Cooking by--and Among-- the Books

LONDON â€”  American Celia Brooks Brown goes to work at a London bookshop these frosty mornings lugging a big tool chest and two heavy crates.

Inside the crates one day lay fresh vegetables, spices, olive oil, butter and a carefully wrapped chocolate macaroon tart. Inside the chest rested knives, peelers, a lemon squeezer, a Parmesan shaver and what she calls a miniature blow torch--�for instant grilling and the occasional brulee-ing.�

Brooks Brown cooks by the books. She’s one of half-a-dozen chefs who take turns bringing to life both everyday and exotic recipes at a savory London institution called Books for Cooks: 8,000 titles, five tiny tables, one vest-pocket test kitchen. A three-course lunch costs around $18, BYOB.

“We’re the only cookbook store in London, and we may be the only one anywhere in the world that tests the recipes we sell right on the spot,� says manager Rosie Kindersley.

The rules are simple. The cooks must make a soup, two main courses, at least one of them vegetarian, and two desserts. They may use recipes of their own or from any book in the shop; the inventory comes mostly from British, American, French and Australian publishers.

As are the people who buy them in a city that has awakened to good food, the books are diverse.

Current bestsellers range from a bulky Cordon Bleu volume on cooking techniques to “Verdura� by Californian Viana La Place to “New Food� by Australian Jill Dupleix. As Brooks Brown caressed portobello mushrooms, salsa verde and Brazilian black beans one recent morning, a tourist bought a tiny $5 garlic cookbook that comes with a magnet to stick on the refrigerator and a London chef stopped in for a $250 volume by Yves Thuries on modern French pastry.

“If you want a book on Sri Lankan cooking, we can recommend which is the best. We regularly find Persian recipe books for exiles who cannot return to Iran,� says Heidi Lascelles, the shop’s owner.

A nurse by training, Lascelles founded the shop in 1983, partly out of frustration, she says, at being unable to find anything more than run-of-the-mill cookbooks. “In those days, London lived up to its reputation as a terrible place to eat.�

Since then, she says, British eyes have been opened and tastes awakened by travel that has whetted appetites for good food at home. “People have had good Greek, Italian and Spanish food on vacation, and they want to know how to cook it themselves,� she says.

In fact, says manager Kindersley, many people start with nuts-and-bolts basic books about cooking. Their number is leavened by experienced cooks who want to know how to get their recipes published. “We get famous chefs,� says Kindersley, “and we get Arab women covered head to foot in full purdah who are followed around the store by a servant who carries stacks of books about desserts to a waiting Rolls Royce.�

Beginning in February, the shop will sponsor demonstration classes for cooks and would-be cooks in a new studio kitchen. There already are cooking classes for children ages 7 to 12 at which Jane Foster, one of the shop’s weekly cooks, unveils gastronomic yum-yums like Cheesy Feet: Cheddar cheese baked in puff pastry and glazed with beaten egg yolk. “Carrot skin or tomato skin both make good toenails,� Foster says.

Everybody working in the shop must know how to cook. Requests for particular recipes and appeals for help when things go wrong on the stove are part of the action.

“I don’t know anything like this in Manhattan,� says Christina de la Torre, a New York chef who spent two hours browsing in the shop one recent morning. “The selection and variety are incredible, and the range of ethnic cooking is amazing.�

(Nach Waxman’s Kitchen Arts and Letters, this country’s most famous cookbook shop, is in Manhattan, but it has no cafe nor does Cook’s Library in Los Angeles.)

One dollar will buy a paperback on English desserts. An opulent French work on edible table centers is available for $125. A chef with more than $1,000 to burn can have a boxed five-volume facsimile of a 1742 French cooking classic by Vincent La Chapelle titled “Le Cuisinier Moderne.�

Sometimes people call for help on cooking quizzes. Others want seasonal recipes: Yorkshire Pye at Christmas or one boned bird baked inside another bird inside another bird. “There’s no fixed kind or number of birds, but quail-pigeon-chicken-goose-turkey would be fun,� Kindersley says.

Books for Cooks offers two books, one French, one American, on how to cook for cats and one book that teaches how to cook a cat. “Why Not Eat Insects?� by Vincent M. Holt is there, but “Unmentionable Cuisines� by Calvin Schwabe, which discusses cooking reptiles and that ilk, is momentarily out of stock after a big holiday rush, Kindersley says.

“The Mafia Cookbook,� osso buco to zabaglione by Joseph “Joe Dogs� Iannuzzi, is in stock, though, and so are “The Art and Science of Cookery With Cannabis,� “Food for Love� and “A-Z Aphrodisia.� “Flesh and Blood, a History of the Cannibal Complex� is also available but contains no recipes.

There is strong new year’s demand for “Hungry for You,� an anthology of writings about food from cannibalism to seduction, but there is only modest call for “Recipe Memories of Desert Storm: The Delight of Saudi Cooking.� Says Kindersley, “It’s the only Saudi cookbook we’ve ever seen.�

Beyond obvious commercial and olfactory advantages, there is a practical side to cooking in the shop, says Brooks Brown, who hails from Colorado Springs and specializes in gourmet vegetarian cooking.

“What we have is a one-of-a-kind experimental station for food. The truth is that people publish books with recipes that don’t work. Sometimes books use recipes from restaurants that have not been tested in reduced quantities. They can give us trouble. We rarely have a disaster, but we often have to rectify things,� says Brown.

For the last two years, Books for Cooks has published a $7 paperback volume of its own with the year’s most successful recipes from the test kitchen. Here, from Anissa Helou’s “Lebanese Cooking,� is the one among them that Heidi Lascelles likes best.

Books for Cooks, 4 Bleinheim Crescent, London W11 1NN, is open 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Sunday. Call for luncheon menu, reservations, 44-171-221-1992; fax, 44-171-221-1515.

BAKED STUFFED FISH

1 cup pine nuts

1 cup shelled walnuts

1 onion, chopped

5 cloves garlic, chopped

2 handfuls cilantro, roughly chopped

2 teaspoons cumin

2 teaspoons coriander

2 teaspoons paprika

Juice of 2 lemons

2/3 cup olive oil

Salt, pepper

2 (1-pound) white fish fillets (California red snapper or sea bass)

8 tomatoes, halved and seeded

Serve this fish with couscous.

Coarsely grind pine nuts, walnuts, onion, garlic, cilantro, cumin, coriander, paprika, lemon juice, olive oil and salt and pepper to taste in food processor.

Spread stuffing evenly on 1 fillet; top with second fillet. Fill tomato halves with leftover stuffing. Cook fish and tomatoes on baking sheet at 375 degrees, 15 to 20 minutes. Cut fish into 4 pieces and serve hot or warm.

Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

838 calories; 183 mg sodium; 109 mg cholesterol; 68 grams fat; 20 grams carbohydrates; 50 grams protein; 2.68 grams fiber.