One of the joys of a food maven's life is to find a new cookbook that's not like all the others, that is more than a collection of recipes and tips — one that expresses a personality, a point of view, some attitude, evidence of skill and hands-on experience.

In my experience, when you come across one of those, you know within a few flipped pages.

I knew it when British chef and food columnist Simon Hopkinson's "Second Helpings of Roast Chicken" (Hyperion, $24.95) came into my hands. Among the dozens of cookbooks that clog my mailbox and pile up on the floor around my desk, perhaps one in 10 go home with me for a closer look. Perhaps 1 in 10 of those cause me to flag some pages with Post-Its — fodder for future dinners, columns or stories. And perhaps 1 in those 10 end up in The Advertiser cookbook library (some of which, to be honest, resides in my house). Also-rans find a home at the Friends of the Library book sale.

"Second Helpings," sequel to the 1994 "Roast Chicken and Other Stories," which I unfortunately missed, had me sitting on the sofa while my husband watched TV, flagging pages, chuckling, nodding in agreement, making interested sounds. He's used to my multitasking in this way and knows that it often results in a delicious dinner later.

This book will not be everyone's platter of chicken. It helps to be an Anglophile, or at least familiar with British idiom.

It's necessary to be the kind of cook who doesn't think microwaving counts. If this sounds elitist, so be it. The book is about cooking. Cooking is a process in which, as Hopkinson delicately phrases it, "a modicum of toil is involved." Although many of us, myself included, "cook" by heating and eating at times, this book is for people who enjoy and prefer to take food from raw ingredient to finished dish, even if it requires the investment of some time and labor. Even if we only have that time on the weekends.

Hopkinson is a complex personality, by turns acerbic and curmudgeonly, delicate and graceful in his turns of phrase, warm-hearted and appreciative of his mentors, including his mother and at least as opinionated as his American counterpart, Anthony Bourdain.

His message is one many food writers and activists are attempting to convey: "All is not well." All is not well, he says, in a world where people buy millions of cookbooks, watch thousands of hours of food TV and yet have no idea where their food comes from, have never purchased a whole chicken or made a pie crust or a cake from scratch or or experienced the difference between a fresh-shelled pea and a frozen one. They couldn't make a beef stew from scratch if their lives depended on it. Couldn't, and, more frighteningly, wouldn't.

Frightening — to me, at least — because something is lost when we allow control of our most basic human need to pass from our hands, when we care so little about it that we trade our time to other things. But, if you've read this far, I'm preaching to the choir.

The format of the book is simple: a subject — from Almonds to Vinegar, alphabetically — followed by an often rambling essay and three recipes. Some will seem strange or inaccessible to the American reader; there's a chapter on suet and another on skate (a fish), for example.

But there is so much to be learned, so many valuable insights into the hows and whys of cooking encapsulated in the essays that even those recipes which I'll never prepare seemed worth my time.

When you finish, as Michael Burkett writes in his foreword, "Now you understand why very few cookbooks should be read, and the rest just used."