In the recently released “Salads: Appetizers, Entrees and Sides” (Ryland, Peters & Small, $19.95), author Elsa Petersen-Schepelern (a prolific producer of single-subject cookbooks, including tomes devoted to salsas, smoothies, shakes and more) devotes an early page to the creation of a vinaigrette that satisfies on its own or can be used as a building block. It’s sound, practical advice. Here’s what she writes:

“Vinaigrette can be a simple thing - jsut oil, vinegar or other acidulator such as citrus juice, plus salt and freshly ground black pepper. You can add lots of other things to ring the changes, but in my opinion, this simple mixture can’t be beaten. I think the oil should be as good as you can find, and the vinegar as little as possible. The secret is in the ratio of oil to vinegar. I like the ratio of six parts oil to 1 part vinegar, but his can be a matter of taste. I find you can use more if the vinegar is replaced by lemon juice. Remember, if you have to add sugar, you’re probably using too much vinegar.”

Here’s her basic recipe:

SIMPLE VINAIGRETTE
Makes about 1/2 cup.

6 tbsp. extra-virgin oilve oil
1 tbsp. white wine vinegar
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions
Put the olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper in a salad bowl and beat with a fork or a small whisk.

Here are her suggested variations:

1. Add 1 tsp. Dijon mustard and beat well; the mustard helps form an emulsion.

2. Use harissa paste instead of mustard.

3. Use fresh garlic instead of mustard; crush 1 clove garlic with a pinch of salt to form a paste.

4. Use Japanese rice vinegar, which gives a mild, smooth taste. You can also substitute red wine vinegar, sherry vinegar, cider vinegar and others.

5. Use freshly squeezed lime or lemon juice instead of vinegar.

6. Instead of extra-virgin olive oil, use 2 tbsp. mild virgin olive oil and 3 tbsp. nut oil, such as walnut, macadamia or hazelnut.

7. Heat vinaigrette in a small saucepan over very low heat until just warm, the pour over salad.

Finally, one more idea from Petersen-Schepelern:

BLUE CHEESE DRESSING
Makes about 1/2 cup.

8 oz. Gorgonzola dolcellate or other blue cheese, crumbled
6 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp. white wine vinegar
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions

In a medium bowl, crush crumbled blue cheese with a fork. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil and mash until creamy, adding remaining olive oil and then vinegar as you go (if mixture it too thick, beat in a little hot water until it is loose and creamy). Season with salt and pepper to taste; take care with salt, as blue cheese is already quite salty. Dressing may thicken on standing, so you may have to beat it again (and add a little more hot water) before serving.

Cauliflower was front and center at farmer Sor Vang’s stand at the St. Paul Farmers Market.

Because I am a creature of habit, I always look for a parking spot on the south side of Mears Park when I’m headed to the St. Paul Farmers Market. Saturday was no different, and I lucked out; just as I was approaching the park, a car was leaving a primo spot. I pulled in and walked a block to the market, and the first stand I encountered was Sor Vang’s, which anchors the market’s high-traffic northwestern corner.

The Vang family’s offerings for the day included red-skinned new potatoes, green beans, cabbage, herbs and the first cauliflower I’ve seen this year. Mark Twain famously said that cauliflower “is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” I’ve always liked its tightly packet florets-on-stems look, which to me resembles a pickled brain in a bad Sci-Fi movie. The name is Latin: caulis means stalk and floris means flower.

Cauliflower can of course be eaten raw (the entire floret is edible) but I was hoping to find a few recipes that might utilize saute or steam methods. I went to my kitchen library and Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s name jumped out at me. Lynne is of course the host of public radio’s “The Splendid Table” and author of the celebrated 1992 cookbook of the same title. In 1999 she wrote “The Italian Country Table,” and it’s that book’s spine that caught my scanning eyeball.

“Country” didn’t make the same splash as “Splendid” (although, frankly, follow-ups are always tough; I mean, Broadway director/choreographer Michael Bennett knew that anything that trailed his landmark “A Chorus Line” wasn’t going to ever top it, and he was right; “Ballroom” was spit-roasted by the critics, and the public didn’t exactly line up at the box office, either).

Too bad, because “Country” is an overlooked gem, particularly for anyone with a CSA share. That’s because the book’s subhead is “Home Cooking from Italy’s Farmhouse Kitchens,” the key word being “farmhouse.” If farm cooks don’t cook seasonally, then who does, right? Perhaps the publisher should consider a new marketing effort, because the book’s recipes are tailor-made to CSA-ers deluged with vegetables. For anyone cooking from their garden, from the farmers market, the seasonally-minded co-op or the CSA, this book definitely worth the investment. (Amazon.com has used copies for $10 and less).

