BOOK REVIEW : The World Is My Kitchen : Back to Square One, By Joyce Goldstein ; (Morrow: $23; 320 pp.)

The scope of this very ambitious cookbook is impressive and ever so intimidating. Joyce Goldstein--proprietor of San Francisco’s acclaimed Square One restaurant--means to claim as her turf the entire globe, throughout history.

She knows that much of the food we love best has less to do with quality of preparation than it does with quality of memory. Ever since Proust bit into that tea-cake and felt his childhood come flooding back, we have been looking for evocative eats, dishes that connect to our emotional pasts. We all have an equivalent of that tea-cake, and Goldstein serves them up, one region of the world after another; in Hollywood high-concept jargon, “Back to Square One” is United Nations meets Father Time. She means to give us recipes that improve upon the original dish people’s moms or grandmoms cooked--or perhaps overcooked.

The book is a food voyeur’s dream. Even if you have no desire to eat baked rockfish with Indonesian sauce and no personal investment in that region’s past, it’s fascinating just to read the recipe.

I’m a duck lover who once risked alienating a quartet of close friends because I had the audacity to think that anyone who could read a recipe could roast a duck. Not true, as it turned out--and while I’m not quite ready to try again, not yet, I have read Goldstein’s assortment of duck recipes with a growing desire: curry duck, Indonesian duck, three Asian recipes with fruit. The variety of flavors (and if you concentrate on a single recipe and use your imagination, the taste will rise off the page) makes the reader feel a little drunk on sensation. It’s difficult not to be seduced by the overwhelming array of options.

Which leads us to the issue of execution. The good news is that some of the recipes are startlingly bright, vivid dishes, guaranteed to surprise even the most devoted home chef. I loved the sound of the Yucatan marinade for fish--olive oil, fresh orange and lime juices, garlic, jalapeno and a handful of spices. It gave a tart, smoky flavor to a piece of delicate, sweet sea bass--reinvented the fish, really, so that it tasted new. And Goldstein’s throwaway instruction to use any leftover marinade on roasted potatoes was inspired. Those creamy little spuds, that peppy coating were as good the next day, cold, as they were in their debut.

The corn pudding was supposed to serve six--and it would have, had the three of us not loved it so much that we devoured it ourselves. There must be dozens of recipes like this one, but Goldstein’s mix of cayenne, ground pepper and nutmeg was delicious. I left out the optional Monterey Jack cheese, figuring that 3 eggs, 6 tablespoons of butter and a cup of half-and-half was enough cholesterol for one dish, and no one complained. The dish had a pudding’s requisite richness without it.

The cazzilli , Sicilian potato croquettes that reminded me of every happy meal I ever ate at the L.A. restaurant Angeli, looked like an easy treat, a vegetarian twist on a dish that often calls for prosciutto. Potatoes, pine nuts, pecorino cheese, egg yolks and parsley get rolled up into little balls and dusted with bread crumbs. By the time they were ready for the frying pan, it was all I could do to remember not to sample foods that contain uncooked egg yolks. They smelled too good for patience.

But wait. The cazzilli that looked so plump and perfect sitting in rows on wax paper, ready for that kamikaze leap into burning oil, seemed to be losing their heads. Or more accurately, their bread-crumb shirts, which came floating off as soon as they hit the oil. The bread crumbs browned very nicely, as predicted, and the potato filling was sublime, but I couldn’t get them to stick together. Frustrated, I fished everything out of the pan and served it. Not what you’d call a feast for the eyes.

But I tried again, using a smaller pan, and it worked. Aha, I thought, there’s something going on here. In a smaller pan, wouldn’t the oil reach the proper frying temperature faster? And just how hot is 350 degrees? Maybe a frying thermometer wouldn’t be a bad idea. A lesson in humility for me, and a cautionary tale: Goldstein’s instructions are to be taken quite literally. Now, not every cookbook is geared to the novice chef; there are levels of this game, as any other, and Goldstein is clearly not after the freshman college student who wants to whip up a quick meal. But I doubt that most cooks of my status--the “when she is good she is very good, and when she is bad her guests get rubber duck” cook--have mastered the wide array of skills needed to really enjoy this book. We have zeal, and I imagine we are the market Goldstein is after. What we need is a little guidance.

I thought about the corn pudding recipe again. It calls for warmed milk and cream to be whisked in with the eggs. Since I like to bake, I’ve already had my chance to overheat the liquid and pour it in with the eggs, resulting in a mass of very wet scrambled eggs. I know now to use room temperature eggs, pour the liquid over them slowly and whisk quickly.

But the next person who tries the recipe may know as little about custards as I do about ducks and deep-frying. It would be nice if there had been just a few more signposts in what clearly could be a grand adventure.