Comments: Does a great regional cookbook make you want to head to the kitchen to cook or get on a plane and start visiting all the restaurants? All we can say is we've been searching Travelocity like mad since we started reading Anya von Bremzen's book.

Spain has gone through a complete transformation of its cooking over the past 30 years, but it did not throw out the baby with the bathwater – it kept its traditional roots, its focus on ingredients, and many of its cooking methods. It just got better. The New Spanish Table, through 300 recipes and countless small essays, shows where Spanish cooking is today, and how we can enjoy it.

Chapters introduce you to all the regions of Spain, then tackle tapas, soups, salads, eggs, breads, seafood, meat, poultry, beans and potatoes, rice and pasta, vegetables, and desserts. There is an enormous amount of added information scattered through the book – on traditions, methods, restaurants, chefs, ingredients, etc. – some of which may be a little hard to find in the index. But this is a book that is meant to be read as well as cooked from.

Some ingredients will be hard to find, but the book does include a list of mail-order sources. Some of the recipes look daunting (and include boatloads of ingredients), but the author has done a good job of translating traditional and chef's recipes into procedures that can be made by most American cooks in most American kitchens.