More good news: most of the book’s recipes steer clear of high-falutin’ ingredients, meaning that this title is also a valuable one for budget-minded cooks. And it’s awfully readable. Once my recipe search was over, I started flipping pages (”There is nothing, absolutely nothing that pleasures me more than a bowl of pasta and tomato sauce. When I want to reach out with all my love to my husband, a dish of pasta and tomatoes is almost always in my hands.”) and a half-hour passed before I realized it. Lynne writes just the way she sounds on MPR; you can literally hear her voice as each sentence passes through your brain.

I shot this on our back steps. My partner collects hand-painted pottery from Deruta, Italy, so in honor of Lynne I included it.

Just as I knew she would, Lynne has a few fantastic-sounding recipes that put cauliflower front and center, I’ve included them below. Here are excerpts from an interview I conducted with Lynne in 1999, when the book was first published.

Lynne poses with her then-new “Country” book, in a Strib file photo. That’s her checkerboard kitchen floor in her St. Paul home.

Q: What is the theme of this book?

A: The book is really about 30 years of traveling, asking questions and then coming back with new eyes and asking new questions. This book is very much about why Italian food reaches out to people in such a special way, why we have this incredible attraction for all things Italian. There is something about this food. It tastes like the food of home, even if your home had nothing to do with Italy whatsoever.

Q: The book seems to be about capturing and preserving an endangered way of life: la cucina povera, or poor-people’s cooking.

A: We must understand that the one constant tradition is change. This culture, with people living off the land, with its immense respect for the work of hands, has continued to evolve, and it is disappearing. But these people are not stupid or backward. They keep looking for ways to improve quality and make a better living. The difficult thing is that the new laws of the European Union governing food production are accelerating change by a factor of 20 or 30 times. Many of the laws are good ones, but the sad thing is that they are setting stringent standards on food production based upon large-scale industrial production. And the key to high-quality food, no matter where it is produced in the world, is smaller-scale, hands-on production. When you put into place a law that changes production methods, you wipe away traditions that have been evolving for centuries.

Q: How difficult is it to translate Italian peasant food to American ingredients and kitchens?

A: It requires a sense of subtlety. Small shadings make a big difference. It’s about browning the meat a little more, or using a young six-inch basil plant to approach that very special pesto of Genoa. What comes through loud and clear is that it is all about local and seasonal and the freshest you can get. In a sense, if you follow my recipes rigidly you’ll miss the entire point of what this book is about and what this food is about. It’s all about improvising. That’s what these people do. If the broccoli isn’t ready, use cauliflower.

Q: Your cousin Edda Pollestrini plays a central role in the book.

A: She’s remarkable. I’ve known her all my life. She and my mother met in 1928. I first met her when I was 15 years old, on her first trip to the United States. I saw her four or five more times before I actually went over to Tuscany to stay.

Q: Talk about your love affair with tomatoes.

A: The tomato is the single most important flavoring agent to come on the scene in Italian food maybe after salt and pepper. Tomatoes bring out qualities of other foods in the most extraordinary ways. It’s their complexity, their lushness. They enlarge almost anything. They make meager foods more savory and satisfying, and that’s the key to the peasant food that I’m writing about.

Q: The book has four very different tomato sauces that are made with basically the same ingredients.

A: It’s remarkable, but you can take the same five ingredients - tomatoes, herbs, olive oil, garlic and onions - and, depending upon how you cook them, you will get a different sauce. But that’s the tomato.

Q: A good fresh tomato isn’t too easy to come by in Minnesota until probably August. What’s a good canned brand?

A: There are three labels that I like, and it shocks people to hear that a supposed Italian food authority isn’t raving about imports. But I like Hunt’s, Contadina and Muir Glen. You can name the store, and chances are they’ll be there on the shelf. And just because I like them doesn’t mean that it’s the word from some deity on high. Do what I do and compare what’s around. And you want whole peeled tomatoes. Crush them in your hands. And stay away from anything with paste in it. Canners seem to use a low grade of tomato paste for thickness and body, but what happens is when you cook it the paste brings out the tomato’s most unattractive aspects. Diced tomatoes packed into tomato juice are just fine.

Q: What’s your feeling on fresh vs. dried pasta?

