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Sixty years ago, a woman from Kansas with the ur-American name Clementine Paddleford covered, by her own account, more than 800,000 miles by train, plane — she had a pilot’s license — automobile, muleback and foot to document America’s “regional cooking,” a term, Molly O’Neill claims in the foreword to THE GREAT AMERICAN COOKBOOK (Rizzoli, $45), that Paddleford invented. A prolific columnist and food editor for The New York Herald Tribune, she wasn’t as well known as her fellow Americana pioneer James Beard, partly because she didn’t have a knack for cultivating celebrity and partly because an early bout of throat cancer meant that she had to manipulate a mechanical voice box in order to speak.

But Paddleford loved and told the stories of others, and she sought out people and families who cooked the foods journalists and locavores still think we’re discovering today. (Who knew that Long Island was long a cauliflower colossus?) Kelly Alexander, the judicious editor of this updated version of the original “How America Eats,” reports on her struggles to reduce Paddleford’s pie-crust recipes to one. But there are other recipes to try, many of them simple and local and right back in fashion.

Traveling Paddleford’s byways as they have for decades, Jane and Michael Stern, authors of the frequently updated “Roadfood,” have usefully compiled THE LEXICON OF REAL AMERICAN FOOD (Lyons Press, paper, $19.95), with idiosyncratically chosen entries like the “hot brown” sandwich and the Southern boardinghouse ritual of “round-table dining.” The Sterns have always been culinary and cultural anthropologists, and the slightly ironic distance as well as the enthusiasm they bring to their subjects always makes them worth reading.

For full-length stops on the trail, head south by southwest. Lisa Fain’s HOMESICK TEXAN COOKBOOK (Hyperion, $29.99) has won converts for its author’s voice: she is herself a New York City convert but wants to recreate her home state in her tiny kitchen. And so she makes Texas’ salsas, tacos, carnitas, posole and enchiladas accessible, never shying from complexity but making them doable. (Well, she does admit that “the preparation of chicken-fried steak is a violent, messy, and dangerous affair.”) Just lay in plenty of lard, garlic, cumin and cilantro.

More evocative of its region than strictly tied to it is A NEW TURN IN THE SOUTH: Southern Flavors Reinvented for Your Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, $35). Hugh Acheson is a cook who freely draws on his French training and Ottawa childhood to inform the food he found around his adopted home, Athens, Ga., where his two restaurants — Five and Ten, and the National — have won acclaim. His is a seductively simple sensibility that sent me to use long-grain rice in a pepper pilaf, which perfumed the house with bacon and garlic and was even better the next day, after the rice soaked up more of the jalapeño, smoked sweet red peppers and cider-spiked cooking liquid.

Even those who embrace food-industry-chic gels and high-tech equipment are making eloquent pleas to return to simple home virtues. Ferran Adrià, who pioneered cutting-edge cuisine at his restaurant El Bulli, offers THE FAMILY MEAL: Home Cooking With Ferran Adrià (Phaidon, $29.95), a curious book with good intentions but puzzling execution. Each recipe is given in pictures with laconic instructions laid on top, like balloon captions in a cartoon. The instructions, perhaps written with translation into dozens of languages in mind, are so terse as to raise more questions than they answer. Still, you can learn to make caramel foam in a siphon.

More instructively for inquisitive home cooks, Heston Blumenthal, proprietor of the Fat Duck, in Bray, England, and another international modernist celebrity, now gives us HESTON BLUMENTHAL AT HOME (Bloomsbury, $60). Despite the title, it’s not really for domestic use, or at least not entirely, and the photographs, taken in the same antiseptic white kitchen and featuring only Blumenthal, are far from homey. But it is a cooking course that will show you how to make the building blocks of many of his dishes without the capital investment. (He does allow himself a chapter on sous-vide cookery, which he thinks should and eventually will be ubiquitous in home kitchens.) Here he shares easily achievable techniques — for instance, “ice filtration” to clarify stocks, freezing them in blocks and melting them over a filter in the fridge, and long oven-browning of onions for a deep-flavored soup, with the bonus of the “amazing meaty effect” of adding star anise. And there are homelier tips (adding roasting juices to salad dressing) as well as some very simple recipes, like quickly seared sea bass with vanilla butter. But the book hasn’t been converted for American cooks — it’s all grams and Celsius, and nobody took out the Marmite consommé — and you do come across instructions like “Have your digital probe ready.”

The lavish photographs in John Besh’s MY FAMILY TABLE: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking (Andrews McMeel, $35) are the opposite of Blumenthal’s, teeming with picturesque children and the telegenic father who cooks with them. Besh takes an opening shot at his modernist brethren: “So many of us chefs spend way too much of our time overmanipulating foods, attempting to turn them into things they inherently are not.” Many of his recipes, written in his warm, natural voice, are easy. Yet some are more special-occasion than the title might imply. The most useful section provides the dishes his wife challenged him to create when he “made the mistake” of questioning her “about what she was feeding our children” on weeknights, when he’s “almost never around.” So he came up with some recipes kids will eat and distracted, time-pressed cooks can make: cauliflower mac and cheese, sloppy Joe sliders, tomato soup with grilled ham and cheese. (You’ll want to stock pepper jelly, which he likes with almost everything.) These, and building-block recipes like a chicken fricassee open to endless variations and a roast chicken that can be reused throughout the week, are the ones family cooks will turn to.

Corby Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic. His most recent book is “The Pleasures of Slow Food.”

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