Themes of fresh ingredients and simpler home-cooking styles are conveyed in many current offerings, including the reissued classics and books of international cuisines.

Most notably, there are more good vegetarian and vegan cookbooks. In contrast, more books focusing on chocolate have arrived - perhaps because our favorite ingredient has been sanctioned, to some extent, as a new health food.

Here are some suggestions for enhancing the cookbook libraries of those on your gift list - and your own:

Alice Waters, credited with bringing "fresh and local" to the fore in American cooking, has her say in The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (Clarkson Potter). She starts with how to stock and equip your kitchen and proceeds to her favorite recipes, from a simple vinaigrette to a six-part Provençal-Style Fish Soup with Rouille.

A reissue of the 1974 classic, Beard on Food: The Best Recipes and Kitchen Wisdom from the Dean of American Cooking (Bloomsbury), brings James Beard's essays and recipes to a new generation.

Meanwhile, home diva Martha Stewart offers a dual perspective in The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics (revised and updated) and The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics (Clarkson Potter).

For basics, consider the revised Good Housekeeping Cookbook (Hearst), a primer for new homemakers since 1903. And Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison (Broadway Books), the 10th anniversary edition, which brings us to one of the year's significant food subjects - vegetarian cooking.

Vegetarian/vegan fare has entered the American mainstream thanks to Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food (John Wiley & Sons). The author, who says he's cut his consumption of meat 60 percent to 70 percent, provides basic cooking techniques, charts, tips, illustrated how-to guides, and 2,000-plus recipes to satisfy strict vegans and flexitarians (i.e. occasional omnivores).

For purists, there's Dreena Burton's Eat, Drink & Be Vegan (Arsenal) and Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero (Marlowe).

Not strictly vegetarian? A good transition book is Vegetable Harvest: Vegetables at the Center of the Plate by Patricia Wells (William Morrow).

At the opposite pole are grilling and game cookery, subjects well represented by Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill Cookbook: Explosive Flavors from the Southwestern Kitchen (Clarkson Potter) and After the Hunt: Louisiana's Authoritative Collection of Wild Game & Game Fish Cookery by chef John D. Folse (Folse Publishing), a 101/2-pound history of hunting with game sources, recipes, wine pairings and more that's a sure shot at pleasing hunters and he-men.

Used to be that cooks relied on bread-baking - all that kneading - and cast iron skillets to stay in shape. Now the cookbooks build muscles.

Other mega-volumes this year include teacher James Peterson's step-by-step guide to Cooking: 600 recipes, 1500 Photographs, One Kitchen Education (Ten Speed Press).

Crossing borders, fans of Spanish food may be tempted by 1080 Recipes by Simone and Ines Ortega (Phaidon), the first English edition of Spain's classic cookbook and longtime best-seller. Straightforward Spanish classics are the fare - six versions of paella alone.

Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy: Food & Stories (Ecco), is the London-based chef's highly readable, visually pleasing treatise on his native cuisine.

And for Francophiles, Anne Willan's latest, The Country Cooking of France (Chronicle), is a tasty tour of traditional regional French fare.

The standout Pierre Gagnaire Reinventing French Cuisine (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) recalls Gagnaire's rise from apprentice to top-tier chef (three Michelin stars and eateries in Paris, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo). Recipes follow his growth, reflecting his influence on today's culinary scene.

Such combinations of memoir and cookbook give us the best of both worlds. Cecilia Chiang's food memories are woven through epic tales of war, the Red Guard, emigration, changing cultures and fortunes in The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco (Ten Speed Press), a book that is hard to put down. The Chinese regional home recipes are a bonus from the woman often credited with bringing authentic Chinese cuisine to America.

Restaurant partners Pino Luongo and Mark Strausman set a lighter tone, letting their two unique culinary voices play off each other, tag-team-style, in Two Meatballs in the Italian Kitchen (Artisan). The result is a feast of traditional Italian and innovative American-Italian recipes.