A: It’s not a matter of better or worse. It’s just different, and there’s a place for both. No Italian makes fresh every night, and you can get such great dried boxed pasta.

Q: What do you recommend?

A: My first choice is De Cecco, second is Barilla. If you want to spend as much on a box of pasta as you would on a pound of steak, then get Rustichella or Latini. Williams-Sonoma carries Benedetto Cavalieri, and it’s great, so is Pugliese, very lusty. And I can’t recommend any American pastas. The trick is to read the labels. If it says rinse after cooking, then it’s a low-grade brand. And that eliminates Creamettes from the competition. [Laughs]. Creamettes has a place, just not on my plate.

Q: Do you have a favorite recipe in the book?

A: It might be the sweet rosemary pear pizza. It’s a wonderful dish, part of the old sweet-pizza tradition of central and southern Italy. I like the surprise of having a fruit dish you flavor with rosemary and basil and black pepper. It’s one of those dishes that makes you grin, because although it feels as if it were just created for a magazine spread, it was being made in 1600.

SPICED CAULIFLOWER WITH ZITI
Serves 6 to 8 as a first course, 4 as a main dish.
Note: From “The Italian Country Table” by Lynne Rossetto Kasper (Scribner, $35). “In this dish (called ziti con Cavolfiore Piccante), cauliflower chunks are browned and slowly cooked with spices and tomato into a sauce for hollow ziti pasta,” writes Rossetto Kasper. “Typical of Sicilian cooks’ talent for mixing the sweet with the piquant, clove and cinnamon season the cauliflower, along with anchovy and vinegar, which cook in to the dish until they’re only pleasing base notes. Tomatoes perform their usual magic, brining everything into harmony. Instead of cauliflower, try about 1 1/2 pounds green beans (cut into 1-inch lengths) in this dish, or two generous heads of escarole that have been rinsed, thoroughly dried and torn into bite-sized pieces. Both cook just as cauliflower does.” Rossetto Kasper recommends a red Corvo for a wine pairing.

1 large head cauliflower, cut into 1 1/2-inch flowerettes
6 qts. boiling salted water
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Generous pinch of hot red pepper flakes
Generous pinch of ground cloves
Generous pinch of cinnamon
1/4 c. tightly packed chopped fresh basil and flat-leaf parsley leaves
2 large garlic cloves, minced
4 oil-packed anchovy fillets, rinsed
3 tbsp. red wine vinegar
1 lb. ziti
1 14-oz. can whole tomatoes, drained and finely chopped
1/4 lb. ricotta salata cheese, shaved into long furls
1/3 c. pine nuts, toasted

Directions
Drop cauliflower into boiling water and cook 1 minute. Scoop out with a slotted spoon and drain. Keep water boiling. Film bottom of a 12-inch saute pan (not non-stick) with olive oil and heat over medium-high heat. Saute cauliflower 2 minutes. Stir in onion, sprinkle with salt and pepper and stir frequently until the cauliflower is golden brown. Stir in hot red pepper flakes, ground cloves, ground cinnamon, basil and parsley, garlic, anchoives and vinegar and cook about 1 minute. Remove from heat. Cook pasta in fiercely boiling water, stirring often, until tender yet firm to the bite. Remove from heat, reserve 2/3 cup of pasta water and drain pasta in a colander. Place saute pan over medium-high heat, blend in reserved pasta water, and scrape up bottom of brown glaze on bottom of pan. Stir in tomatoes and boil 3 minutes, or until cauliflower is crisp tender. Reduce heat to medium-low and add pasta, tossing to blend. Season to taste with salt and a generous amount of black pepper. Fold in cheese and serve hot, sprinkled with pine nuts.

HOME-STYLE CAULIFLOWER AND RED ONIONS
Serves 4 to 6.
Note: From “The Italian Country Table” by Lynne Rossetto Kasper. “Rarely do we think of cauliflower as a summer vegetable, yet it is in its prime from midsummer to fall,” writes Kasper. “In this dish (called Cavolfiore alla Casereccia) , chunks of cauliflower are spiced with lots of black pepper and sauteed garlic and onion. Cauliflower’s sturdy cabbage quality meets its match with these seasonings and the unexpected finish of basil. This is the kind of dish you often see set on the sideboard in a farmhouse kitchen to rest and mellow before being served as an antipasto or salad. It’s best served room temperature or slightly warm.”

