Larry Forgione, hailed as the godfather of American cooking, is a man with one passion: to reintroduce the essential American flavors lost to us in the rush for newer, quicker, and better. This culinary visionary, largely responsible for the rebirth of farmers' markets across America and the availability of such quality ingredients as free-range chicken and the field green salad, has finally produced his master cookbook. Sure to become the primer that will inspire a whole new generation of American cooks, An American Place returns traditional American cuisine to its rightful place at the pinnacle of vigorous and soul-satisfying flavor.

Forgione takes the best flavors from the past and revitalizes them with the freshest, ripest, and richest native ingredients. Here are nearly three hundred mouthwatering recipes that celebrate the real bounty of American cooking: fish and shellfish from America's shores, everything from chicken, duck, and venison to beef, pork, and lamb from our forests and our farms, and wonderful breads and old-fashioned desserts from our bakeshops.

When food industry people want to know what's going to be happening in American food next year, they call Larry Forgione. In An American Place, in addition to revitalizing traditional fare, he also offers food that won't remind you of anything you've ever tasted before. Forgione's recipes will surprise you, delight you, inspire you, and show you what today's outstanding American ingredients, used imaginatively, can pro, duce: rich Roasted Corn and Beef Soup, an elegant Lobster and Fennel in Napa Cabbage Leaves, silken Pumpkin-Corn Pudding, Scalloped Ginger Sunchokes, Pork with Peppered Apples and Onions, tart and tangy Key Lime Chiffon Angel Food Cake.

His main courses, like Salmon with Cracked Wheat Crust, Breast of Chicken with Artichoke Sauce, and Grilled Spring Lamb with Rhubarb and Dandelion, offer complex and vibrant tastes that are light, healthful, and simple to cook. Dishes such as Sauteed Shrimp with Watercress, Warm Smoked Trout Salad, and Grilled Chicken with Summer Vegetable Compote will bring you delicious and impressive results without your having to spend hours in the kitchen,

Forgione's American food not only tastes good, it feels good, with comfort food like sublime cod cakes and tartar sauce, and the creamiest of golden hashed brown potatoes. There's food that will remind you of the homey kind of favorites that your mother cooked (or wished she had): a thick, pureed vegetable soup, warm chicken salad, Apple Pandowdy, Spiced Ginger Ice Cream. Here also are recipes that belong to the "bring them back alive" school of American heritage: dishes like Waldorf Salad, Old-Fashioned Caesar Salad, Baked Lobster Savannah, and Fried Ipswich Clams that Forgione returns to their former greatness.

And here also are some rare and wondrous dishes from the past for which the wisdom was knowing when to leave well enough alone. The Old-Fashioned Strawberry Shortcake recipe offered here is just the way it started out years ago: the best unsweetened whipped cream, the ripest berries, and a home-baked biscuit.

Forgione's passionate return to freshness has given birth to such cottage industries as local goat cheese producers, growers of specialty berries and field lettuces, the proliferaton of smoked and cured fish and shellfish of all kinds, the return of old-fashioned apple varieties, even the raising of buffalo, which he brought back to the American menu nearly a full century since it last appeared.

An American Place is, hands down, the most important American cookbook of the decade.

Larry Forgione, proprietor of An American Place in New York City and the 1766 Tavern at The Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck, New York, is one of the most acclaimed American chefs today. Voted Chef of the Year at the 1993 James Beard/Perrier-Jouet Restaurant Awards, he lives with his family in New York.