, and it delivered. Scan the recipe list, and you may crave dishes you haven't had before: a ragout of fava beans and chanterelle mushrooms, a consomme flavored with gingered pheasant. But plenty of the 105 recipes in "White House Chef" are uncomplicated and should appeal to the palate of Everyman. The collection also reflects America's culinary evolution at the end of the last century: lemon grass to salsa to pomegranate glazes.

The memoir of executive chef Scheib's 11 years of service, written with Andrew Friedman, is the first of several 2007 books with recipes from high-profile Washington chefs. In full disclosure, we devoured the rest of "Chefs" as well. We enjoyed the chapters on G-8 summit dinner deliberations, private lessons for Chelsea Clinton and cooking comfort food post-9/11 in the Bush years, and Scheib's understated way of describing the creative differences with social secretary Lea Berman that foreshadowed his departure in 2005.

Next up: Roland Mesnier's "All the Presidents' Pastries," released this month.

-- Bonnie S. Benwick