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Jane Brody's Good Food Gourmet Jane E. Brody (Norton, $25) In her columns for The New York Times and in her books (Jane Brody's Nutrition Book and Jane Brody's Good Food Book), this sensible writer has tried to set us straight on what we should and shouldn't eat and why. Having done that, she now devotes this follow-up to recipes that have passed her test as company fare without violating her precepts about health. Of these, the most important is moderation. The cumulative impression is more responsible than dashing. Brody removes the skin from chicken; substitutes ground turkey, no-fat yogurt, or brown basmati rice for less salubrious ingredients; and allows so very little cooking fat that you need a nonstick skillet to avoid disaster. This isn't really gourmet fare-unless her penchant for fruited chicken dishes makes it so-but it is good food, palatable and wholesome. B+ Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant The Moosewood Collective (Simon & Schuster, paperback, $16.95) To survivors of such countercultural offspring of the '70s as food co-ops, alternative work styles, and salvation through soybeans, the institution that put Ithaca, N.Y., on the map is not Cornell University but Moosewood, a collectively owned and operated vegetarian restaurant now in its 18th year. The first Moosewood cookbook, a solo project by founding member Mollie Katzen, sold over a million copies. Now the collective has worked together to produce another sampling of its own. Like the restaurant's special Sunday menus, each of the book's 18 chapters features a different ethnic or regional cuisine as interpreted by one of Moosewood's 18 cooks. Some explore the spicy reaches of Thai, Caribbean, or Northeast African cooking; others honor the stolid East European and Jewish fare that has always shared the Moosewood menu with more Aquarian creations. Some recipes aim for authenticity; others freely ''Moosewoodize,'' as one cook puts it. But then, ethnic purity has never been a Moosewood fetish-and, to be fair, the group's eclecticism embraces some down-to-earth ethnic cooking in this new harvest of Moosewood's Sunday best. B
The Useful Pig Roberta Wolfe Smoler (HarperCollins, $22.95) No one but the pig lobby would call pork a health food, but American hogs have been getting progressively leaner for the past half century, while beef cattle until very recently have been made fatter and fatter. So maybe it's time for this long- maligned flesh food to make a comeback. If anything can update its image, it's Roberta Wolfe Smoler's repertoire of pork and fixin's. Her unstinting recipes combine pork with other proteins (beans, yes, but also veal, rabbit, fish, shrimp, clams, or chicken liver) and dress it up with a cosmopolitan pantry's worth of flavors: Thai fish sauce, Mexican green tomatoes, preserved lemons, shiitake mushrooms, and the like. Even her simplest pork-and-bean dishes have some essential extra-such as chopped fresh mint leaves-added at the end. All of which might not get the pig back into the parlor but could restore its status in the dining room. B
