Then again, if anyone could predict what would make a good cookbook, I suppose it would have to be Roy Finamore, the book's author. In his job as a cookbook editor at Clarkson Potter, Finamore has steered works by Martha Stewart, Diana Kennedy and Anne Willan toward best-seller lists. He co-authored the potato book with Molly Stevens, a contributing editor to Fine Cooking magazine. And why not a book of potato recipes?

Once confined to a relatively small corner of the globe where they grew wild in a wide range of shapes and colors, potatoes and their culinary cousins the sweet potatoes have been passed over fences and carried across oceans until they are practically universal. After 500 years of globe-trotting, potatoes have rubbed shoulders with all the great cuisines of the world, and have been incorporated into all kinds of dishes.

Potato recipes run the gamut from hors d'oeuvre to dessert with soups, salads, casseroles and myriad side dishes along the way. Finamore and Stevens rounded up 300 of the most compelling dishes they could find, and with hardly any redundancy, they pretty well covered the bases.

Makes about 2 dozen

For The Dipping Sauce 1/3 cup fish sauce 1/3 cup fresh lime juice 2 tablespoons sugar 1 small habañero chile, cut into rings For The Fritters Peanut oil for frying 3/4 pound sweet potato, peeled and grated 1/2 pound medium shrimp, peeled, deveined and cut into 1/2-inch bits 3 whole scallions, chopped 1 garlic clove, crushed 1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger 1 teaspoon coarse salt or to taste 1/2 cup cornstarch 3 large egg whites 1 head Boston or bibb lettuce, leaves cleaned, separated and any thick ribs removed Fresh cilantro and mint leaves To make the dipping sauce: 1. Pour the fish sauce and lime juice into a small bowl. Dissolve the sugar in 1/4 cup warm water and add it to the sauce. Stir in the chile. 2. Let the mixture sit for 20 minutes before you serve it. To make the fritters: 1. Fill a heavy pot or deep fryer with at least 3 inches of the peanut oil — but make sure this fills the pot no more than halfway — and heat it to 350 degrees. Place a couple of racks on a baking sheet, slide it into the oven, and heat the oven to 250 degrees. 2. Toss the sweet potato, shrimp, scallions, garlic, ginger and salt together in a mixing bowl. Sift in the cornstarch and toss again until evenly combined. 3. Put the egg whites in a separate bowl with 2 tablespoons warm water and whisk until you have set foam — not yet soft peaks, but there shouldn't be any liquid white. Stir the egg whites into the sweet-potato mixture. 4. Use a large, flat spoon to scoop up a very generous tablespoon of the fritter batter and slide it into the hot oil. Add a few more spoonfuls to the pot, but don't crowd. Fry, turning a few times, until browned and crisp, 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer to the racks in the oven to keep warm while you fry the remainder. 5. Serve the warm fritters with a plate of cilantro, mint and lettuce leaves for wrapping and a bowl of the sauce for dipping. Print friendly version.

I was drawn first to the most familiar recipes. How about "Mom's Potato Salad"? My own Mom makes potato salad with the "wrong" kind of potatoes — starchy, not waxy — homemade mayonnaise, piles of chopped celery, onion and pickle and generous sprinklings of salt, pepper and garlic powder. Clearly, Finamore never met my Mom, but I have to admit, his Mom makes a good potato salad, too: With nary a distracting bit of pickle or celery in sight, it's just smooth potato, boiled egg and store-bought mayonnaise with "a few shakes of garlic powder, some salt, and a very little pepper."

What makes the recipe for potato salad exceptional, though, is the sub-recipe for hard-cooked eggs. They could have just listed hard-cooked eggs in the recipe and left us to our own devices; instead, the authors added a chatty half-page primer on hard-cooked eggs that yields such good results it should be distributed on index cards and filed in every home in North America. This is no doubt the influence of Stevens. She and her team at Fine Cooking are famous for making recipes sing. (When they published a couple of my recipes a few years ago, they sent out an editor to prepare them with me on my own turf and make sure that everything was spelled out precisely enough to guarantee that anyone following my instructions would get good results.)

Certainly, the authors seem to have anticipated everything that could go wrong in every recipe. Most of the paragraphs on technique are larded with phrases like, "If things appear too dry during this time, add a bit more water." The effect is like having a good cook tell you what to watch out for as you take each step. This is so much better than the formulaic "Add two tablespoons and call me in the morning" approach that recipes took in decades past.

Broader troubleshooting is covered in several brief essays on "Potato Principles." Finamore and Stevens take advantage of the explosion of newly available potato varieties and recommend specialty types for specific recipes.

While sweet potatoes may differ from other potato types — botanically they're not related — it makes sense to put them in a collection of potato recipes because culinarily speaking, they're kissing cousins. Like regular potatoes, they originated in South America and were dragged around the world rubbing shoulders with cooking techniques as far removed as any could be. Also like their unrelated cousins, they lend themselves to a variety of recipes. They can be fried, mashed or baked into biscuits and pies. I was so intrigued with a recipe for "Vietnamese Sweet Potato Shrimp Cakes," which puts sweet potatoes in a dip with tamarind and lime, that I was compelled to make it twice. Now I can hardly wait for the leeks in my garden to get a little bigger so I can try that Leek and Potato Tart.

Greg Atkinson is chef at The Puget Sound Environmental Learning Center and Canlis restaurant and is author of "The Northwest Essentials Cookbook."