Most cooks have at least one moment in the kitchen of utter disgrace. Mine happened in cooking school, when I knocked my head against a fuse box and slowly crumpled to the ground as a fellow student spilled a bowl of crepine (caul fat) all over my torso. Of course, I had to get right up and cook for three straight hours, my trousers clinging and sticking to my legs all the while.

But compared to the disasters in “Don’t Try This at Home” (Bloomsbury, $24.95), that’s child’s play. Take the natural potential for disaster in any kitchen (knives, heat, culinary misjudgment), add mercurial cooks, unreliable suppliers, demanding customers, and a punishing workload, and you have fertile ground for catastrophes of truly epic proportions. Literary agent Kimberly Witherspoon and food writer Andrew Friedman have gathered memorable stories from some of the best chefs in the world, and it’s just plain satisfying to read about their flubs.

Operatic drama abounds: There’s satisfying revenge (Mario Batali triumphs over an evil chef), life-and-death crisis (Daniel Boulud and staff replace 1,000 spoiled servings of fresh pea soup in an afternoon), flat-out hilarity (Eric Ripert’s misadventures as a waiter), and inspired improvisation (Michel Richard’s willful destruction of a crushed wedding cake). But unlike a night at the opera, you’re almost always left with a happy ending – almost invariably, the chefs pull through the fire triumphantly.

These disasters seldom involve actual cooking missteps; adding too much tarragon to a dish, say, does not qualify as a kitchen catastrophe. But in our kitchens at home, those modest issues are the most important. We don’t need to cook pasta for Pavarotti. We just want to make our food better – easier, tastier, more economical. “How To Break an Egg” (Taunton Press, $19.95) is a guide to doing just that.

Like a modern, food-focused version of “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management,” this is a grab-bag of nearly 1,500 “Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, Emergency Substitutions, and Handy Techniques” from Fine Cooking magazine, a bastion of simple, sensible cooking. And nearly every page has an idea I know I’ll use in my kitchen (a feature most cookbooks can’t claim). If you’ve ever wondered how to reheat pasta without sticking, how to make the bottom crust of a pie crispier, or how to roast garlic cloves without the mess of peeling them, this book has the answers.

And there are plenty of ingenious ways to make a good cook feel clever. Advice includes: Use an envelope as a quick funnel to fill your pepper grinder with peppercorns; pit olives with a cherry pitter, and rub a paste of baking soda and water into hands that are irritated by chiles. Small-scale ingenuity abounds. Like “Don’t Try This at Home,” it’s hard to imagine reading “How To Break an Egg” straight through. The capsule stories and quick tips are best digested in small servings. At the risk of being impolite, I would suggest them as bathroom readers. They’re great books to open up at random and enjoy. Taken together, they’ll help you become a better, smarter cook – one who has it easy compared with that beleaguered chef behind the swinging doors.