These were among the several dozen cookbooks that arrived at my house one day after I had agreed to judge a national cookbook contest. My category, for which the coffee table still thanks me, was professional and restaurant cooking. Oversize tomes featured a centuries-old temple of kaiseki-style cooking in Kyoto, Japan, or a seaside Australian spot where the chef gathers wild greens. Lavish, full color and glossed-out to impress, these books demanded display space.

Which is why I didn't vote for them.

(ENLARGE)

'Grand Livre de Cuisine: Alain Ducasse's Desserts and Pastries'

(ENLARGE)

'In Search of Perfection'

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I was looking for books that showed a sharp culinary mind at work. Books that would teach me something I didn't know. Books that would make me want to cook, to try something I hadn't considered before. If these books were also eye candy, all the better.

The best recent example of a chef-penned cookbook is without question Thomas Keller's 1999 "French Laundry Cookbook", written with Michael Ruhlman. It cost a then-exorbitant $50 and occupied the dimensions of a paving tile. Its beautiful photographs aside, this was a book filled with tips and insights on every page. Cooking from it gave you a better understanding of food.

Is there a worthy successor? One certainly tries.

Michel Richard, chef at Citronelle restaurant in Washington, shares his puckish sensibility in "Happy in the Kitchen." The French-born Richard has one of the most original and certainly the most playful of approaches among America's chefs today.

Richard often starts by thinking "What if," and then manipulating foodstuffs to achieve his effect. What if you diced carrots to bits and turned them into a risotto? What if you scrambled pureed scallops like eggs? What if you tried to perfect the chicken nugget?

What fun it was to cook from this book. I learned to make moist, full-of-flavor tuna burgers by allowing the diced tuna to marinate with herbs and a hearty splash of olive oil before cooking. I also discovered that tucking a few potato chips under the bun adds a joyful, transformative crunch.

The scrambled scallops were interesting mush that I won't prepare again, but I'm happy to have tried the recipe once. (By the way, Richard suggests serving the scallops inside a halved eggshell onto which you have glued deep-fried loops of zitoni pasta to serve as handles. He knows that, in part, readers want to marvel at the efforts of an ambitious restaurant kitchen.)

"Happy in the Kitchen" provided the slickest package of cooking insight and Pavlovian thrill, but my favorite cookbook was a sleeper, "Geoffrey Zakarian's Town/Country: 150 Recipes for Life Around the Table". Zakarian runs two well-regarded Manhattan restaurants named Town and Country. They offer the moderately creative but basically solid cooking that appeals more to locals than tourists.

Zakarian's average-size book, easy enough to miss in the pile, organizes itself alphabetically by ingredient, giving each a "Town" (refined, sophisticated) and "Country" (hearty, sensible) treatment. For instance, "Town" presents a bisque with tomato-olive relish; "Country" fennel is a cheesy gratin.

At first the idea seemed too cute by half, but the recipes speak for themselves. Moreover, they benefit from extra touches — perhaps a technique that adds 30 seconds and makes all the difference, giving simple home cooking the finesse of a restaurant plate. For instance, Zakarian takes a skin-on salmon fillet, cuts it through the center and folds it so the skin keeps the center moist and the fish takes the form of a hearty steak.

Zakarian also has a canny sense of framing flavors. Faced with a surfeit of summer zucchini, he devises a cold relish that sings with its gentle but sonorous flavor, one that too many other cooks willfully obscure.

I also found myself returning time and again to "The Professional Chef, 8th Edition," a massive tome that is one of the principal texts at the Culinary Institute of America. I can open to any one of its 1,215 pages and learn something new. While I may never find myself in the position of skinning a beef tongue, I do like beef tongue, and I'm glad to find out what the process entails.

Add in a lesson on the skeletal structure of fowl, a chart detailing the known edible tubers, step-by-step instructions on prepping spaghetti squash, a fascinating discussion of the various salts and hundreds of international recipes.

Plus, all the classics have a home in this book. The day may or may not come when I want to make Duchesse potatoes (oven-browned rosettes of potato puree), but I'll surely want a reliable recipe for french fries and rösti potatoes before then.

So what if it's a textbook? You don't find the brilliant mind of Michel Richard in this book, nor the sure hand of Geoffrey Zakarian. But there's something to be said for a book that distills years of conventional wisdom from the nation's top cooking school. Being a professional — even a vicarious one — means knowing when and how to go to the source. As far as I see, this book is it.

A full menu of creativity

• "You Don't Have to Be Crazy, but It Helps" by Raymond Arpke (self-published, $40, www.euphemiahaye.com)

• "Grand Livre de Cuisine: Alain Ducasse's Desserts and Pastries" (Les Editions d'Alain Ducasse, $195)

• "In Search of Perfection" by Heston Blumenthal (Bloomsbury, $34.95)

• "Happy in the Kitchen" by Michel Richard (Artisan, $45)

• "Geoffrey Zakarian's Town/Country: 150 Recipes for Life Around the Table" (Clarkson Potter, $37.50)

• "The Professional Chef, 8th Edition" Culinary Institute of America (John Wiley & Sons, $70)

• "French Laundry Cookbook" by Thomas Keller (Artisan, $50)