With households watching every penny, a growing number of Americans are ditching their takeout menus and heading into the kitchen to cook dinner at home. The trouble is, many don’t know how.

“We have forgotten how to cook,” says author Mollie Katzen, best known for The Moosewood Cookbook. As families learned to rely on dialing for pizza, they stopped being able to bake their own.

Now, lots of people want to save money but can’t even make eggs, she says. We’ve become a nation of inexperienced but newly determined cooks, and that has given cookbook authors and publishers a promising new niche.

After years of cookbooks that ranged from pretentious celebrity chef volumes to glossy tributes to cupcakes, the latest trend embraces Cooking 101 — books that take readers back to the basics.

This fall, British chef Jamie Oliver releases Jamie’s Food Revolution, which teaches basic techniques that save money and produce healthier eating habits. And Katzen will roll out Get Cooking, the first in a series of books that targets beginning cooks with straightforward recipes for soups, pasta, chicken and burgers.

These new offerings follow last fall’s Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics by television chef Ina Garten and Martha Stewart’s Cooking School by Martha Stewart. Garten’s book was the top seller and Stewart’s was in the top five, says Kathryn Popoff, vice president of trade books for bookseller Borders Group Inc.

Books such as New York Times’ columnist Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and Cooking Know-How, by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough also populate the growing genre.

Dorothy Harr, a 41-year-old marketing executive from Centerville, Va., is among the more than 40 percent of people surveyed by Worthington, Ohio-based consumer research firm BIGresearch who say they’re cutting back on dinners out. But her limited skills mean her family doesn’t eat much variety.

“I tend to cook the same thing over and over, and it gets really boring,” she says. She’s hoping a brush-up of the basics will change that.

Basic cookbooks have long been a staple of the cookbook industry. Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking walked Americans through Gallic cuisine. Fannie Farmer taught home cooks how to measure properly. The Joy of Cooking introduced asparagus and how to handle it. What has changed is the level of knowledge — or, perhaps, ignorance — these new books assume.

Katzen is amazed at the level of skills. “The questions I get are so basic — ‘Should I buy the frozen spinach or the fresh,’ ‘I’d like to make an omelet, how do I do that?’ I thought it was obvious, but it’s not.”

Culinary historians say America’s migration from the stove began sometime after World War II, when more women moved into the workforce and the makers of packaged foods began casting cooking as drudgery to be dispensed with quickly.

Our skills eroded through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s as families worked more and ate fewer meals together. Now, the average home cook’s knowledge has declined so thoroughly that The Betty Crocker Kitchens Stylebook, which is used for recipes and package directions, has simplified some of its terms. For instance, modern cooks are instructed to “beat” sugar and butter together rather than “cream” it (the instruction of yesteryear), cookbooks manager Lois Tlusty said in an e-mail.

At the same time, people began to eat out more. Not just hamburgers but high-end fare at restaurants presided over by culinary luminaries. Chefs became celebrities and food-driven media like specialized magazines and the Food Network helped make contemporary diners more sophisticated than ever — at least on the surface.

“People want to throw around terms like jus or coulis,” says Anne Mendelson, a culinary historian and contributing editor at Gourmet magazine. “Some people say we’re getting more sophisticated. But then you look at the cookbooks meant to teach people to cook and you hear horror stories of the trouble ordinary people have using those books.”

Cookbooks are only part of the effort to help Americans get comfortable in the kitchen again. Many beginning cooks seem to want more instruction than a book can reasonably offer, giving rise to cooking schools.

Roughly 350 cooking schools can be found nationwide, says Stephan Hengst, spokesman for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., up from 200 a decade ago. In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available, more than 62,000 students were enrolled.

“People realize that at the core of it, they never really learned to cook to begin with,” Hengst says. “With the rise of Whole Foods and farmers’ markets people are discovering ingredients
that they’re completely unfamiliar with and they want to know what to do with them.”

At Sterling, Va.-based Cookology, where timid cook Harr has taken more than a half-dozen classes, owner Maria Kopsidas even offers a farmers’ market class based on what cooks might find at their local markets. But she also recognized the need to teach these same cooks to improvise — that is, cook with confidence.

“How do you teach such a special skill?” says Kopsidas. “You can show people, look, there are two or three ways that we tend to cook things like vegetables, and then give them a few recipes to use as a foundation.”

But some culinary observers worry that a whole shelf of books on Cooking 101 won’t help a culture that has moved so far from the kitchen.

