Amazon.com (ISBN 1579651747, Hardcover)

In books including Seductions of Rice and the award-winning Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, authors Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid offered a new kind of cookbook--part anthropological portrait, part recipe source, part travel memoir (with photos taken by the pair), and in all, fascinating as well as useful. Their Home Baking is differently pitched. Though the authors have traveled to places including Russia, Hong Kong, and Australia, to bring back traditional baking formulas from their sources, they've also relied on home favorites plus other cookbooks whose recipes they admire. If the book lacks the layered scope, depth, and something of the interest of their former works, it nonetheless delivers unique goods--over 200 accessible recipes for savory and sweet goods like Nigella-Date Hearth Breads, Provincial Quince Loaf, Silk Road Non (a version of nan), Taipei Coconut Buns, and There-Layer Walnut Torte Whipped Cream. Fans of the authors, plus those new to the Alford and Duguid approach, will find much to explore and bake from here, as well as a beautiful, color-photo-studded volume in the A. and D. tradition.

Arranged by concepts such as Family Breads and All-Around-the-World Cookies, the book also offers food and travel asides such as Kisses from Brazil (about the skillet bread called beji, "kiss" in Portuguese), as well as informative headnotes that set each dish in context. (It should be mentioned that these notes and others are written in the first-person singular, but are unsigned or otherwise credited.) There are technical notes like those for bread making that guide bakers in the relaxed Alford and Duguid fashion, and where necessary, useful equipment discussion. There is also an eccentric entry or two, including a high-altitude recipe for chocolate chip cookies. But, ultimately, it's the unusual, traveled-derived formulas that make the book so worthy. --Arthur Boehm