But a few days later the memory of that salmon drifted back into my head, and I began longing for it. Hearing that I was going to have grilled salmon at the house of a friend in Lawrence, Kan., I thought excitedly, "Maybe she'll make Bob Blumer's recipe." How could she have? She didn't own the book. Nevertheless, I was stupidly disappointed, and the instant I got back home I made Blumer's salmon a second time. I decided that the recipe was, in fact, very good, and that my original "Eh" had been due to the fact that no actual food can live up to a really luscious prose description. (You'd think I would have learned this from eating in countless restaurants whose menus have been written by food poets, but I haven't.)

If you're my age, 154, the rest of "Off the Eaten Path" may seem too young for you. What busy centenarian has time to mess around with poaching fish in the dishwasher, baking shrimp on top of a car engine, cutting honeydew and cantaloupe so that they look like (pale green and orange) fried eggs or making a bed of polenta that actually looks like a bed, with little ravioli pillows? ("You can find uncut sheets of pasta at fresh pasta stores. Alternatively, use extra wide sheets of dried lasagna pasta and make single 'beds.'") What's the point of food that looks wacky but tastes ordinary? Still, that maple-soy salmon ...

If you buy only one cookbook from which to make only one recipe, let this be the one. Add a little salt to the pepper crust, though. And maybe sprinkle some chopped scallions on top when you take the salmon out of the broiler.

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When you think about it, it's odd how often cookbook authors single out only a few recipes in their books for particular attention. Doesn't a comment like "This is the best chicken I've ever tasted" hurt the feelings of all the other chicken recipes in the book? Aren't all the book's dishes supposed to be the best the author has ever made? You can't introduce a recipe with "This is only OK," of course, but that seems implied when just three or four recipes in a book are given a red-carpet introduction.

On the other hand, raving over every single recipe in a cookbook is asking for a different kind of trouble. This is the challenge faced by Fran McCullough and Suzanne Hamlin in "The Best American Recipes 1999." Reading the book makes you aware that choosing the year's best recipes is a task akin to writing restaurant reviews. To an outsider it may sound like fun, but there are just so many recipes out there.

When we first embarked on this project [say the authors], we were filled with joy and a huge sense of fun. There we were, let loose on the entire world of food to do our favorite thing: search out the year's most fascinating recipes and race into the kitchen to cook them. At first slowly, then at a more alarming rate, our house began to fill with hundreds of cookbooks, towering stacks of magazines, piles of Internet printouts, newspaper clips, handouts and even the odd recipe clipped from a food package. We were literally drowning in recipes (well, not literally), thousands upon thousands of them ... Sometimes a recipe that sounded great on the page failed to deliver in the kitchen. Just about as often, really good dishes came from obscure sources, not the celebrated food establishment.

Many of the recipes we tried were perfectly pleasant but not truly great. So, just what IS a great recipe? Margaret Ann Surber, the recipe tester for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, puts it simply: "It gives you maximum return on your effort."

Exactly. And yet a cookbook has to be well balanced, which means the authors had to find as many "great" recipes for vegetables as for the much-easier-to-track-down "great" desserts and main courses. Thus there is a certain amount of hype for recipes like roasted green beans with garlic: "This is one of those astound-your-guests recipes; everyone who tastes them will be amazed by the beans, and they won't guess the secret ingredient." But I made it, and my guests did guess -- the secret ingredient is anchovies -- and I noticed that none of them was "amazed" enough to have a second helping. On the other hand, this book is well worth buying for its cajeta poundcake alone and also for Marion Cunningham's buttermilk pancakes. And while we're at it, the "amazing" roast duck brushed with Thai curry paste actually is amazingly good, and easy.

Besides, it's plain old satisfying to see a year's worth of food trends summed up in one book. I hope this book turns into a series. Are you listening, Houghton Mifflin? You should do much better with recipes than with the year's best short stories and essays.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"