BOOK REVIEWS : In Search of the Great African Cookbook : The African Cookbook, <i> By Bea Sandler</i> ; <i> (Citadel Press: $12.95; paperback; 232 pp.) </i> : A Taste of Africa, <i> By Dorina Hafner</i> ; <i> (Ten Speed Press: $24.95; 160 pp.) </i>

Smart cookbook buyers live for the small fraction of capable, honest, well-planned works shining out amid the other 90% or 95%. Here and there are people with something to say and the ability to say it. And then there is the rest.

In the early 1970s, a brief flurry of African cookbooks appeared, some quite ambitious, promising to form a solid future addition to international cookbook literature. Somehow this never happened. The vogue went flat for a while. I’m willing to bet it wouldn’t have been revived if Africans and African-descended people hadn’t started coming to this country in big numbers in the late ‘80s.

The newly reissued “The African Cookbook” (first published in 1970) belonged to the early wave of African works. When it first came out, the roughly 200 recipes with suggested menus (preceded by descriptions of dining customs) from about a dozen nations offered a glamorous trek into the unknown. But today the effect is hardly the same.

The author, the late Bea Sandler, readily accepted as “African” some things like “jungle dressing” for salad (coconut seems to supply the requisite junglesomeness) and touristy ice cream parfaits that put one in mind of “Irish” pubs dyeing the beer suds green on St. Patrick’s Day. She also seemed more interested in turning out streamlined Americanizations than in understanding African ingredients and cooking methods. Lacings of hot peppers were regularly softened into a sprinkle of cayenne; apparently unfamiliar with flame-roasted green peppers, Sandler noted them as a curiosity. Packaged convenience ingredients turned up everywhere, with no discussion of how well they matched originals. Readers of this book also faced a somewhat peculiar recipe-format and directions that could mystify (how do you beat fresh ginger “to a powder?”).

Any author dusting off a work like this 23 years later surely would want to acknowledge new developments and fix old shortcomings. It’s a shame that Citadel Press didn’t try to do this. Today’s readers could well have used an index, a few obvious updates such as “Zaire” for “the Congo,” and especially a nod to the new immigrants who have brought so many foods into the ken of black and white cooks. Does a guide to African cuisines really have to be full of clumsy substitutes in 1993, when millions of us can buy tiny blazing “bird peppers,” palm oil, dried shrimp, manioc, taro and true African yams (which Sandler seemed to think interchangeable with American sweet potatoes)?

Although not an ideal candidate for anyone’s first book on the subject, “The African Cookbook” could find a place on the bookshelves of people with the time and skill to choose recipes that appeal to them and cook by comparing versions in several cookbooks. The same is partly true of a better-planned recent book, Dorina Hafner’s “A Taste of Africa.” The Ghanaian-born author, founder of an African dance company in Australia, has had the penetrating idea of dividing her coverage among 10 African nations (scattered around the continent, with north-of-the-Equator coastal lands getting most attention) and a handful of other areas shaped by the African slave trade, including Brazil, parts of the Caribbean and New Orleans.

This plan in itself suggests a greater insight into the word “African” and puts one on the alert to notice culinary connections and influences. Plainly Hafner and the Australian publishing team she worked with are interested in deeper, more systematic understanding than Sandler was. The chosen regions are introduced with maps and tables of relevant facts such as important crops (locally consumed or for export); the author shows a real concern for the context (geography, climate, history, folklore) without which recipes are just blind alleys.

Though geared to meat-oriented Western tastes, the choice of African dishes also conveys how a few elements such as rice, millet, local greens, tropical root vegetables, beans and corn sustain life over most of the continent. Tourist-gimmick recipes are conspicuously absent, and Hafner has a knack for finding unexpected things like lemon grass tea or a porridge made from partly roasted popcorn kernels. The color photography by Jonathan Chester/Extreme Images strikes me as perfectly matched to the spirit of the whole, a much better visual punctuation than Diane and Leo Dillon’s would-be-atmospheric woodblock illustrations in “The African Cookbook.”

However, hopeful purchasers should know that the U.S. publisher has done nothing to make a patchwork of cooking terminology and measurements consistently plain to American readers. Hafner’s cooking directions likably suggest a free spirit who goes by feel and not by formula, but will frustrate those who cannot interpret “4 medium fish” with no estimate of weight or “Bring enough water to the boil” (to steam 3/4 pound of couscous). Another drawback is the author’s (and photographer’s) evident unfamiliarity with some foodways on this side of the ocean. In Cuba, frijoles negros certainly aren’t black-eyed peas; plenty of Louisianans, white and black, are going to turn up their noses at sweet corn bread made with yellow cornmeal.

For these reasons, “A Taste of Africa” would be best used by experienced kitchen troubleshooters who can supply knowledge of their own. I do think that a little more care would have made it close to an ideal introduction.

As it is, those in search of authentic African fare will do best with older books that may still be in stock in better cookbook stores. The book that probably does the best job of presenting African cooking to Americans is the 1985 “Africa News Cookbook” by Africa News Service (Penguin: $17, paperback). If you are serious about wanting to explore the different culinary heritages of Africa, search for the out-of-print “First Catch Your Eland” (Morrow 1978; no recipes)--invaluable despite the sometimes patronizing attitudes of the South American author Laurens van der Post (who also did an interesting African volume in the Time-Life “Foods of the World” series).

I’m about 99% sure that the selection in this field will become broader and livelier in the next few years. It’s one culinary area where different factors--movements of peoples in response to the political and other disasters we read of every day, historians looking beyond dumb cliches in our own national claim to African legacies, food writers putting two and two together when they taste something in Sao Paulo or Kingston that they tasted a year ago in Accra--are rapidly combining to raise the level of understanding.

One of these days we may get a really groundbreaking African overview. The likely viewer would be a savvy African-American cook like Jessica Harris, who’s already sketched out the Brazilian and Caribbean aftermaths of the African story in “A Taste of Brazil” (Macmillan: $23) and “Sky Juice and Flying Fish” (Fireside: $12.95, paperback), and opened up the heritage of the New World-African culinary exchange in “Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons” (Atheneum: $22.95).

Meanwhile, I’d be surprised if we didn’t see more cookbooks about the ancestral cuisines of particular immigrant enclaves in U.S. cities (especially from Ethiopia and several parts of West Africa). This time I don’t think we’ll see an African cookbook vogue just peak and go away. Too many people have come too far.