Water
1 large cauliflower, cut into large flowerettes
Extra-virgin olive oil
2 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 medium to large red onion, sliced into thin rings
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 c. tightly packed fresh basil leaves, torn

Directions
Set a collapsible steamer in a 6-quart pot. Add about 2 inches of water and bring to a boil. Arrange cauliflower flowerettes on steamer rack, cover pot and cook about 5 mknutes, or until stems resist only a little when pierced with a knife; cauliflower should be tender-crisp. Transfer to a colander and rinse under cold water to stop cooking. Film bottom of a 12-inch skillet with olive oil and set over medium heat. Saute garlic slices to barely blond, then immediately remove with a slotted spoon and reserve. Increase heat to medium-high and saute onion for 2 minutes, or until beginning to color. Add cauliflower and salt and pepper to taste. Cook, turning pieces, 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer cauliflower to a platter and sprinkle with garlic and a generous amount of black pepper. Let stand at room temperature at least 1 hour. When ready to serve, scatter basil over cauliflower.

And because Lynne loves this pear pizza recipe - and so do I - I’m including it. Try it, you’ll adore it.

SWEET ROSEMARY-PEAR PIZZA
Serves 8 to 10.
Note: From “The Italian Country Table” by Lynne Rossetto Kasper. “The wedges of pear on this big farmhouse pizza are sprinkled with rosemary, basil, cinnamon, sugar and orange zest,” writes Rossetto Kasper. “Such uncommon spicing steps straight out of centuries-old recipes for sweet pizzas. Sweet pizzas are new to us, but in central and southern Italy, they used to be commonplace. There the word pizza describes all sorts of pies, turnovers and flavored flatbreads, both savory and sweet, made with leavened dough or pastry, as in this pizza. Farm women used to bake them as a once-a-week family treat. Usually they slipped the pizzas into their bread ovens after they had removed a week’s worth of baked loaves of bread. Don’t be put off by the sprinkling of olive oil - it has long been used in sweet dishes and adds just the right fruity note to the pizza.” Rossetto Kasper suggests a modest Tuscan Vin Santo for a wine pairing.

For pastry:
1 1/2 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
Generous 1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. sugar
1 stick (4 oz.) cold unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1 large egg, beaten
2 to 3 tbsp. cold water, divided
For topping:
4 (1 1/2 to 2 lb. total) firm ripe Bosc pears (preferably organic)
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Shredded zest of 1 large orange
1 tbsp. fresh basil leaves, chopped
1 tsp. fresh rosemary leaves, finely chopped
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1/2 c. sugar
2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

Directions
For the pastry, combine flour, sugar and salt in a food processor or a large bowl. Cut in butter with rapid pulses in food processor, or rub between your fingertips until butter is size of peas. Add egg and 2 tablespoons water. Pulse just until dough gathers in clumps, or toss with a fork until evenly moistened. If dough seems dry, blend in another 1/2 to 1 tbsp. water. Oil a 14- to 16-inch pizza pan. Roll out dough on a floured board to an extremely thin 17-inch round. Place dough on prepared pan. Don’t trim excess pastry - fold it over toward center of pie. Refrigerate 30 minutes to overnight. Set an oven rack in lowest position and preheat oven to 500 degrees. Take dough out of refrigerator. Peel, core, halve and stem pears. Slice vertically into 1/2-inch wedges, about 14 slices per pear. Moisten with a little lemon juice. Fold back dough’s rim so it hangs over edge of pan. Arrange pear slices in an overlapping spiral on dough, starting right at rim of pan. Sprinkle with orange zest, basil, rosemary, cinnamon, pepper, sugar and oil. Flip overhanging crust onto pears. Bake 20 to 25 minutes, or until pears are speckled golden brown and crust is crisp. Cover crust’s rim with foil if it browns too quickly. Remove pizza from oven and serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

Our CSA delivery this week included a majestic head of Romaine lettuce, and when I saw my mind immediately went to Caesar salad. From there it only took a moment for me to recall the awesome Caesar I once enjoyed at San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe, and how its formula was meticulously re-created in “The Zuni Cafe Cookbook” (W.W. Norton, $35).

Author Judy Rodgers, the restaurant’s owner, spent five years writing a publishing rarity: a useful restaurant cookbook. While no two-dimensional book can ever replicate the sensory experience of eating in a restaurant, this one actually comes close.

Here are excerpts from a conversation I had with Rodgers in 2003, shortly before she walked away with a triple crown at the James Beard Foundation Awards: the book won in the professional cooking category as well as for Cookbook of the Year, and Zuni won for Outstanding Restaurant.

