And pretty much every spread shows underlying techniques and tricks you likely never thought of. For instance, a simple quinoa salad with cauliflower--it just requires a pressure cooker, and it's really fast--it takes just four minutes of cooking for the quinoa, something that never occurred to me to try, and includes the tip of freezing a baking sheet to cool the cooked grain for the salad. And cauliflower is rendered palatable (i.e., invisible) to doubters by being shaved over a mandoline or grated on a Microplane grater, mixed with green apple, celery, pine nuts, currants, and a hone-vinegar and lemon dressing. Easy, right? And good for winter. And not what you'd expect from this book.

Some of the techniques that will likely change your own regular practices include "low-temp oven steak," which involves first freezing steaks or any other tender cut of meat, quickly searing them, then putting it into the oven at the lowest temperature until a digital thermometer reads 133 F (or your desired degree of doneness). This, Myhrvold explains, yields meat that's evenly done to exactly the degree you want, rather than meat with an overdone exterior and underdone dead-center.

And there are unexpected forays, such as deconstructed carnitas that just require a pressure cooker and provide incidental lessons in braising meat, which the authors extend on the next pages to other braised recipes: steamed omelets that, like the frozen-then-low-temp steak, result in a completely uniform doneness and texture that the authors assure us is tender and delicate, as well as braised short ribs that, of course, require a sous-vide setup, the $300-or-so vacuum-bag and controlled water-bath machine that started being a foodie must last year--and a set-up, on a larger scale, that most restaurant cooks routinely use for short ribs, though they almost always fail to say so.

I still think you should go into debt to get the six-volume set--but that's just for hardcore cooks who want an invaluable reference. This is the book for anyone who wants to understand her or his kitchen better, and have a taste of what all the controversy over sous-vide and xanthan gum has been about.

Burma: Rivers of Flavor, by Naomi Duguid

Naomi Duguid, a tireless wanderer, a photographer with marvelous eye, and a teacher of cooking classes in Chiang Mai, Thailand, has a deep knowledge of Asia from her decades of chronicling and writing about village food in books like Hot Sour Salty Sweet and Seductions of Rice. She traveled all over Burma when the kind of cultural opening we saw this year was still a dream, and by good fortune the release of Burma: Rivers of Flavor coincided with President Obama's November visit.

She found a cuisine related to the Thai food she knows so well--chiles, ginger, lemon grass, turmeric, fish sauce, tomatoes as a condiment--but different in some of its building blocks, like shallot oil, fried garlic, chile oil, and, for protein, toasted chickpea flour and pan-roasted peanuts. Once you have a few of these on hand, you can make easy dishes like golden egg curry, the boiled eggs quickly deep-fried to give them a sizzling crust, and put in a fresh tomato-chile sauce with fresh sliced cayenne chiles, or an easy stir-fry of pork tenderloin with star anise and palm sugar water. And as usual, Duguid has new ways to make rice, like jasmine rice with shallots, cinnamon stick, turmeric, and coconut milk, which sounds celebratory. The real influence the book is likely to have on your cooking, though, are the salads and soups--what sound to be the real glory of Burmese food--easily assembled from various vegetables and leftover meats dressed with lime juice, shallot oil, and various fresh herbs that give them new life.

From A Polish Country House Kitchen: 90 Recipes for the Ultimate Comfort Food, by Anne Applebaum & Danielle Crittenden