Splendid Table cookbook on trial

Every time I open the cookbook cupboard at my house, a pile of weighty hardbound tomes, saddle-stitched softcovers, magazine pages, newspaper clippings, email printouts, and hand-scrawled notes threatens to landslide. I have about as much need for another recipe as I do a box of Foie Gras Helper. But when I found out that Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of public radio's The Splendid Table, had written a new cookbook, How to Eat Supper, with her producer, Sally Swift, I wondered if these hometown stars might convince me to carve out some space in the cupboard.

The Splendid Table has been on the air for more than a decade, long enough for Kasper's cheery schoolmarm shtick to become as recognizable to public radio listeners as Garrison Keillor's wheeze. Each week, Kasper functions as a food lover's Oprah, interviewing all sorts of experts and authors who recommend Spanish cheeses, discuss Thomas Jefferson's passion for wine, or explain the humble origins of the tater tot. Though the show is produced in St. Paul, a city few consider a culinary capital, it has gained a large national following. Its broad appeal is based largely on its equally broad approach to food, presenting historical and political context alongside ideas on what to make for dinner. The show helped to democratize the gourmet hobbyist, and probably helped get the word "foodie" into the dictionary.

The role of the first American cookbook, which in 1796 instructed readers to bake their johnnycakes over a fire, was to help women fulfill their duty to be "good wives and useful members of society." Today's most popular manuals, by contrast, emphasize quick, simple recipes for busy people who want to avoid processed foods fraught with extra pounds. Even the promotional materials for Kasper and Swift's book acknowledge the glut: "Just when you thought the last thing you needed was another book on weeknight cooking...."

As cookbooks have evolved, they've developed two audiences: those who buy them for the "cook" and those who buy them for the "book," meaning that plenty of people are completely content to read recipes and pore over photographs without feeling the need to sharpen a knife or light a burner. How to Eat Supper's scrapbook-like format offers plenty of notes and anecdotes to please those who treat cookbooks as literature. The tidbits, tips, and recommendations in the margins read like asides to a conversation, mimicking the radio show's hodgepodge of interviews, trivia questions, and listener call-ins. Compared to Kasper's previous two cookbooks, on regional Italian cooking, this one is a clearer brand extension of the radio show. (The design, too, is as buoyant as Kasper's radio personality: a brash color palette, a smorgasbord of fonts, and bright, appealing photos.) Advice is as practical as a list of ways to use stale bread and as fantastical as what wine to pair with Twinkies. For every straightforward guide to salad greens and tomato varieties, there's a wacky factoid, such as how a chicken's earlobes reveal the color of its eggs, or results of a British Cheese Board study about how cheese affects sleep (apparently Stilton eaters dreamed about cuddly toys, while cheddar eaters had visions of celebrities).

The recipes themselves come from a variety of sources: both general inspiration from, say, Brussels pub food or Mediterranean cooking, to specific formulas from Swift's mother or reprints from other cookbook authors. There are global flavor influences—California, Italy, Asia—but the unifying factor seems to be simple preparations using fresh, high-quality, organic-when-possible ingredients.

The book is narrated in Kasper's frank, folksy tone: "It was June 1988 and I hadn't seen a salad in eight days," one chapter begins. And it offers much of the insider information that the radio show's groupies certainly crave, from Swift's admission that she's afraid to smash garlic with the side of a chef's knife to Kasper's bad-girl suggestion for buying grape tomatoes: "If you can, sneak a taste of one before committing to the entire container." A few items give the authors an ever-so-slightly bawdy edge: Kasper proclaims one dish as "good hangover food," and Swift confesses that she protects her vegetable garden from deer and rabbits by pouring her own urine around its perimeter.

When translating The Splendid Table from broadcast to print, though, many phrases that sound cute when spoken can come off as cornball on the page. For example, Kasper's description of a cauliflower dish that "reheats like a trouper," or her comment that ethnic markets are "a new recreational opportunity," or her remark that preheating the oven to 450 "opens you to culinary serendipity." When I got to the sentence, "We feel special—don't you?" I knew it was time to stop reading and start cooking.

For three days I grocery shopped, cooked, served, and ate supper the Kasper way. Besides the fact that it's a helluva lot more work to evaluate three meals when you have to prepare them yourself, here's what I found: