A chickpea by any other name...

There are those who buy cookbooks as much to read them as cook from them. Even noncooks may spend hours watching food shows on television, or devouring chef’s memoirs and “foodie” mysteries as if they were, well ... popcorn.

Many cookbooks, except for southern ones, don’t spend much time on okra except to note -- as food maven Mark Bittman did in “How to Cook Everything” (Wiley, 1998) -- “many northerners have never come to appreciate” it. Yet John Martin Taylor, author of “The New Southern Cook” (Bantam, 1995) claims that okra’s flavor “is one of the best in the vegetable kingdom.” And a British writer, the late Jane Grigson, waxed poetic about the vegetable.

Making the “composed salad” — or “salade composee,” if you want to get French about it — is an art in danger of being lost. A composed salad is simply a salad in which the individual ingredients have been arranged on a plate rather than being tossed together in compost-heap fashion.