“We’ve fallen into the hands of other people making our food for us,” Mendelson says. “And I don’t know if there’s any road back from that.”

BACK-TO-BASICS COOKBOOKS

Jamie’s Food Revolution
(out this fall)

Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics

Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Martha Stewart’s Cooking School

Get Cooking (out this fall)

Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough's Cooking Know-How takes a simple approach to making bouillabaisse. Larry Crowe/AP.

NO-FUSS BOUILLABAISSE

Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough take an unconventional yet intuitive approach to cooking in their recent cookbook, Cooking Know-How. They focus on basic techniques and recipe styles, then suggest using them with different ingredients to produce a variety of dishes. In this case, they offer a simple approach to bouillabaisse, a seafood stew.

Start to finish: 11/2 to 2 hours (50 minutes active)
Servings: 6 to 8
3 tablespoons olive oil
4 ounces diced shallots (about 4 shallots)
1 medium fennel bulb, trimmed and thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 cups diced tomatoes
2 tablespoons minced parsley
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1 tablespoon finely minced orange zest
1/2 teaspoon saffron
2 bay leaves
6 cups (11/2 quarts) fish broth
2 pounds thick fish fillets, cut into 2-inch pieces (such as halibut, grouper and cod)
1 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
Salt, to taste
1 batch rouille (recipe below)
In a large Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium. Add the shallots, fennel and garlic. Saute until just soft, about 5 minutes.
Add the tomatoes, parsley, thyme, orange zest, saffron and bay leaves. Cook until the tomatoes begin to break down, stirring often, about 6 minutes.
Add the fish broth and bring to a simmer. Cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer until the vegetables are very tender, about 30 to 40 minutes. Add the fish and shrimp, then return to a simmer and cook, uncovered, until the fish is just cooked through, 5 to 10 minutes.

Season with salt and stir in the rouille until thickened.

ROUILLE

Start to finish: 5 minutes
Makes 1 batch
2 whole jarred roasted red peppers
3 cloves garlic, peeled and quartered
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unseasoned breadcrumbs
1/2 cup olive oil

In a food processor, combine the peppers, garlic and salt. Process until smooth. Add the bread crumbs and process again until fairly smooth. Scrape into a bowl and stir in the olive oil in a slow, steady stream.
Recipes from Cooking Know-How, Wiley, 2009

This recipe from Martha Stewart’s recent cookbook, Martha Stewart’s Cooking School, is versatile. Any cooked vegetables can be substituted for the squash filling. The goat cheese also can be left out and more Parmesan added.

The versatility of this squash and goat cheese frittata, in which any cooked vegetable can be used in place of the squash filling, makes it a standout choice. Larry Crowe/AP

SQUASH AND GOAT CHEESE FRITTATA

Start to finish: 30 minutes
Servings: 6
For the filling:
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
1/2 pound mixed small zucchini and yellow squash, halved lengthwise and sliced crosswise 3/4 inch thick (11/2 cups)
For the eggs:
12 large eggs
1/4 cup heavy cream
4 basil leaves, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh chives
Coarse salt and ground black pepper
For the topping:
3 ounces fresh goat cheese
1/2 cup (2 ounces) Parmesan or asiago cheese, finely grated

In a 10-inch nonstick oven-safe skillet over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the onion and cook until soft and translucent, stirring occasionally, about 3 to 4 minutes. Add the zucchini and squash, then sauté until tender and golden brown, about 10 minutes. Set aside.

Heat the broiler.

In a large bowl, lightly beat the eggs with a whisk, then whisk in the cream, basil and chives. Season with 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1/8 teaspoon of pepper.

Pour the egg mixture into the skillet with the vegetables. Using a heatproof flexible spatula, stir and push the egg from the edges to the center of the pan, so the runny parts run underneath, until the eggs are almost set (wet on top but otherwise set), 2 to 3 minutes.

Drop dollops of goat cheese on the top, distributing evenly and pressing them into the eggs a bit. Sprinkle with the Parmesan. Place the skillet under the broiler and cook until the frittata is set on top and slightly puffy, and the cheese is melted and golden, 1 to 11/2 minutes.

Gently run the spatula around the edges and underneath the frittata and carefully slide out of the pan onto a plate. Slice into six wedges and serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

Recipe from Martha Stewart’s Cooking School, Clarkson Potter, 2008