Hot Dish

It used to be that community cookbooks were amateur productions, collections of casseroles usually spiral-bound and illustrated with drawings by one of the sponsoring organization's quasi-artistic members. But The Artful Table, produced by the Dallas Museum of Art League, compares with Martha Stewart's illustrated fiction--I mean cookbooks. It has color photographs of the tableware from the decorative arts collection of DMA (one of its better collections), and the result is part coffeetable book, part cookbook. The Artful Table includes 300 recipes for everything from "Pheasant in Orange Wine Sauce" to "Toulouse-Lautrec Cake." Not a can of mushroom soup in sight. It's $35, available at DMA.

--Mary Brown Malouf