Cooking 101 for timid chefs

With households watching every penny, a growing number of Americans are ditching their takeout menus and heading into the kitchen to cook dinner at home. The trouble is, many don't know how.

"We have forgotten how to cook," says author Mollie Katzen, best known for "The Moosewood Cookbook." As families learned to rely on dialing for pizza, they stopped being able to bake their own.

Now, lots of people want to save money but can't even make eggs, she says. We've become a nation of inexperienced but newly determined cooks, and that has given cookbook authors and publishers a promising new niche.

After years of cookbooks that ranged from pretentious celebrity chef volumes to glossy tributes to cupcakes, the latest trend embraces Cooking 101 - books that take readers back to the basics.

This fall, British chef Jamie Oliver releases "Jamie's Food Revolution," which teaches basic techniques that save money and produce healthier eating habits. And Katzen will roll out "Get Cooking," the first in a series of books that targets beginning cooks with straightforward recipes for soups, pasta, chicken and burgers.

These new offerings follow last fall's "Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics" by television chef Ina Garten and "Martha Stewart's Cooking School" by Martha Stewart. Garten's book was the top seller and Stewart's was in the top five, says Kathryn Popoff, vice president of trade books for bookseller Borders Group, Inc.

Books such as New York Times' columnist Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" and "Cooking Know-How," by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough also populate the growing genre.

Basic cookbooks have long been a staple of the cookbook industry. Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" walked Americans through Gallic cuisine. Fannie Farmer taught home cooks how to measure properly. "The Joy of Cooking" introduced asparagus and how to handle it. What has changed is the level of knowledge - or, perhaps, ignorance - these new books assume.

Culinary historians say America's migration from the stove began sometime after World War II, when more women moved into the workforce and the makers of packaged foods began casting cooking as drudgery to be dispensed with quickly.

Cookbooks are only part of the effort to help Americans get comfortable in the kitchen again. Many beginning cooks seem to want more instruction than a book can reasonably offer, giving rise to cooking schools.

Roughly 350 cooking schools can be found across the country, says Stephan Hengst, spokesman for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., up from just over 200 a decade ago. In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available, more than 62,000 students were enrolled.

"People realize that at the core of it, they never really learned to cook to begin with," Hengst says. "With the rise of Whole Foods and farmers' markets people are discovering ingredients that they're completely unfamiliar with and they want to know what to do with them."