I am a hard sell on low-fat cooking, even at the beginning of the new year. Frankly, what is the point of living a long, miserable life? But award-winning cookbook author and journalist Sally Schneider was saying all the right things. In A New Way to Cook, she promises not to ignore the pleasure principle and deliver all the rich flavors I crave in a way that I won’t miss the extra fat grams.

Pros: Highly personal, well-written cookbook of traditional Korean family recipes. Recipes are refined but generally not difficult, even for a person unfamiliar with Korean cuisine. Cons: No photos of dishes or unfamiliar ingredients; dishes indexed by main ingredient or English names only, Korean names generally not indexed. No list of suggested menus.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the great French gastronome Brillat-Savarin observed that little had been done in the way of a scientific analysis of taste. There are too many tastes, he said, and classifying them would require a whole new language. Until then, we would just have to use generalizations like sweet, salty and sour to describe taste.

Pros: France’s haute cuisine king and quick’n’easy queen play lively kitchen duet. Cons: Some recipes get lost in translation.
Last year, peripatetic French superstar Alain Ducasse stormed New York with his extravagant, not to mention exorbitant, cuisine. This year, he is crossing the pond with Françoise Bernard, the doyenne of easy cooking. This culinary Odd Couple teamed up to write The Good Cuisine, a “simple to spectacular” study of 52 of the most popular ingredients in France by a master chef and a quintessential French home cook.