A World That Prized Fragrance Like Rubies : CLASSICAL TURKISH COOKING: Traditional Turkish Food for the American Kitchen, <i> By Ayla Algar (HarperCollins: $30)</i>

Here is a cookbook in which that overused label classical actually signifies something. By “classical Turkish cooking” Ayla Algar means the amazingly refined, varied, specialized Ottoman Turkish court cuisine that visitors to Topkapi Palace in Istanbul ranked as one of the wonders of the world from at least the 17th Century until after World War I.

Her collection of roughly 175 recipes tries to show that the food she grew up with in modern Turkey is still substantially permeated with elements of that fabled “palace cooking” style. At the same time, she is working backward in time to investigate the far-flung origins of the imperial Ottoman heritage.

This is a tall order for a cookbook, since claims about the history and meaning of Turkish food ways will be, to say the least, not terribly accessible to most American food buffs. We are talking about a people who made an extraordinary centuries-long journey from the borders of China to the borders of Greece (and beyond), absorbing an incompletely documented swarm of culinary influences from the civilizations they met in the process--notably Persia and Arabic Islam. It would take miracles of scholarly popularization to put even a little relevant evidence about the fortunes of Turkish cooking on the table in front of a lay readership.

Despite all this, Algar comes across with something that may delight many cooks (whether or not they grasp all her arguments about the words for different dishes in such-and-such languages). What makes this book exciting, rather than obscure, is the sort of food she has chosen for bringing her case to life.

The recipes almost uncannily conjure up the smell and taste of mint, garlic, spanking-fresh tomatoes, yogurt, olive oil, quinces, almonds and “sweet” spices long before you even get to the stove. Algar gives us marvelous vegetables at the heart of things, simply stewed with olive oil and lemon juice or stuffed with many aromatic mixtures. There is a good sprinkling of fish and mussel dishes along with a gorgeous variety of breads and pastries (savory or sweet). Lamb is nearly the only meat (braised, or in kebabs, or minced for kofte ).

All this marks “Classical Turkish Cooking” as one more good choice in the Middle Eastern field, among such works as Claudia Roden’s justly beloved “A Book of Middle Eastern Food” and new explorations of Greek and Georgian cooking from Rosemary Barron and Julianne Margvelashvili. What sets it apart from (if not above) the others is that through her food, Algar really does create a picture of the former “palace cooking” as a still-vital distillation of all that was best in Middle Eastern food.

This view is kept before us in two ways: through a steady (though not exclusive) emphasis on rich or curious dishes that indeed originated in the palace or can be seen to have a venerable past, and through a lively barrage of citations from historical sources and adaptations from earlier Turkish cookbooks. A good place to start absorbing the approach is a brief chapter titled “Flower and Fruit, Color and Scent.”

Liberally spiced with historical allusions, it takes you into a world that prized colors and fragrant essences like rubies. Sherbets (iced drinks based on blossoms, fruit juices or scented syrups), perfumed icy fruit compotes and preparations such as “rose sugar” were all outgrowths of this passion. So were exquisite jams and fruit preserves (often sun-cooked), which Algar tells us “were a food in their own right, something to be savored in small quantities, not smeared over bread.”

Of course, not everything breathes so rarefied an air. You can find plenty of recipes no more poetic or imperial than sliced beets with garlic and vinegar, or “a humble bowl of beans.”

But you are seldom far from something linked with a magnificent or exotic past. A sweet milk pudding based on shredded chicken is an obvious echo of very old cooking traditions, also known at the courts of medieval Europe, that confound modern categories of sweet and savory. The name of the famous eggplant dish hunkar begendi (“the prince approved”) is said to refer, at least apocryphally, to its first tasting by the “particularly irascible and arbitrary” Sultan Murad IV. The colors of another complexly sauced dish remind Algar of “Turkish embroidery, which similarly depicts every nuance of color and texture.” Even coffee-drinking in Turkey has a “quasi-ritual aspect” preserved “down to the present, at however reduced a level.”

In another cookbook these allusions might be scattered about as trivial window-dressing. Here they firmly serve Algar’s purpose of anchoring modern Turkish food in the context of a great though partly vanished civilization.

Directions are for the most part lucidly written without sounding like sterile cookbook-ese. The recipes are sensibly aimed at different levels of skill and zeal: For cooks with a good hand at noodle dough, Algar provides a long, demanding version of manti (akin to very small, delicate ravioli), but she also accommodates the more timid or time-pressed with a quite different manti recipe planned around commercial won-ton skins.

It should also be noted that this is an uncommonly pretty book dotted with charming but unobtrusive Turkish-motif decorations (uncredited).

For all the attractions of this work, it is not the only kind of book that could have been written on Turkish food. Some would surely like to have seen a book that helped them understand the contents of Turkish neighborhood stores in America, or paid some attention to the culinary contributions of minorities such as Armenians and Jews in Turkey. Greeks probably will not buy the argument that the Byzantine influence on Turkish cooking styles was fairly minor. The fascinating culinary give-and-take between Turkey and Western Europe in the aftermath of Columbus’ voyages is largely ignored.

A more concrete drawback for other readers will be that Algar is curiously uninterested in analyzing some important ingredients. We never learn if it matters whether the “creamy, full-flavored black olives” in a wonderful-sounding bread are oil-cured or brine-cured, why some of her pilafs are based on basmati rice and others on the short-grain arborio type, or whether it’s possible to make an equivalent of kaymak (something like clotted cream but with a more complex flavor) in your own kitchen. And I wonder whether I’m the only person who would have welcomed some kindergarten instruction on how to pronounce the array of Turkish words that we meet in these pages.

But cavils or no cavils, one can only wish that more cookbook writers were as charged with purposeful conviction as Algar.