BOOK REVIEW : The Basics Problem : THE FAMILY CIRCLE COOKBOOK: New Tastes for New Times <i> By the editors of Family Circle and David Ricketts (Simon & Schuster: $23; 648 pp.)</i>

How well I remember my first “serious” recipes a few decades ago, feeling that whether they were for fudge or feijoada they were the corner of an intergalactic map. Carefully following their instructions, I believed, would take me from boiling water to the furthest reaches of a knowledge shared only among “real cooks.”

I truly wonder how anyone could develop such a view today. The general cookbooks currently being published are very different than the ones from which I learned to cook.

Consider the new “Family Circle Cookbook,” chock-full of well-organized, thoughtfully selected recipes in condensed but meticulous detail. Time was when service-magazine devotees and gourmet cooks regarded each other as the publican and the Pharisee, but today magazines such as Family Circle are just as interested in fresh ingredients and adventurous approaches as more pretentious venues. So what’s to complain about?

“Second-guessing” is one way of putting it. Sometimes you think that the apostles of popular culture have all possible market segments and selling angles so obsessively doped out that every one of us is either a letter or a blank space in a demographer’s jigsaw. (Election years tend to reinforce that feeling.)

In this book the positioning seems negative--very much defined by what’s not there or what has been kept to a minimum. This is fine insofar as it means eliminating a lot of time-consuming dishes. However, it also seems to mean an oddly restricted range of ingredients and a careful tiptoeing around all but a few elements in the ongoing American ethnic shake-up.

The intended buyers of this “new tastes for new times” collection presumably aren’t the new people on the block and have only the most timid curiosity about how their new Cambodian or Haitian neighbors eat. Their shopping horizons rarely go beyond the supermarket--though, to be sure, today’s upscale, boutique-ized supermarket offers livelier possibilities than its dear old ancestor did. Yet this audience doesn’t want to be branded with the awful label “white bread.” And they desire safe conduct through the health/nutrition minefield.

The Family Circle editors work heroically at putting all this together--but certainly not in the manner of the older service-magazine manuals. Those works used to give basic formulas for, say, rice pudding or meatloaf before moving on to macaroon rice pudding or chili-sauce meatloaf. Beginners could get the idea of plain yeast bread, split pea soup, white sauce, fish cakes, baked beans and lemonade as the taking-off point for this or that spiffy variation.

The new “Family Circle Cookbook” has things such as herbed fish cakes with mustard-dill sauce or spiced lemonade (based on a sugar syrup with allspice, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and crystallized ginger). The basic models from which to understand the essentials either aren’t there or have been squirreled away in little sidebars or charts. With a few exceptions, such as the half-dozen soup stock recipes, the whole aim of a general how-to-cook guidebook has been relinquished.

Instead, what we get is a recipe showcase dotted with compartmentalized bits of information, and with carefully calibrated doses of mild novelty applied at every chance. The editors have envisioned their audience as being ready for dried cherries, mache, shark, blue cornmeal, wasabi, instant couscous and squid-ink pasta--but not for squid itself, masa harina , chapati flour, rice noodles, fish sauce, goat meat or tropical root vegetables.

They have also been quick to eliminate things perceived as de rigueur , overly demanding or unpopular with the health constabulary. Don’t look for souffles, dumplings, or clam chowder, chipped beef, sauerkraut or herring. Or any variety meats, from calves’ liver to oxtails. At one time such a book would have had a large sampling of simple egg dishes. This one limits its egg dishes to two frittatas and a low-fat egg salad sandwich.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that your $23 will buy you only an airhead excuse for a cookbook. There are attractions here well worth considering. The biggest one is the generous percentage of the 700-odd recipes that handle good ingredients appealingly. The days when similar cookbooks used condensed soups and packaged mixes by the ton are gone. Though canned and processed ingredients figure heavily, they tend to be products such as broths, tomatoes, beans or frozen vegetables.

Fresh fruits and vegetables are strongly emphasized. Among the most pleasant ideas are a sweet potato soup with corn and jalapenos, a barley pilaf with walnuts, vegetables and fried vermicelli pieces (a switch on a well-known Middle Eastern rice dish), a sweet-and-sour cherry and onion relish and a kind of potpie with a cornmeal crust and a chile-spiked chicken-corn-black-bean filling.

A certain palette of flavors keeps cropping up throughout the recipes: lots of fresh or candied ginger, honey, red or yellow sweet peppers, cilantro, balsamic vinegar and hot pepper sauce. It is difficult to tell whether they may seem a trifle repetitive over the years. Note also that an urge toward mix-and-match experiments with colorful ingredients is freshly indulged. For my money, this impulse gets a little silly in a few places such as the beverage chapter and produces excellent things in the pasta and vegetable departments. In any case, we’re a long way from the marshmallow-and-Jell-O-salad mentality.

The compilers have also made a smarter effort to turn around old menu assumptions than some authors of would-be-healthful cookbooks. Cakes and pies are outnumbered by lighter fruit-based inventions. Many of the main dishes are good object lessons in the all-important principle of surrounding a small amount of meat with a rich assortment of vegetables (or replacing it with some vegetable source of protein). There’s a big pitch for quinoa and some other unusual grains. I count more fish than beef recipes--and the fish recipes revolve around interesting uses of many varieties, not the nameless fillets that used to be many Americans’ only exposure to non-canned fish.

Information is another plus, at least up to a point. Not trying to beat culinary reference works at their own game, the “Family Circle Cookbook” still crams in a lot of useful material on subjects such as cheese varieties, various salad greens, internal temperatures for roast meats or managing a charcoal grill. Unfortunately, “crams in” is the operative phrase.

The pages of the work--by the way, loose-leaf pages that are sold unassembled and must be put into the binder in sequence by the purchaser--are maddeningly carved up to accommodate umpteen different elements. The eye drifts past a farrago of recipes, sidebars (for important technical points or trivial tips), suggested menus, occasional instructional or informational photographs (many of them quite good), and hundreds of “styled” food photographs (vapid and stagey). All this gingerbread somehow evokes a Gertrude Stein-ish feeling that there’s no there there. Something for every constituency, but the general context to glue it all together somehow got left out.

Nowhere is this emptiness more evident than in the handling of nutrition information--something clearly meant to be quite a selling point. Instead of a lucid, connected introduction to how our bodies use food, we get choppy nutrient-by-nutrient recitals. There is an extra index devoted to “healthful recipes,” which are a rich selection indeed by the time the editors finish identifying whipped-cream frosting as “low-sodium” and spiced tea as “low-cholesterol.” The text is sprinkled with innumerable little health “factoids,” some so far-fetched--Jerusalem artichokes are said to be “high in protein,” tofu is called a good source of Vitamin A--as to recall a high-school yearbook that tries to say something nice about every nerd.

How much better the space devoted to sort-of-science and banal photographs could have been spent on some plain, uncontrived basic recipes to fill in the missing center of culinary instruction in this often engaging book.