Aside from a few Southern recipes  handed down to me by my Alabama grandmother, I am admittingly a rudimentary cook, but I do love cookbooks and cooking shows (Top Chef is a guilty pleasure). I love the alluring promise they offer inexperienced or unskilled home chefs like me (yes, you too can create this exquisite complicated dish by following these simple steps!). So it was no hardship for me to stroll the aisles at last month's BookExpo in quest of the fall season's hot culinary titles. 

Like the rest of the show, most cookbook publishers were fairly low-key. Gone were the flashy cooking demonstrations by celebrity chefs of previous years. And some major houses didn't even have booths, prefering to use designated meeting rooms to present their lists. Off the beaten path was the highly anticipated Gourmet Today (September, $40),  featuring over 1000 all-new recipes embracing contemporary cooking trends and edited by Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichel, because its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was hidden away in one of these basement rooms. LJ cookery columnist Judith Sutton, who also attended the show, noted that there didn't seem to be much going on for East Village culinary sensation David Chang's Momofuku (Clarkson Potter. October. $40), although serious food people and fans of his popular Asian restaurant eagerly anticipate this volume. 

However, PW's Cooking the Books  newsletter reports that the "hottest ticket at BEA (for foodies, at least) was an "underground after-party...hosted by Matt and Ted Lee, authors of The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern, which Clarkson Potter will publish in November." A signing at the Chronicle Books booth by Top Chef contestents Hosea Rosenberg (season 5 winner), Ariane Duartee (season 5) , and Hung Huynh (season 3 winnner) drew a crowd of enthusiastic fans. Although they signed copies of Top Chef: The Cookbook, the reality show stars were also there to promote the forthcoming followup title,  Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbook (November. $24.95), which features 75 of the best recipes drawn from the show's Quickfire Challenge. 

Workman/Artisan was very excited about French Laundry chef/proprietor Thomas Keller's first cookbook for the home chef, Ad Hoc at Home: Family Style Recipes (Artisan, November. $50), which draws on the dishes (leek bread pudding, pineapple upside-down cake, chocolate chip cookies) served at the chef's more family-friendly, comfort-food restaurant Ad Hoc.

Also coming from Artisan is Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys (October, $29.95) by Lucina Scala Quinn, Martha Stewart's director of food and entertaining. For the budget-minded cook, there is food bloggers Alanna Kaufman and Alex Small'sThe Frugal Foodie Cookbook: 200 Gourmet Recipes for Any Budget (Adams Media, September. $14.95).

And finally at  BEA's inaugural  Librarians' Book Shout and Share program last week, moderator Barbara Genco of the Brooklyn Public Library and Jason Honig of the San Francisco Public Library highlighted the cookbooks and food memoirs that caught their fancy: Elena Kostioukovitch's narrative history, Why Italians Love to Talk about Food (FSG, October. $30),  La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy (Rizzoli, October),  Jason Epstein's Eating (Knopf, October), and Gesine Bullock-Prado's Confections of a Master Closet Baker (Broadway, September).