Jewish holidays are inextricably linked with food, probably because most of them celebrate survival, and there's nothing more life-affirming than eating.

This is especially true for Passover. Not only does the holiday begin with the multicourse ritual meal, or seder, commemorating the ancient Israelites' escape from slavery in Egypt, it goes on for eight days of a special diet designed to fill the stomach while avoiding bread, pasta and other leavened foods.

Traditional recipes can be comforting, but it's also fun to try new variations and incorporate dishes from other streams of Jewish culture. A lot of cooks must be thinking this way, because this year has brought a bumper crop of Jewish cookbooks designed to expand the repertoire. Passover begins at sundown this Saturday.

"Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover's Treasury of Classics and Improvisations" by Jayne Cohen (Wiley, $32.50), is the most comprehensive. Within its 574 pages are almost 300 recipes from all over the diaspora, organized by holiday, along with a how-to guide for celebrating and cooking.

It's an expansion of Cohen's first book, "The Gefilte Variations," with everything from the first volume plus 100 dishes more, plus tips, stories and other guidance. The Passover section, she said, is "a book within a book."

"People have told me that while they love innovative recipes, they felt unable to put together an entire seder," said Cohen from her home in New York City. "In the past they depended on their mother or grandmother to make the holiday meals, even when they had families of their own. Now they are doing it themselves and need a little help.

"If you don't update your traditions, they can become stale and rote. There is a directive in the Passover service that every person in every generation should experience the Exodus personally. Adding new traditions is another way of doing that. People forget the whole seder itself has been evolving since it was instituted."