THE MOST IMPORTANT RECIPES FROM THE MOST IMPORTANT COOKBOOKS OF A CENTURY

This is the season for “Best of” lists. A hefty and recently published book, “101 Classic Cookbooks,” not only lists what some consider the most important cookbooks in a century, but also features the best recipes from each one.

Clark Wolf, a co-editor of the anthology, published jointly by Rizzoli and New York University, says that the hardest part of the multiyear editing process was choosing the 100th and 101st books. “The first 99 were clear, obvious,” he said, but the selection committee argued hotly over the last two. That group included food luminaries like Alice Waters, Laura Shapiro, Betty Fussell, Michael Bauer and The New York Times’s Florence Fabricant and Marian Burros.

The book is an attempt to collect the most important American cookbooks of the 20th century (loosely defined: the first is Fannie Farmer’s “Boston Cooking-School Cook Book,” from 1896, and the last is “The French Laundry Cookbook” by Thomas Keller, published in 1999). But its goal, Mr. Wolf said, is to not only showcase the holdings of N.Y.U.’s Fales Library, now the largest collection of American food literature, but also to entice readers “to take the book down from the shelf, to buy it, to steal it from your mother if necessary.”

To that end, once the books were chosen, a team of graduate students in the university’s Food Studies department was enlisted to cull the best recipes from each one — and 500 of those are reprinted in the new anthology.

The students researched which recipes had been reprinted most often in newspapers, written about in magazines, anthologized, recommended and (in recent years) blogged about. Most books are represented with multiple recipes (the 1982 “Silver Palate Cookbook,” of course, by Chicken Marbella — yawn — but also by the spectacular Tarragon Chicken Salad and Curried Squash Soup); only one book contributed none (“Diet and Health With Key to the Calories,” 1918).

For cooks, this recipe collection is like the United States Olympic basketball team: all of the stars, none of the scrubs.

At a bash to celebrate the publication, all the food was made from recipes pulled from the books — but only those written by authors who are no longer living. (“Can you imagine the fighting otherwise?” said Mr. Wolf; many of the living authors were in attendance.) Marion Cunningham, who died last year, is among the authors with more than one book on the list; the others are Julia Child and James Beard. Ms. Cunningham was represented by her famous Heavenly Hots pancakes with maple butter.

N.Y.U. organized a panel discussion in conjunction with the book’s publication titled, “The Cookbook Book: Why Books and Benchmarks Matter.” Panelists included Madhur Jaffrey; the Fales Library director, Marvin Taylor, who wrote the introductions to each book; and from The Times, Ms. Fabricant, Ms. Burros and Mark Bittman. An excerpt of the discussion is above.

By Julia Moskin in "The New York Times" (http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com) December 13, 2012. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.