If you're too nervous to cook for mom--how will give you confidence. A big cookbook from the food lifestyle giant, especially one that starts with--can it be?--equipment, is sure to elicit snickers of reverse snobbism. But it's a fine book, for both the novice cook who doesn't know what "julienne" means and for the more proficient cook who still needs photographs to figure out how to make a lattice crust. Sometimes when reading a recipe, or more often, in the midst of cooking, you end up begging for a picture of what the dish is supposed to look like. Here you are, plus techniques you didn't even know you weren't good at: flooding icing, roll-cutting carrots, tempering eggs. All this and tasty recipes, too.
Another "equipment" book comes from Marie Simmons and the folks at Sur la Table: Things Cooks Love: Implements, Ingredients, and Recipes (Andrews McMeel, $35, 9780740769764/0740769766, May 2008). They say that cooking is easier and more fun with the right tools, and they help you figure out what you need for your style, from basic essentials to global essentials (a Portuguese cataplana, a Moroccan couscoussière, a tortilla press.) Not everything is that exotic; the chapter on cast-iron skillets is excellent, explaining not only how to season them, but what they are good at, and what they are not. But the cookbook is not just a tool book, it has more than 300 pages of scrumptious recipes, like Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce, Sautéed Fish Fillets with Herb Butter and Mango, Fresh-Fruit Quesadillas. The only thing missing is dessert, but that leaves more room for Cornish Hens with Basil and Mint, and Pommes Anna.
Maybe mom could use a little spice in her life, a few laughs--who couldn't? Perhaps a book that cooks, so to speak, but doesn't involve a stove (although an apron is a possibility). Try Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (Norton, $24.95, 9780393064643/0393064646, April 2008). Written by Mary Roach, who brought us the memorable Stiff and Spook, this exploration into sex research is both informative and hilarious, right down to the clever chapter names with photographs: "Re-member Me," about implants and transplants, is heralded by pencils broken, straight, short and knotted. In explaining the "strange, brave career" of Dr. Ahmed Shafik, she writes, "[He] won my heart by publishing a paper in European Urology in which he investigated the effects of polyester on sexual activity. Ahmed Shafik dressed lab rats in polyester pants." Roach takes us into labs (including brothels and pig farms) and curious scientific minds studying things a bit difficult to describe, in our publication, anyway. Suffice it to say, she's witty ("The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked . . . ") and her subject is fascinating and often oddball, a delightful mix.--Marilyn Dahl