BOOK REVIEWS : Looking at the Big Picture : Giuliano Bugialli’s Foods of Tuscany By Giuliano Bugialli (Stewart, Tabori & Chang: $50; 304 pp.) : Tuscany the Beautiful Cookbook: Authentic Recipes From the Provinces of Tuscany By Lorenza de’ Medici (Collins Publishers San Francisco: $45; 256 pp.)

Nobody wants to hear that the respective aims of cookbooks and picture books often make a difficult marriage. But they do, and if you doubt me, look at a few lustrous volumes in the recipe-cum-photo genre--each more expensive than a fair-sized chunk of truffled foie gras --and try imagining them in your kitchen at some moment of first-guest-at-the-door meltdown.

I don’t mean to trash the whole genre. Many people get great pleasure from cookbooks meant to dazzle the eye with gorgeous color photographs and luxurious layouts. The most hardened skeptic has to love a few--the one that stands out in my mind is the pre-Tiananmen Square “The Taste of China” by Ken Hom, in which Leong Ka Tai’s photographs sum up the meaning of the word searching. But the wise shopper will do well to remember that beyond a certain point, physical size adds nothing to either the beauty or the usefulness of a cookbook--in fact, it makes it less practical to use or even to read.

Two attractive current works show that it’s relatively easy to design a pleasing, practical illustrated cookbook of middle size. “A Taste of Switzerland” (Hearst Books: $30) has a serviceable text by Sue Style, with unremarkable but very pretty photographs by John Miller. “A Taste of the Aegean” (Abbeville Press: $27.50) is a more thoughtful glimpse by Andy Harris, magnificently served by Terry Harris’ photographs. Unfortunately both books are British imports, and their recipe conventions may pose problems for American cooks. But they are well proportioned, a pleasure to hold in the hands and look at.

When visual-fantasy cookbooks get bigger than these, a certain absurdity factor may set in. Witness the latest works of two highly respected writers on Italian food, Lorenza de’ Medici and Giuliano Bugialli.

Overproduced is the word that springs to my mind on the first, second and 15th voyage through these huge photograph-strewn volumes (which are too haughty to even mention a price on the book jacket). Every chapter brings forth solemn new compositions of edible objects and a grand duke’s ransom in kitchen or dining-table props, all scattered around Tuscan vistas as improbably (but not as wittily) as artifacts in a surrealist painting. The printed recipes have the reverential air of catalogue text for some museum exhibit that you have to wait three months to get into. At about 4 1/2 pounds each, both are ridiculously cumbersome even for armchair browsing, let alone cooking. Oh, for the sweet unpretentiousness of a book like Elizabeth Romer’s “The Tuscan Year.”

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But despite their kinship as impractical coffee-table extravaganzas, these works have differences, and they’re more striking than the similarities.

The Australian publishing team that put together “Tuscany the Beautiful Cookbook” makes more of an effort to sketch a basic context for cooks and readers. The book opens with a historical--albeit thin--introduction to the region; it provides a brief Baedeker by interspersing the six recipe chapters with gastronomic guides to six major Tuscan cities. The glossary--not great, but sometimes helpful--and the small regional maps suggest that someone wanted readers to be able to get themselves oriented.

De’ Medici’s text carries through fairly well on the good intentions. I wouldn’t give great credit to every supposedly scholarly claim (it’s a mite surprising to hear that the common Italian interjection “deh,” which Dante was using 700 years ago, is “said to be a mispronunciation of the English the “). The important thing is that a browser can get a reasonable overview of culinary influences and approaches from her descriptions.

The Australian packagers also have an idea of how to vary the pace in visual terms. Different photographers did the food and scenic photography. The latter, by Michael Freeman, provides a large enough spectrum of subject, mood, angle, and lighting to play effectively against Peter Johnson’s sometimes stodgy shots (not always very faithful to the printed recipes, by the way) of dish after picture-perfect dish.