Judy Rodgers at her Zuni Cafe. Photo from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Q: “The Zuni Cafe Cookbook” is a stylistic departure from most cookbooks. In a world that values uniformity, how did you manage to create something so different?

A: In publishing, there really is an abiding belief that the average cookbook buyer doesn’t want a big, heavy tome. The perception is that the market is wider if a book is short and chirpy. There are other golden rules: no recipes longer than a page and no ingredients that can’t be bought in a Topeka supermarket during off hours. The more color photos the better, and recipe steps should be numbered. That’s all probably born out of statistics, because I heard it a lot.

Q: And you broke those rules, didn’t you?

A: Well, many of them. There is a similarly standard bank of cookbook-review criticisms, and it creates a bias before the readers have seen the book and decided for themselves. You can bet publishers respond to that, too. All along I kept hearing, `Oh, Judy, you’ll be criticized for doing this or doing that.’ But if it becomes OK to have four-page recipes, then we will get greater variety in cookbook writing. Of course, it’s legitimate to criticize when that four-page recipe doesn’t work or is difficult for the sake of being difficult. But it’s not when I couldn’t have written it any other way. If I had printed recipes in neat one-page, three-paragraph blurbs - in other words, leaving out the stuff that makes the dish the dish - I would have been slapped with a more serious criticism, that the recipe doesn’t work.

Q: Still, even at 548 pages, you probably had to cut a few things. What didn’t make it into the book?

A: There was a long chapter on pizzas, but I struggled with how to make them without a brick oven and ultimately couldn’t come up with a satisfactory alternative. There were more tarts and frozen granitas, two of my favorite things to make. Actually, there was a little bit more of everything. What didn’t get cut was the prose, the essays, the atypical stuff. A different editor would have said, `We want more recipes, and we want shorter recipes,’ but with my editor it was, `Don’t cut a word of the prose.’ She was gambling that that was something people would like. And I think she was right. It’s my opinion that a lot of potential cookbook buyers treat cookbooks as a vicarious pleasure. Of the hundreds of letters I’ve received about the book, more than half talk about how they buy cookbooks to sit on their bedstand and read, that they love to read them even if they don’t use the recipes. I think that’s great. I wanted this to be a cooking book, not just a recipe book. I figured that was something I could add to the equation. There are already so many recipe books out there. If I’m going to burden the world with another collection of recipes, I wanted to make sure I said stuff that hasn’t been said before. I mean, do we really need another recipe for pappa al pomodoro? What’s fun is the whole process of cooking. I love to understand what is happening in cooking, as opposed to being an observer in cooking. There is so much stuff going on in terms of sense experience and science. It’s not just following instructions while you’re drinking a martini and watching television. I’m watching cooking while I cook.

Q: You wrote that readers need not slavishly follow a recipe. Isn’t that heresy coming from a cookbook author?

A: I really struggled with the whole proposition of writing a recipe. I doubt if I’ve ever sat down and followed more than two or three recipes in my whole life; I learned to cook by watching cooking happen. No one at Troisgros [the three-star French restaurant owned by her host family when she was a foreign-exchange student, a deeply influential experience] used a recipe. I dutifully wrote while they cooked, taking down ingredients and quantities, so I could go back home and re-create the same dishes. So I’m back in St. Louis in 1974. I go to the supermarket, idiot that I was, to buy the ingredients for a dish of Jean’s, a bean salad with creme fraiche. And guess what? The green beans were as thick as the ropes on a cabin cruiser and the cream was hyper-pasteurized. It was horrible. Of course my family said, `Oh, this is wonderful,’ but I knew it wasn’t good; it tasted tough and plastic. Everything that was wrong was all the things I never thought about. At Troisgros, great ingredients were a given. But returning to America, I discovered that all those numbers that I’d carefully recorded didn’t matter. Quantities are the easy part, they’re subject to adjustment. What you can’t change is the character of the raw ingredients. That absolutely has to come first.

Q: Finding great ingredients in food-obsessed San Francisco isn’t much of a problem, is it?

