To the delicious Abraham Lee and Zevin Jones: You’ve got big appetites like your mama—use them wisely. Thank you for being the best travel partners I could have hoped for.

We sent Cooking Light’s ebullient and tireless contributing editor, Allison Fishman Task, on a mission: to crisscross this great land in search of favorite regional foods. The result of her road-tripping culinary anthropology is an almost dizzying collection of classic treats from the diners, county fairs, cocktail parties, and hotel dining rooms of our collective yore. Between the Reuben sandwiches, Waldorf salads, sweet-and-sour meatballs, red flannel hash, and apple pie, there’s enough comforting nostalgia here to butter all of New England’s lobster rolls. But while traveling and eating, Allison also had her eye on a bigger theme: to lighten these American classics for a country that is starting to think hard about what it eats, even as it reaffirms what it loves from its past.

At Cooking Light, it’s been our mission for more than 25 years to honor the flavor values of traditional foods while coaxing a lot of fat and calories out. Nothing gives us more pleasure than a light cheesecake that has the same swoon-inducing, throat-catching effect of the Brooklyn original—and half the calories. We love eating and cooking, but we don’t give indulgent treats like artichoke-spinach dip a nostalgia pass just because they remind us of the time we snuck big mouthfuls at Mom’s bridge-party soirée. We see lightening up these dishes as a new sort of cultural preservation: classic flavors served up for a healthier generation. This is important because the recent push toward mega-burgers, bacon bombs, five-cheese pizzas, and other over-the-top glop isn’t doing much to honor and advance our food culture, let alone our health. We much prefer Allison’s approach—respect the traditions, but improve upon them. Love what you eat, but do so with a healthy future in mind. And keep an eye out, as Allison did on her road trips, for the new favorites—the Vietnamese bánh mì sandwiches, the Mexican fish tacos—that continue the evolution of our food through the inspirations of immigrant cooks.

This book moves our preserve-but-improve philosophy nicely down the road, serving up more than 150 recipes that American families can really dig into, happily and healthfully.

Scott Mowbray

Editor, Cooking Light