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The diversity of Chinese cookery has always been an astonishment, especially for its virtually limitless variations on noodles, dumplings and breads. Those stimulating creations are the subject of Florence Lin's Complete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings and Breads (Morrow; $19.95). Lin has taught cooking at the China Institute in America in New York City for years, and her patience with students mastering the intricate hand operation of Chinese cooking is evident throughout. There is meticulous information on ingredients and techniques -- buying the correct flours, handling rolling pins and cutters and sealing edges so that dumplings do not steam apart. Cold noodle salad with sesame, peanut butter and chili sauce is a lovely accompaniment to barbecued meats and perfect on an outdoor buffet. The fried Beijing-style dumplings guo tie would be just right with a steaming borscht and a nice change from piroshki. Small fried won tons are a refreshingly different finger food, and the gently sweet miniature split-pea cakes favored by the Empress Dowager Ci Xi would be welcome with ice cream and after-dinner coffee.
John Clancy is not only a teacher and a chef with his own restaurant, he is also a born explainer. He has an extremely catholic taste, an attribute immediately apparent in John Clancy's Favorite Recipes -- A Personal Cookbook (Atheneum; $21.95). In a book well suited to the relatively inexperienced cook, he includes such simple, solid fare as hamburgers, braised shoulder of lamb, German vegetable beef soup and French crullers. He gives meat loaf some style by way of jalapeno peppers, tenderizes and flavors broiled duck with a ginger-and-wine-vinegar marinade and imparts a herbaceous Provence fragrance to the lowly blowfish. Clams in black bean sauce, beef stew in a pumpkin, and mousse of sea scallops are among the showier offerings. Seafood cookery and baking are his specialties; the first is the feature of his own restaurant in ^ Greenwich Village, and the second is the way he originally earned his high reputation.
Anne Rosenzweig, the inventive and talented chef who is part owner of the Manhattan restaurant Arcadia, is shy and diffident in the dining room, but given the consistent excellence of her food, she must have an iron will in the kitchen. The new American dishes served at her small and sophisticated restaurant are at once surprising yet comfortably familiar in taste. Now she and the artist Paul Davis, who painted the impressionistic seasonal mural that wraps around the walls of the restaurant, have put together a tiny, precise and endearing conceit: The Arcadia Seasonal Mural and Cookbook (Abrams; $14.95). This may be the gift cookbook of the year -- 28 pages opening out in a gatefold reproduction of the glowing Davis mural. Under the panels for each season are a few of Rosenzweig's most popular dishes for that time of year. Among her best: corn cakes with creme fraiche and caviars, chimney-smoked lobster, roast quail with savoy cabbage and kasha, wild mushroom tarts and such knockout desserts as macadamia nut tarts, lemon curd mousse and chocolate bread pudding. It would be a pity to cook by this book, thereby soiling pages with dabs of butter and egg yolk. Better photocopy recipes and keep the book on the coffee table, where it belongs.