Ms. Koenigseder, a transplanted Californian who cut her culinary teeth with Narsai David, a familiar name in the Bay Area's restaurant and catering circles, also worked as a grill cook for Alice Water's famed Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

"Actually it all goes together," says Ms. Koenigseder, who now lives in Arlington. "I was raised in a family that was very much into the arts, and food was taken seriously in our house. There were four of us, and my mother always cooked from scratch. When my parents were married in 1936, my father gave my mother the '36 edition of the Joy of Cooking."

After cooking and catering for others, Ms. Koenigseder started a catering business of her own, followed by a mail-order cooking club. Once a month, subscribers got a packet with menus, a shopping list, instructions and timetables for a dinner party for eight.

It went well until the end of the '70s, when people started fretting about nutritional values and women started going back to work in substantial numbers. Not only did people want less fat in their foods, they wanted simpler things to prepare. With the proliferation of frozen and fast foods, home cooking dwindled even more.

Then, in the 1980s, she married, moved to Texas and launched a catering business. The book was a pragmatic solution to a time-buster. Whenever she shared recipes with friends, Ms. Koenigseder always had to reconfigure them to accommodate smaller numbers of people. She ended up with loads of 3-by-5-inch index cards with dinner-for-eight recipes that she kept replicating for friends.

Finally, she decided to take the plunge and compile more than 200 recipes for appetizers, soups, entrees, desserts and sauces that don't frighten. The end result was Cook Smart. To put novice cooks at ease, she even included a "glossary of scary terms."

Unsure of how to pronounce boccone dolce or spanakopeta? Practice in the privacy of your own kitchen with her handy-dandy pronunciation guide.

Although tighter editing would have eliminated wayward commas, awkward phrases or repeated steps, one of the nicest things about Cook Smart is its friendliness.