Dishing with Style By Rori Trovato (Clarkson Potter hardcover, $29.95)
A lot of cookbooks these days look as if they were meant more for the coffee table than the kitchen: oversized, cumbersome, filled with gorgeous pictures of food alongside ill-laid-out hard-to-read recipes. Rori Trovato’s book is gorgeously illustrated (with photos by husband Luca Trovato) but this time out the photos are explicitly the point of the enterprise. Trovato aims to demystify the whole subject of “food styling” and make its principles accessible to the most harried home chef. Her down-to-earth recipes afford her opportunities to illustrate more than one way to present everyday and party dishes, ways in which the ingredients you’ll be using anyway can become part of a striking and appetizing presentation, without frills and over-tweaking. The book is small enough to fit on a crowded kitchen counter, pretty enough to make a terrific hostess gift for a favorite hostess. Roger Downey
