T. Susan Chang

You might have had a Vietnamese-style "summer roll," with shrimp and fresh herbs wrapped in translucent rice paper. But what else could you tuck into this versatile wrapper? Sandwich fixings (minus the bread!), leftovers — your imagination's the limit.

This season's standouts praise America's culinary traditions from coast to coast — and everywhere in between. Authors of these plainspoken and charming cookbooks craft memorable recipes around just a few well-chosen flavors: meals for every day that are anything but.

This year, cooks poured their hearts into these carefully crafted, kitchen how-tos. T. Susan Chang says these cookbooks are like a properly seasoned skillet — heavy-duty, battle-tested and much to be prized.

This year has yielded a bumper crop of cookbooks for the farmers market regular. Food writer T. Susan Chang has sorted through this bounty to come up with an armload of recommendations — as well as a score of great summer recipes — for the locavore in your life.

If you're the kind of person who's always believed that a book can teach you to do anything, this year's crop of cookbooks will prove you right. Cooks lacking confidence will find comfort in detailed instructions and comprehensive how-tos.

This year's crop of spring and summer cookbooks is a sprawling, eclectic collection, hard to summarize and harder to sort. In these books we find a world of thrilling arcana, seemingly custom tailored for a summer in which eating in looks to be the greatest adventure of all.

There's no reason not to eat well, even in tough economic times. Three cookbooks conjure deliciously simple dinners from the most ordinary of ingredients.