A: In California, we live in this blessed enclave. And over the years, we’ve refined sourcing enough so that it doesn’t make it into the door at Zuni if it’s not pretty darned good. Everything I cook is already in good shape, ingredients-wise. And we have decent pans and stoves that work. What I struggle with at Zuni is teaching cooks, and how they misinterpret. I’ll give cooks our basic Caesar salad recipe, but then I warn them: Eggs can vary in size and flavor, and lemons vary in size, juiciness and fragrance. The basic recipe - which really hasn’t changed in 15 years - is a road post. But if the day’s lemons are fragrant and juicy, you’ll need to use less than half a lemon. Or if they’re lousy and you can’t count on them to carry the flavor load, you’ll have to push harder with the Parmesan and garlic. It’s the experience of knowing how the dish will taste today. You’re constantly striving to make the dish as good as it can be with the ingredients you have. By shooting for an absolute standard, you’ll probably end up with mediocrity. If you train yourself to pay attention as you cook, that process of optimizing flavor is not intimidating or frustrating. It’s fun, and it means you are engaged in the cooking process. Making allowances for the variation in ingredients is something to be celebrated.

CAESAR SALAD
Serves 4 to 6.
Note: From “The Zuni Cafe Cookbook” by Judy Rodgers (W.W. Norton, $35). Measurements should be considered approximations.

For croutons:
4- to 5-ounce chunk or slice of day-old levain or sourdough bread or other chewy, peasant-style bread
2 to 3 tbsp. mild-tasting olive oil
Salt to taste
For salad:
2 to 3 heads Romaine lettuce (to yield about 1 1/2 lbs. usable leaves)
1 tbsp. red wine vinegar
2/3 c. mild-tasting olive oil
1 1/2 tbsp. chopped salt-packed anchovy fillets (6 to 9 fillets)
2 tsp. chopped garlic
A few pinches salt
2 large eggs, refrigerated
3 oz. Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated (about 1 1/2 cups, very lightly packed), divided
Freshly ground black pepper
3 tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice (about 1 1/2 lemons)

Directions
To prepare croutons: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut bread into 1/2- to 3/4-inch cubes. In a large bowl, toss bread cubes with olive oil to coat evenly. Salt lightly, toss again, and spread on a sheet pan. Roast, rotating pan as needed, until golden all over, about 8 to 12 minutes. Taste a crouton; it should be well seasoned and slightly tender in the center. Remove from oven and cool croutons completely on sheet pan.
To prepare lettuce: Discard the leathery outer leaves of romaine, then cut off base of each head and rinse and dry leaves. Go through leaves, trimming them of discolored, leathery, bruised or wilted parts, but leave them whole, until you have about 1 1/2 pounds of prepared leaves. Layer leaves with towels if necessary to wick off every drop of water - wet lettuce will make an insipid salad. Refrigerate leaves until just before dressing salad.
To prepare dressing: In a medium bowl, whisk together vinegar, olive oil, anchovies, salt and garlic. Add eggs, a few sprinkles of cheese and lots of black pepper and whisk to emulsify. Strain lemon juice through a fine-mesh sieve (discarding solids) and add juice. Whisk again, just to emulsify. Taste dressing, first by itself and then on a leaf of lettuce, and adjust any of the seasonings to taste. If Romaine is very sweet, dressing may already taste balanced and excellent - if it has a mineral taste, extra lemon or garlic may improve flavor. If you like more anchovy, add it. (You should have about 1 1/2 cups of dressing).
To prepare salad: Place Romaine in a wide salad bowl. Add most of dressing and fold and toss very thoroughly, taking care to separate leaves and coat each surface with dressing, adding more as needed. Dust with most of remaining cheese, add croutons and toss again. Taste and adjust as before. In general, the tastier the romaine, the less you will need to emphasize the other flavors. First pick out large, then medium-sized and then smallest leaves and arrange on cold plates. If croutons are at all dry, add a last drizzle of dressing to bowl, add croutons and stir them around in bowl to capture dressing on each of their faces and in their hollows. Distribute croutons among salads and finish each serving with a final dusting of cheese and more pepper.

Fair warning: I hate the kind of pronouncement that I’m about to make.

But, what the heck, I’ll make it anyway. If you’re cooking with the seasons and you want to buy just one cookbook to cover your kitchen endeavors for the next three or four months, then there’s really only one title that belongs on your kitchen bookshelf. It’s “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets” by Deborah Madison (Broadway Books, $39.95).

One reason: the book’s new paperback version (above), very nearly hot off the press, is available at Amazon.com for $17.16. That’s a bargain.

But the main reason is that it can be described with all the right words: Encyclopedic. Creative. User-friendly. Gorgeous. Practical. Madison’s other books - “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” and “The Greens Cookbook” are right up there, too, but when summer produce begins to flood Minnesota markets, this is the guide that every cook should have on their counter.

