Home Cooking & More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin

If Laurie Colwin were living and writing in today's food-obsessed culture, her food essay collections would likely be bestsellers. The woman with the cheerful face and the frizzy hair could write. Oh, how she could write!

In her first collection, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, Colwin made eggplant not only interesting but sound like the tastiest thing aside from chocolate candy.

In these two collections of food essays, Colwin, who died in 1992, offers more than good recipes. She offers a few good recipes, cooking wisdom and large dashes of humor. In the essay "Feeding the Fussy," Colwin waxes wise on entertain fussy eaters, from those with food allergies to finicky eaters and others. "Vegetarians, for example, are enough to drive anyone crazy. Like Protestants, they come in a number of denominations," she writes, as she proceeds to distinguish between lactovegetarians and vegans. "And some people say they are vegetarians when they mean they do not eat red meat, leading you to realize that for some people chicken is a vegetable."

In her second collection, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen, Colwin's subjects range from the glories of tomatoes to the virtues and sins of butter to her obsession with raspberries.

"A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins," she writes.

Colwin also writes that "God created raspberries in large part so that we would preserve them in glowing jars to stack smugly in the cupboard ... But raspberry picking is not invariably about jam making, any m ore than sex is invariably about procreation."

Colwin is the writer who first pointed me to the wonderful literary food writing of Elizabeth David. In the essay, "Why I Love Cookbooks" Colwin concludes, "And for those of you who are suffering from sadness or hangover, or are feeling blue or tired of life, if you're not going to read Persuasion, you may as well read Italian Food by Elizabeth David."

Colwin, by the way, also is the author of a few novels, among them Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object and Goodbye Without Leaving.