BOOK REVIEW : Too Rich, Too Thin : The Tiffany Gourmet Cookbook, <i> By John Loring</i> . <i> (Doubleday: $50; 280 pp.) </i>

Any book put out by Tiffany & Co. has to be glitzy. And “The Tiffany Gourmet Cookbook” is certainly that. It probes the culinary lifestyles of the super-affluent, giving the rest of us a chance to press our noses against the windows of some very tony dining rooms.

The book is expensive, but it delivers lots of spectacular photographs of food and table settings and lengthy descriptions of how the privileged live and entertain. The concept might be regarded as out of tune with today’s economic hardships. But perhaps the editors were thinking of the lavish films made during the Depression to give regular folks a brief escape from their privations, a vision of something better.

And so, “Tiffany Gourmet” provides a trip to fantasy land. We learn, for example, that California’s Betsy Bloomingdale faced a tough decision as a bride. She had to choose between a new mink coat and a set of antique Crown Derby Imari dinnerware. “Young as I was, I made the right choice,” she is quoted as saying. (She chose the Imari.)

Bloomingdale approaches party-giving with scholarly intensity. “I keep loads of notes on my own parties and also on parties I attend,” she says in the book. Each dish served at her events is photographed, and the photo is filed with comments on the recipe and presentation “for future refinements.”

In San Miguel de Allende, Martha Hyder pays nuns to keep the imposing dome of a nearby church fully illuminated while her guests sip late-evening Margaritas around the pool. The lights go off when the guests go in to dinner.

Carolyne Roehm Kravis, who shuttles from a Manhattan apartment to a weekend house in Connecticut, a summer house in Southampton and a ski lodge in Vail, is said to breakfast on coffee and a single Oreo cookie in order to preserve her perfect size 4/6 figure.

Kravis spares nothing for her guests, though. In Southhampton, supper might include honeydew melon with gin and lime, Mediterranean lobster and fish stew with linguine, a green salad and a fig tart with blackberry and Cassis glaze. This summer repast would be served on an antique Portuguese palace table in front of a marble fireplace in the “comfortably opulent” living room.

Mrs. John R. Drexel III, described in the book as the “leader of Newport social ‘royalty,’ ” wears a diamond tiara on state occasions. It’s one of the props in the photo of her table setting, which features an extravagant Louis XV Revival gilt bronze centerpiece and compotes. Wealth goes way back in this family. Mrs. Drexel’s grandfather moved his family from New York City to Newport for the summer in 12 private train carriages.

Charlotte Aillaud heads the Tiffany A-list with two entries, one for her Paris house and the other for her “country domain” in Nanteau. On hot summer days in Nanteau, guests move from the dining room in one block of farmhouses to a terrace beyond a second block. There, says Aillaud, they have dessert, dodge wasps and “chase off the children when they come offering us horrible little bunches of dandelions.”

What does it take to entertain well? Aillaud says you have “to have taste, to have appetite, and above all-- above all-- to avoid boredom in any and all its diverse forms.”

Aillaud turned reporter for the section on author Francoise Sagan, a close friend. Sagan exhibits “habitual indifference toward the pleasures of the table,” according to Aillaud, but with aid from cook Pepita manages to serve “wonderful dishes, which she herself rarely tastes.”

Mrs. Prentice Cobb Hale creates an indoor garden for parties in her San Francisco apartment. The dining room is done up in green floral chintz, and Hale decorates it with blossoms from the 117 rosebushes planted on a quarter acre at the Hale ranch in Sonoma County. The flowers are transported to the city in decorative florist pails made in northwestern France. “This is my madness,” Hale states in the book, “but it is vitally important.”

Hale’s kitchen help is none less than “superstar chef” Jeremiah Tower, who turns out such elegant fare as lobster and asparagus ragout. Prentice Hale’s favorite childhood dishes (tomato soup, lamb chops, baked potatoes, apple pie and ice cream) are now “things of the past,” the book comments. In Hale’s early years, they were prepared “by his mother’s adoring Chinese cook.”

Wolfgang Puck is in the book on his own. But we don’t learn about Puck’s home entertaining. Instead, we get dinner at Postrio, Puck’s restaurant in San Francisco, as prepared by chefs Anne and David Gingrass, not Puck.

What do you feed jet-set guests? Why, jet-set food, of course. That’s what you might taste at Arabesque, the Acapulco home of Baroness Sandra di Portanova and her husband, Baron Enrico. The baroness describes this monumental place as “a cross between the Alhambra and Hadrian’s Villa.” Its facilities include a 1-acre rooftop terrace, a living room “the size of a football field,” three swimming pools, a nightclub, a 50-foot waterfall and six kitchens, the main one large enough for a hotel.

Loring, the book’s author and Tiffany’s design director, was honored at Arabesque with a special dessert--truffles modeled after Tiffany shopping bags. The truffles were made by Houston caterers and flown to Acapulco on the hosts’ private jet.

Loring leads off the book with the story of his own indoctrination in French culture and cuisine. Passionately appreciative of European table arts, he writes: “There are settings that stimulate a sense of pride and privilege, and there are settings that simply delight. The best do both.”

Even in the finest setting, beautiful people do not always behave beautifully. Francoise Sagan concludes a list of tips for dinner hosts with this advice: “In case of either small problems or irreparable gaffes, keep a low profile, don’t intervene in the hostilities, and slip away to your private apartments to powder your nose.”