There is a new interest in the first slant, with a recent very good book by leading culinary commentator James Villas entitled `Crazy for Casseroles' and an artfully done book on comfort foods, `Lost Recipes' by Marian Cunningham. But, this is hardly a hot topic like low carbs and fast cooking. In fact, the collection of recipes in this book is so basic that a final edit could have framed the recipes in the book in at least three different directions, toward comfort food, fast preparation dishes, and `family style' eating. In fact, the book reminds me of a story told about an information science book of about 20 years ago where it was claimed that at the last minute, in the light of the fast rise of object oriented programming and design, the author did a global change to the text with his word processor to change all occurrences of `procedure' and `subroutine' to `object'. It would not be hard to do a similar operation on this book with practically no harm done to the presentation or relevance of the recipes. This impression is reinforced by the fact that many of the `potluck' iconed sidebars have notes which have little or nothing to do with transporting the dish to your neighbor or the local parish.

The second slant of this book is the personality and product line of the author, Emeril Lagasse. Emeril is probably as little liked by foodie types as he is liked by the occasional food show viewer who treats `Emeril Live' as just a different flavor of reality show which is what it is. The great irony of the Food Network programming is that the greatest success in their shows and book publishing goes to culinary educators Alton Brown and Rachael Ray, while mainstream restaurateur culinary critics give Emeril's shows. Emeril's personality and marketing angles pervade the book. Every third recipe seems to include one of his products, primarily his spice mix, `Essence' as an ingredient. The locations and means of reaching his restaurants are in the back of his book. The web site addresses of all his commercial connections from the Food Network to All Clad to B& G foods are also in the back of the book. But, the most pervasive presence is Emeril's quite familiar persona in the introduction to each recipe.

Emeril's theme, encapsulated in his trademark exclamations, `Bam', `Kick it up a notch', `Gaaaarlic' and `Pork Fat Rules' is that his cooking takes traditional recipes and improves on them. This is dramatically different from the mantra of almost every other food writer today, where the holy of holies is fresh local ingredients. In a sense, I really respect Emeril for not beating this horse any more than it already has, and for touting his claims that he is presenting improved versions of comfort food classics.