Two seasoned food professionals--one a cookbook editor and the other a caterer--match wits here to solve the kitchen dilemme of the '90s: how to serve imaginative, lively food without spending hours fussing or compromising on soul-satisfying flavor. Their solution is just to look to the great cooks--from Julia Child to James Beard to Diana Kennedy--for the simple dishes that are hidden away in even the most complicated cookbooks. They've assembled a treasury of superb recipes that depend on perfectly balanced flavors. The range is broad, from favorite American classics like spoon bread, corn fritters, and the only really delicious oven-fried chicken to exotic new tastes like Moghul Lamb, Bangkok Chicken, and Pasta with Vodka. For each recipe the editors offer tips, variations, suggests, and down-to-earth commentaries about how to work with exciting new ingredients as well as giving their own tried-and-true favorite recipes, simple winners they've cooked for years to great applause. Altogether there are 119 master recipes with 81 variations and 34 Editors' Kitchen recipes, a true culinary gold mine. In their pursuit of the secrets of true flavor, Frances McCullough and Barbara Witt come up with some unusual approaches, rethinking some of our basic ideas about how to prepare roasted chicken and turkey (in a very hot oven), pasta (one method lets it sit in hot water off the flame), and baking potatoes (they're particularly wonderful baked to death). Here you'll find a lot of nitty-gritty information about entertaining, a refresher course on how to make a really good green salad, lists of canapes and tidbit desserts, a collection of quick breads, and microwave notes. In a warm, intimate, encouragingly frank style, McCullough and Witt constantly encourage cooks to improvise by offering a range of variations, to start them experimenting with foods and flavors to develop their own recipes. This is a unique, user-friendly book that works for beginners who are reasonably sophisticated eaters as well as for experienced cooks. It will become the contemporary cook's favorite sourcebook for distinctive food.