At the first signs of spring, as the buds begin to poke out on the branches and my frighteningly grubby winter parka finally feels unnecessary, I start craving Passover fare — that is, matzo ball soup, gefilte fish and charoset, a chopped fruit paste eaten during festive meals.

I generally find Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine too bland, too salty, and too starchy, but as Passover (beginning Saturday, April 19 at sundown) looms on the horizon, both the holiday-specific and year-round standbys — noodle pudding, babka, and kasha varnishkes, buckwheat groats cooked with onions, mushrooms, and a bowtie pasta, — of my Yiddish-speaking ancestors call out to me. So I was in the perfect frame of mind when “Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited” (Ten Speed Press, $35) hit my desk. The author’s promise to make these old favorites lighter and better-suited to “today’s tastes” — along with the book’s abundance of historical information about New York Jewish culinary traditions — gave me new respect for the possibilities in Eastern European cooking.

“Jewish Home Cooking” is a great starting point and reference book and certainly delivers the Jewish home cooking it promises: There are recipes for virtually every dish in the Yiddish repertoire, and most are fairly easy to prepare. However, I wish Mr. Schwartz had done a little more revising, and not just “revisiting.” There are some suggestions for improving the health — “a lessening of the schmaltz here, a tweak there … a green vegetable or two alongside the braised brisket or sweet-and-sour flanken,” as Mr. Schwartz puts it. A low-fat (although still egg-y) matzo ball recipe is included alongside a traditional one, although my execution of it turned out dense and hard, not “fluffy” as the book promised. The fritatta-like potato kugel is also fairly healthy, although too salty, and the book offers tips for lightening up notoriously rich noodle kugel, albeit with the caveat: “If you go for every possible fat reduction, it won’t be the same recipe and I can’t guarantee it will give the same pleasure.”

On the less healthy front, Mr. Schwartz revisits classic desserts — making them larger and more decadent than the original versions. The chocolate filling he offers for hamantaschen, the Purim cookie usually filled with preserves or poppy seeds, missed the mark, however. Basically just brownie batter, it baked to a solid, instead of gooey, consistency, and, even when I halved the suggested two teaspoons, it spilled out over the pastry in which it was wrapped, yielding messy and misshapen cookies.

I would have liked to see more suggestions (other than simply “green vegetable”) for light dishes that could complement the schmaltz-filled standbys and more experimentation with herbs, spices, and fresh ingredients.

Fortunately, Jayne Cohen’s “Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover’s Treasury of Classics and Improvisations” (Wiley, $32.50) succeeds where “Jewish Home Cooking” stumbles. While the recipes are, for the most part, more complicated and time-consuming than Mr. Schwartz’s (alas, neither book offers time estimates with recipes), they are also infinitely more imaginative and sophisticated. In addition to the classic rendition of most dishes, Ms. Cohen offers numerous variations, such as roasted fennel matzo balls, salmon gefilte fish, and wild mushroom-potato kugel.

While Ms. Cohen likens her extensive tinkering with customary dishes to the rabbinic tradition of “rethinking, questioning and reinventing,” at times her variations are so removed from the original that they may fail to satisfy those desiring “authentic” Jewish food: upside-down caramel-cranberry-pecan noodle kugel, for example. Both Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Cohen go well beyond the role of recipe writer/collector, each providing a wealth of historical information and food lore. But “Jewish Holiday Cooking” is especially thorough, particularly for those planning Passover celebrations. The 137-page Passover chapter is a virtual book within a book, offering a detailed history of the holiday and its culinary traditions, tips for planning a seder, sample menus for the entire holiday, as well as suggestions for vegetarians and vegans, a difficult constituency on a holiday where (at least for many Ashkenazi Jews) legumes and most grains are forbidden.

While great for planning holiday meals, the book is a bit tricky to navigate if you’re just looking for, say, a soup or dessert recipe, regardless of holiday. An index organized by type of food would have been a nice touch.

Let all who are hungry come and cook!