And next to their reading chair, because Madison not only writes a good recipe, but she’s a good storyteller, too, guiding readers on a nationwide journey to farmers markets of all stripes. She packs about 350 recipes into its pages, taking advantage of just about every conceivable fruit and vegetable a shopper could find at an American farmers market (or in an American CSA delivery box).

I loved Madison’s impressions of the St. Paul Farmers Market, the one Minnesota market she includes in “Local Flavors.” “Everything at this impressive market is produced or grown within a fifty-mile radius of the Twin Cities,” she wrote. “As long as there’s farmland close urban centers, farmers can, it appears, make a living. Certainly they are giving urban dwellers something they want, for customers here were described as not only being loyal but also tending to develop relationships with growers. Which means that when they sit down and eat, they are sitting down to high-quality food grown by people they know - a rare experience in our world today.”

OK, I’ll get off my soapbox. But before I do, here are two added Madison bonuses. The first is an interview I had with her in 2002, when “Local Flavors” was first published. The second is a pair of recipes for the highly underrated radish, two nuggets that exemplify the book’s deeply ingrained appeal.

Q: Can you highlight a few markets that really made an impression?
A: There was a little one in the Bronx. It was not glamorous, like the market in Manhattan’s Union Square. But what I liked was that it was definitely being used by low-income families. There were women from Cornell University’s Extension Service there, speaking in two languages, teaching customers about the food they were buying. I loved this market because of its sheer sincerity. The rawness of the need it was obviously filling - getting fresh, inexpensive food on the plate - was wonderful.

The St. Paul Farmers Market is fabulous. It has such a bustle, it’s great fun. And the food is gorgeous. I can still remember walking past melons that were so aromatic, so irresistible. And the Dane County Farmers Market in Madison, Wis., is dazzling. What moves me the most about it is the fact that it’s set up around the state Capitol, which feels so politically correct, in the best sense of that term. Here’s this activity, which some might regard as subversive - you know, taking business away from supermarkets - but it’s held right there at the Capitol. It feels like it’s blessed by the government. And it’s huge. It’s wonderful to see that enormous volume of locally grown produce.

Q: What’s the mark of a good farmers market?
A: Variety, the kind you won’t find elsewhere: zephyr zucchini rather than regular zucchini, or beautiful gooseberries, or fragile raspberries that you know were picked by hand just a few hours earlier.

Q: What are a few danger signs?
A: I’m immediately not interested when I see racks of sunglasses, CDs, baby clothes, things like that. Craft people also try to attach themselves to farmers markets, and they can dampen my enthusiasm, too. But when they’re somehow connected to the region - maybe working with materials indigenous to the area - and are held to the same standards as the farmers, then they can be OK. I’m also immediately not interested if I’m in, say, Oregon, and I see bananas. They’re re-sellers, not farmers. That said, I’ve never been to a market where I didn’t get excited over some found treasure.

Q: Can you share a few tips for maximizing the farmers-market experience?
A: Slow down. Take your time. Walk around, get the lay of the land and see what catches your eye. You don’t have to buy right away. And taste whatever you can. Don’t be shy about it. Tasting is the best way to learn about and be surprised by foods. And tasting doesn’t mean you have to buy, either. There’s a grower in Auburn, Calif., who raises kiwis. He’s really big on picking them when the sugar is at 11 or 12 percent, rather than the 6 percent you’ll find with grocery store kiwis; it makes all the difference between a hard, sour fruit and a sweet, tropical one. He’ll ask shoppers if they want a taste, and they’ll all say, `I don’t think so.’ So he’ll ask, `Ever have a vine-ripened kiwi?’ And of course they don’t know if they have, because what supermarket has ever told them that that’s what they’re buying? So they try it and they’re blown away. It’s like the difference between those cottony, sour winter tomatoes and another one ripe off the vine. And tasting works the other way, too; if something isn’t on par, then you know right away. Getting involved is so important. That reluctance to participate is something we’ve all learned at the supermarket, where we just pick things up and put them in our baskets. But at the farmers market, it’s all about direct marketing, about the conversations between grower and shopper.