The recipes themselves offer both pleasures and drawbacks. The selection is extremely attractive, with emphasis on easy or only moderately complicated dishes. Things can be as simple as pureed chickpeas with a few seasonings, polenta with some diced vegetables thrown in to cook along with the cornmeal, or unadorned grilled spareribs. At the other extreme, nothing gets much more demanding than squab with a sausage stuffing or homemade pappardelle with a sauce of hare or rabbit. There’s much to enjoy among these dishes--but it also must be said that some recipes seem to have been slapped on paper without great care.

No one could learn much here about the foods of Tuscany vis-a-vis their American counterparts. In the same breath the author will loftily suggest using either rare ingredients such as elder-flowers and bottarga (preserved fish roe) or unrelated “alternatives” such as rosemary and lump-fish roe, with no comment on how the resulting flavor might differ. Looking at a casual headnote that shows a complete ignorance of the stringless American green bean or a recipe that calls for two pounds of honeycomb tripe without mentioning that it has to be precooked, one thinks sadly of the endless care a writer like Marcella Hazan takes to understand ingredients on both sides of the Atlantic before presuming to recreate Italian cooking on American soil.

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By contrast, “Giuliano Bugialli’s Foods of Tuscany” is a work of some intrinsic individuality--but also of poorer teamwork on the part of the publishers. For a visually oriented cookbook, how dull and leaden many of these pages look; how monumentally glum and unpopulated is the Tuscany shown in a surprising number of the photographs by John Dominis (who also shot the brighter, more varied “Giuliano Bugialli’s Foods of Italy” but here seems ill served by art directors’ choices).

No one has paid much attention to those bits of guidance that would help the uninitiated find their bearings in this big, unwieldy book. Important background material often seems to lie wherever someone tossed it. You never know where comments on particular regions or traditions or culinary specialties are going to turn up. Only in a section on regional fresh pastas (unfindable in the exasperating index) and a chapter of desserts arranged by season does any sort of systematic sequence appear. Perhaps the editors assumed that being in the company of Bugialli is orientation enough in itself.

In a similarly arbitrary way, all the fresh pasta recipes give the alternatives of stretching the dough by hand or rolling it through a pasta machine--but only the machine method is described in the book, in an appendix of ill-assorted notes (also unindexed) on a few culinary processes. And some editor should have questioned the repeated use of the term “casserole” (maybe to translate casseruola ?) where any sturdy saucepan would do.

But persevere, and you will find that Bugialli’s recipes are pretty good compensation. The selection is modest (about 160 recipes to de’ Medici’s roughly 250) but unusual and wide-ranging, and it suggests the taste and judgment of a very particular cook. True, Bugialli heavily stresses lengthy, demanding dishes that would be all-day projects (at least) for many of us. But he also stresses things that he considers the heart and soul of Tuscan food, especially breads and a large variety of fresh pasta dishes (both somewhat meagerly represented in de’ Medici).

Bugialli is a stickler for what he thinks right. This can be a nuisance when he cavalierly decrees the use of some ingredient or implement that most of us won’t be able to get ( farro flour, a terra-cotta mattone , a 20-cup ring mold). However, this persnicketiness also means zealous attention to procedures. In recipes that call for a battuto (an assortment of cut-up vegetables, sauteed as underpinning of a sauce or soup), he always has you chop them together on a board, which helps marry the flavors, while de’ Medici will just blandly list so much chopped onion, celery, carrot, etc., among the ingredients. Small things like this make a great difference.

Though purchasers can’t expect to use these recipes for much spur-of-the-moment everyday cooking, they can expect to be stimulated. There is a challenging quality in the alternation of offbeat simplicity--kale and its cooking water served over toasted bread or a dessert of sliced cucumbers macerated in sugar and lemon juice--and lavish ambition: lasagna-like pasta squares folded over a spinach-ricotta filling and served with two sauces; couscous with cooked white beans, a vegetable medley and small meatballs.

I confess that every time I pick up “Giuliano Bugialli’s Foods of Tuscany,” I mentally picture it reincarnated as a pretty little book with subtle pen-and-ink drawings and better-arranged contents. Still, though less accessible and less slickly realized than the de’ Medici effort, this collection of dishes gives cooks more to think about.