Spicy Reading : Learning Bad Taste : AMERICAN GOURMET, <i> By Jane and Michael Stern (HarperCollins: $25; 270 pp.)</i>

When last we met Jane and Michael Stern, they were glorifying bowling, macrame and TV dinners in their irreverent guide to the gaudy and gauche, “The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.”

With “American Gourmet,” the prolific duo attempts to answer the question of how the masses discovered good taste--or at least what tastes good.

Seven years ago, the Sterns were presenting straight-faced (try it, you’ll love it!) recipes such as baked prune whip and chop suey sundae (served with a dash of chow mein noodles) in their popular retro-cookbook, “Square Meals.” For the Sterns, it wasn’t a dainty madeleine but a G. I. Fruitbar that sent them into paroxysms of nostalgic rapture as they remembered repasts from their Baby Boom childhood.

Today’s foodies should find the fare in “American Gourmet” a bit easier to swallow. When it comes to snob appeal, “American Gourmet” is the upstairs to “Square Meals” ’s downstairs.

Subscribers to Gourmet, Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure are apt to get misty-eyed as they read about the roots of modern American food mania. According to the Sterns, there would be no Wolfgang Puck, Jeremiah Tower or Anne Rosenzweig were it not for the likes of Vincent Price, Joseph Baum and Hugh Hefner--not to mention Julia Child, the Galloping Gourmet and Craig Claiborne.

In their latest pop culture excavation, the Sterns return to their favorite decades: the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. While the average American family was chowing down on burgers and succotash, the American gourmet was discovering an appetite for “fancy food” and fine dining. The Sterns set the parameters of this budding gourmet era as 1946, when the first nationally televised cooking show (“I Love To Eat!”) premiered, and 1971, when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, heralding new heights in food worship.

As they often do when writing about a more “innocent” time in our recent past, the Sterns threaten to wax naive in their foreword: “We wrote this book to chronicle the passion of America’s mid-century gourmets,” they write. “Theirs was a time unspoiled by today’s nutritional sanctimony and the unseemly one-upmanship of the yuppie years.”

Far from being naive, “American Gourmet” turns out to be a witty and often eye-opening account of the pioneers in modern gastronomy. This is a cookbook meant to be read. With more than 100 pages of breezy but engaging text, the “gourmet” recipes sometimes seem a mere curiosity amid all the history, although quite a few of them have more to offer than just high cholesterol counts. And the Sterns’ introductions to these “classics”--from true survivors such as chicken with 40 cloves of garlic to the dubious kiss-and-twirl fondue--are always entertaining and informative.

The American gourmet of the ‘40s was weaned on Gourmet magazine, which continues to set sedately elegant standards 50 years later. The Sterns use Gourmet and its evolution as a sort of benchmark for the budding gourmet movement in America.

The Sterns found this gem in an early Gourmet issue: in 1946, Mrs. Louis B. Newell of Wayzats, Minn., wrote the editors asking for a recipe for “a cheese dish with a creamy or custard-y consistency that sounds like ‘ quietsch a la reine. ‘ She asked, ‘Does that mean anything to you?’ ”

Gourmet, of course, knew that it was quiche lorraine Newell was after, even if few Americans could yet wrap their tongues around the strange French syllables. (And long before they would OD on quiche.)

Post-war foreign travel, the Sterns say, opened American palates and wallets to all kinds of new food adventures. When they got back home, neophyte gourmets were eager to duplicate these strange and wonderful new tastes, whether it was in a restaurant or their own kitchen. At home, all they had to do was flip on the TV and see Julia trilling or Graham Kerr galloping to discover that they too could bone a chicken or flambe a crepe.

The Sterns do an impressive balancing act in tracing the dual track of American gourmet-ism, from the haute cuisine “haute snobbisme” practiced by restaurateurs such as Henri Soule (of the Pavillon in New York) to the popularization of gourmet dining by Joe Baum and Jerry Brody of Restaurant Associates. At Restaurant Associates eateries, such as the Forum of the Twelve Caesars in New York, which opened in 1958, patrons got good food and good theater--most dishes were set on fire table-side.

As “gourmania” became a hallmark of sophistication in the swinging ‘60s, publications such as Cosmo and Playboy magazine took lustful note. Good food became equated with good sex (and we’re not talking meat and potatoes as the way to his heart). Food critics found that the language of love offered the juiciest bons mots for describing their most recent gustatory encounter.

The Sterns have an awfully good time in this chapter, called “Cook Your Way to Romance.” Here is an orgiastic marvel they unearthed from the archives of Gael Greene (“The Insatiable Critic”):

“Writing about a meal at the Restaurant de la Pyramide in Vienne she moaned, ‘I vaguely recall a stirring confrontation with the cheese tray--a creamy St. Marcellin and something chalky and cinder-wrapped, classic manna of a goat. Then an offering of ice cream. . . . Is it possible we accepted? Were not our senses already seduced by the gateau marjolaine , an essay in chocolate, four or five layers of absolutely everything you would want to do with that aphrodisiacal bean?”

Perhaps it was writing like that--and all those heavy sauces--that left American gourmets exhausted and sated by the early ‘70s. Gourmet food, the Sterns write, “was beginning to seem old-fashioned, rather than modern.” Anybody could pass himself off as a gourmet by “defrosting heat-n-serve factory-processed boxes of fancy foodstuffs.”

By 1971, the “gourmet” movement was dying; freshness was the new fad. It would be 20 more years before a self-respecting foodie could open a book such as “American Gourmet” and consider whipping up souffle au Grand Marnier, a relic from Mary and Vincent Price’s “A Treasury of Great Recipes.”