Q: That farmer-customer connection is an important one, isn’t it?
A: Knowing the people who grow what I’m eating is one of the most satisfying experiences I know. Being connected to that process is very important in human life; that connection always enriches us and makes us become a part of the community where we live. When you can sit down at the table and say, `This is so-and-so’s produce, this farmer raised this lamb,’ well, that’s always the best meal that I can eat. If food is anonymous, it’s sort of dead to me. I like the vitality that comes from food that is fresh and locally grown. I like to meet growers. They’re proud of what they do, and I want relationships with enthusiastic people. And think about this: If we are what we eat, then knowing where our food is grown - and who grew it - is important. And besides, it’s lots more fun.

In the pink: Radishes at the Prior Lake Farmers Market.

RADISH BUTTER FOR RADISH SANDWICHES
Makes 1/2 cup.
Note: From “Local Flavors” by Deborah Madison. “A good radish sandwich can be nothing more than sweet butter spread on bread and topped with sliced radishes and sea salt,” writes Madison. “But you might find that this is an easier way for getting radishes and butter on quickly (and getting them to stay on), especially if you’re making radish sandwiches for a crowd.”

6 radishes (French Breakfast radishes, or a mixture of red, purple and pink radishes)
4 tbsp. unsalted butter
1 tsp. finely grated lemon zest
Sea salt

Directions
Wash and trim radishes. If leaves are tender and fresh, set a dozen or so aside, stems removed. Slice radishes into thin rounds, then crosswise into narrow strips. Each should be tipped with color. chop leaves. You should have about 1/2 cup. In a small bowl, mix butter with lemon zest until it’s soft, then stir in chopped radishes, radish leaves and a pinch of salt. Spread on slices of crusty baguette and serve.

RADISH SALAD WITH VELLA’S DRY JACK CHEESE
Serves 6.
Note: From “Local Flavors” by Deborah Madison. “The Vella family’s Dry Jack cheese in Sonoma County in California is one our national food treasures,” writes Madison. “It’s increasingly possible to find nationwide, but if you can’t get your hands on some, use Parmigiano-Reggiano. This is a very pretty, bright and lively little salad. You can stray successfully from its utter simplicity by adding some freshly blanced and peeled fava beans, radish sprouts or very small arugula leaves.”

2 bunches French Breakfast radishes (or mixed varieties, including Chinese Red Meat and daikon)
2 tbsp. thinly sliced chives
Olive oil
2 to 4 oz. Dry Jack cheese (or Parmigiano-Reggiano)
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Radish sprouts, leaves or arugula greens, optional

Directions
Set aside a handful of the most tender radish greens. Trim radish roots, leaving just a bit of stem, and wash them well. Wick up excess moisture with a towel, then slice evenly, either lengthwise or crosswise. Put sliced radishes in a bowl and toss with chives, radish greens and enough olive oil to coat lightly. Put radishes on a platter, shave cheese over them and add salt and pepper (and greens, if using) and serve.

I got a call yesterday from Burning River Farm, the Frederic, Wis. farm where I’ve purchased my CSA share, giving me a heads-up: expect my first delivery next Thursday. It got me thinking about CSA-friendly cookbooks, and I went to my bookshelves and found this one, a paperback that is tailored to busy cooks who are buying seasonally. The recipes are simple and varied (many are culled from the newsletters of CSA farms from coast to coast), and there’s plenty of helpful information about cleaning and storing a huge variety of vegetables. It’s not fancy - no photos, for example - but it’ll be dog-eared by the end of the growing season. Best of all, a new copy is just $12.21 at Amazon.com.

ROSY RADISHES
Serves 4.
Note: From “Recipes from America’s Small Farms” by Joanne Lamb Hayes and Lori Stein (Villard, $16.95). “Many people use radishes raw for years and never think of cooking them,” write the authors. “But, once you give it a try and discover the mild turnip-like flavor and pretty pink sauce that results, you will want to serve them this way often.”

24 to 28 radishes (3 to 4 bunches), trimmed
1/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp. unsalted butter
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 tbsp. flour
1 tbsp. chopped fresh parsley

Directions
In a medium saucepan over high heat, bring 1 3/4 cups water to a vigorous boil. Add radishes, salt and pepper, reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, until radishes are just tender, 8 to 10 minutes. Drain, reserving cooking liquid. Meanwhile, in a medium skillet over medium heat, melt butter. Add onion and saute until lightly browned. Whisk in flour until onions are uniformly coated. Gradually add cooking liquid from radishes, whisking to combine evenly. Simmer, uncovered, for several minutes, until sauce thickens slightly. Add radishes, increase heat to high and return mixture to a boil. Taste and season with salt and pepper, in necessary. Fold in parsley, transfer to a serving bowl and serve.