BOOK REVIEW : Rough and Heady : REAL BEER & GOOD EATS: The Rebirth of America’s Beer and Food Traditions <i> By Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly (Knopf: $23; 354 pp.) </i>

Winging two birds with one lustily aimed stone, the authors of the well-received “Hot Links and Country Flavors” (1990) have come up with a book tailor-made for: a) those sick of the foppish stuff dubbed creativity at some levels of culinary fashion, and b) people looking for bright ideas about cooking with beer.

Not that the new Aidells-Kelly effort is a cooking-with-beer manual. (That concept would go a very short way toward making a book.) It’s a generous grab-bag dominated to various degrees by recipes using beer, recipes for things that would go well with beer (a category as stretchable as a gym leotard), historical gleanings and regional investigations of the micro-brewery/super-premium boom.

Smart readers will not expect one book to dispatch these purposes with flawless precision, but “Real Beer & Good Eats” meets them with rumpled charm. You can fool around with it in a sort of potato-chip-eating mode, paging through the dozens of marvelous beer-memorabilia illustrations and, if you’re old enough, remembering a time when working stiffs drank the local brew without expecting to get cultural-awareness medals for it.

Or you can use the work as a casual history of brewing in the United States. (Those whose curiosity is tickled might go on with the subject via the hard-to-find 1962 chronicle “Brewed in America” by Stanley Baron, one of several sources that appear to be general underpinnings of the Aidells-Kelly treatment.)

The more practical-minded can try to look up the good stout they found last year in Oakland, or see whether anything is mentioned worth crossing the street for in Philadelphia. There’s even a brief account of home brewing, along with a general summary of the commercial process and a guide to major beer types worldwide.

You will fare better in sampling these multiple aims if you aren’t shopping for last-word scholarship or an absolutely exhaustive brand-name survey a la Consumer Reports. (Or, for that matter, the care with details usually associated with this publisher--the many German words that go with the territory are spelled every which way.) What the authors have done is trek around various parts of the country poking their noses into things that look colorful or promising, without trying to keep a uniform approach.

Hence they do much more firsthand brewery-visiting and tasting on the West Coast, where recent history seems to be sharp in their minds and the micro-brewery scene probably is most vigorous. Elsewhere the local color and historical background often seem scattershot: The breed of neighborhood bar nostalgically celebrated in the chapter “The Northeast” could well have graced another regional section; the descriptions of local Southern brews sound like catalogue blurbs compared to the vivid accounts of Washington State experiments.

In another book such uneven coverage might be a real weakness. Here the pictures and the rambling good humor of the whole do much to sweeten the tactic of sticking in something or other about this or that as the moment arises.

But the most important thing that makes this loosely joined book work on its own terms is the inventive, eclectic recipes. There are about 175, grafted onto the historical and regional chapters in more or less unpredictable sequence instead of being arranged by usual menu-categories in a section of their own.

Why stuffed duck legs in ale and bourbon gravy in the chapter on colonial and early 19th-Century brewing? I can’t say much for the stated rationale of “Game has always been a part of American cooking,” but the idea (partly boned duck legs filled with a heavily seasoned hot-sausage mixture, served with a thin stock-based sauce) is attractive.

By the same logic or accident, sandwiches somehow wind up in the Southern chapter, deep-fried seafood in the Northeast, home-smoked seafood in the Pacific Northwest and marinades in California. An organizational mess, but an enjoyable mess.

The large selection of recipes using beer provided some eye-openers for me as a dedicated beer drinker who’s never found beer useful for cooking purposes. I’ve always thought that most brews worth drinking strike a harsh, aggressive note against other ingredients rather than marrying with them. I still lean toward that belief. But Aidells and Kelly consistently come up with things to challenge it.

One approach is to play off the bitterness of hops and complement the sweetness of malt with the natural sweetness of other ingredients such as onions, leeks, carrots, sweet potatoes and fruit--or help things meld with a little white or brown sugar. They even use a full-flavored beer or ale in desserts (chocolate cake with porter, spicy pumpkin cookies). It’s the sort of tactic that seems obvious once someone else thinks of it, and that can convert a drawback into a strength.

The other main Aidells-Kelly flavoring approach is to give the beer its comeuppance with ingredients that slug right back--mustard and other condiments, vinegar, hard liquor, vigorous cheeses and/or loud herb combinations. Ordinarily I’m not crazy about the blitzkrieg school of seasoning. In this case it seems appropriate, though I think many cooks would be wise to start with a fraction of the recommended levels of Tabasco, rosemary, oregano, Worcestershire, etc. and add more to taste.

“Two-fisted” is the effect the authors are after, and that’s the way to describe both the dishes that use beer and the large minority that don’t. Hangtown fry belongs to the Aidells-Kelly pantheon of “good eats.” So does homemade sauerkraut. Or four-cheese spread (blue, Cheddar, chevre and cream cheese) thinned with ale. Fried oysters. New England lobster rolls, authentically served on lousy hot-dog buns. Herring salad in three versions. Chicken and dumplings. Sausage-and-cabbage-filled “beer rocks” (not rocks you find in the beer, but a Midwestern pronunciation of what Russians call piroshki ). Onion soup made with dark lager, served with ale-and-blue-cheese croutons.

It would be hard to put into words just what quality makes all these perfect for beer drinkers, but as Potter Stewart or somebody said of pornography, I know it when I see it.

Directions are on the terse side but will be clear enough for capable cooks. I had good luck with a meatloaf (cutting back mightily on the level of seasonings and still ending up with a pretty vehement result), a smoked-fish chowder and a beer-and-cider takeoff on the Russian or German way of cooking red cabbage with apples and a little wine.

There may be tidier and more elegant volumes in the Knopf Cooks American series, but none that I expect to get more use out of. It’s a fair bet that people will still be shoveling in this sort of food when duck carpaccio and persimmon sorbet have gone the way of the Nehru jacket.