Today's American food scene includes new ingredients and ethnic cuisines undreamed-of by previous generations of cooks in this country. National food-and-cooking media - magazines, television, the Internet, and more than 1500 new cookbooks each year - make this ''New American Cuisine'' familiar in every corner of the United States. Are traditional American dishes and cookbooks now obsolete for all practical purposes, useful primarily as nostalgic mementos or historical records? This program invites the audience to consider the place of American cookbooks and recipes from the past - distant and recent - in the 21st Century American kitchen.