BOOK REVIEW : A Gallic Travelogue With Recipes : LA FRANCE GASTRONOMIQUE, <i> By Anne Willan (Arcade Publishing: $35; 192 pp.)</i>

Writing a food book called “La France Gastronomique” is sort of like christening your new fishing yarn “Moby Dick.” It was the name chosen by the illustrious Maurice-Edmond Sailland, who wrote under the name “Curnonsky,” for his great multivolume survey of regional French merveilles culinaires and bonnes auberges , produced between 1921 and 1926.

Curnonsky was addressing the first generation of French motorcar tourists, an audience to whom voyages of culinary exploration were a novel excitement. It would take some doing to recapture that feeling now. And to be fair, the new “La France Gastronomique” doesn’t pretend to. It is an international “packaging” job: one of those heavily illustrated volumes put together by a wholly or partly independent editorial/production team and printed somewhere with fairly low manufacturing costs (Italy, in this case) for distribution in several countries by local publishers.

With a few bright exceptions, quirky individuality is not often the strong point of such books. The best are usually those that either gather together a lot of solid research material for reference purposes or, like this one, project a quietly tasteful image of the subject. Willan’s travelogue-with-recipes more or less subordinates the supposed motoring-guide focus to the armchair aspect of the effort. Nor does she try to see or do or taste everything. She seems simply to have revisited what she enjoys most in 10 regions of France, leaving other places (Paris, the Savoie, Champagne, Picardy) to other chroniclers.

The author begins in her present home base of Burgundy and ends up in Provence, jumping from one area to another instead of trying to link up all her travels in one grand tour. It’s one of those books that can be read back to front, or by random page-flipping, without much loss of charm. Old-fashioned farms, sleepy rivers, small shops, hill villages, wood-fired bakery ovens and lovingly tended gardens are the sort of things that stick in the mind, both from Willan’s descriptions and Michael Boys’ idyllic photographs.

Famous restaurants, when they crop up, are mentioned with pleasure rather than awe, in no way eclipsing more modest experiences. On the Guerande peninsula of Brittany Willan seeks out the famous salt pans; along the Loire she visits a medieval monastery garden. Amid the revered gastronomic shrines of Lyons she accompanies friends to a “favorite back-street bistro” to sock away the kind of stuff that puts hair on your chest. She is not a dazzlingly vivid writer, but she does draw you into her low-keyed wanderings.

This is not the only possible image of gastronomic France in our day--especially not the only possible visual image. “Timeless” is clearly the way someone wanted Boys’ photographs to look, and vineyard after pasture after venerable church greets the view as if nothing had changed for the past 100 years. After a while this idyll takes on the expensive rusticity of a designer peasant shirt; you start to wonder whether a factory farm, bulldozed meadow, or non-white person has ever been seen in 1990 France.

Willan’s text, though it doesn’t claim to be probing, hints at a more complex reality than the pictures. “To a visitor, country France is rooted in tradition, but not so for the inhabitants,” she notes at one point. At Tours she finds local greenhouses supplied with water from “four nuclear power stations along the Loire”; the snails for escargots de Bourgogne now “come by the million from Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia.” The famous “flat oysters” of the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany have been wiped out by pollution, and an “immigrant Portuguese community” tends strawberries (presumably for mass distribution) in the Dordogne valley while French locals who could carry on the traditional goose-raising and confit-making disappear. These are valuable sidelights that I for one wouldn’t have minded seeing at least occasionally touched on in the photographs.

What goes further to dispel a certain misty quality in the overall portrait is the choice of recipes. There are only about 100, modestly tucked away in 10 sections at the end of the individual chapters, but they convey a lot. The selection emphasizes obvious dishes and use of obvious regional ingredients rather than gee-whiz “discoveries” and “creations.” The possible downside is that many people will already own cookbooks with good versions of fare such as pike quenelles, Alsatian-style sauerkraut, Burgundian gougere, or cassoulet. The advantage, which is considerable, is that the food is not false or overconstructed.

Sturdy old favorites presented with little embroidery include Lyonnais-style fromage fort (a pungent cheese mixture), Perigord duck confit, poached eggs in the ubiquitous Burgundian red wine sauce called sauce meurette , southwestern garbure (a robust vegetable soup), Alsatian plum tart, and a very simple specialty of Angers, cremets (something like a coeur a la creme mixture lightened with beaten egg whites). There are also some familiar dishes with a less familiar note or two, like the green olives in a salt cod brandade or savory accents such as ham, sage and thyme in the usually sweet kugelhopf . And a few contributions reflect a gentle accommodation with more cosmopolitan fashions--for example, tuna tartare or steak au poivre with a five-pepper mixture dominated by the unexpected bits of Sichuan peppercorns.

Unfortunately, the recipes will be less than a breeze for some readers to interpret. As in many internationally “packaged” books, British/American/metric measurements and variant terminology (“tin” versus “can,” for example) are all awkwardly sandwiched on the page together. Prospective buyers should also be able to take in stride glitches such as the Nantua sauce with three tablespoons of butter unaccounted for and the fish recipe with “salmon trout” in the title and “salmon” in the ingredients list.

I am not sure how many people will take in stride the “1 medium-large pumpkin, about 17 lb./7.5 kg” that you are supposed to hollow out and bake for a pumpkin soup. Those who are not accomplished cooks will have to guess at many details--e.g., the meaning of terms such as “pork breast,” or whether to strain the vegetables from a stock before adding it to a fish stew.

It’s a shame that the realization of detail in the recipes doesn’t match the fine selection and the essential fact of good ingredients being well handled. With just a little more care, this food might have been accessible to a much larger range of potential American users. The work is still a charming gift item whether anyone plans to cook from it or not, but one of its best points could have been even better.

Personally, I wish someone would produce a “France Gastronomique” survey in a mode closer to the lively curiosity of Curnonsky, whose pen name literally means “Why Notsky?” and who poked his nose into every corner of France because he wanted to see what was there. Today a real heir to Curnonsky would have to notice major jolts of ethnic immigration, an agriculture metamorphosing under Common Market pressures, and some nearly futuristic developments in food technology and marketing. Well--why not?