cover image The Wooden Spoon Cookie Book: Favorite Home-Style Recipes from the Wooden Spoon Kitchen

The Wooden Spoon Cookie Book: Favorite Home-Style Recipes from the Wooden Spoon Kitchen

Marilyn M. Moore. Atlantic Monthly Press, $15 (178pp) ISBN 978-0-87113-601-5

Moore (The Wooden Spoon Bread Book) offers a concise, easily usable, very traditional American cookie cookbook. The small format mimics that of the dessert itself. She divides the book into chapters covering drop cookies, bar cookies, shaped cookies, refrigerator cookies and cutout cookies, and she gives general instructions for the baker who anticipates doing some of the work with children and for others who want to organize a celebratory cookie swap for family and friends. Every reader will have his or her own favorites: perhaps banana cookies, which also call for pecans; cornmeal cookies, crisp and plain; oatmeal refrigerator cookies. Rhubarb squares are also enticing. Except for biscotti, most are familiar and American (Sept.)