BOOK REVIEW: FOOD : Celebrating the Joys of Eating With Your Sweetheart : DOMESTICITY <i> by Bob Shacochis</i> ; Scribner’s, $22, 320 pages

Yes, we went out to plenty of restaurants; that was what folks in love did in the ‘80s. But now it’s all a blur of credit card slips and heavy silverware, of high-concept pastas and naughty desserts.

The one meal that sticks in my mind, from the days of our courtship, is the first one my now-husband cooked for me (OK, one of the only ones he cooked for me, since he figured the best thing for a noncook to do was blind his prey with a single fabulous dish and hope she’d be too sated to notice there was no follow-up): a caviar omelet.

Forget scrambled with a dollop atop. This was an architectural masterpiece: slim, symmetrical, slightly runny inside and just done outside, fertile with fish eggs. I was a goner--and, since we weren’t in a restaurant, I could express my appreciation in a lavish fashion. Yes, you have to wash the dishes and put away the leftovers, but trust me, there are advantages to taking one’s meals at home.

Bob Shacochis knows it, and has tried, over the past few years, to convince the readers of his “Dining In” column in GQ magazine. “Domesticity”--rightly subtitled “A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love”--is about the voluptuous pleasures of cooking for, and eating with, someone you love, about making meals a participatory rather than spectator sport. It is about excess and obsession.

In an era that promises interactive cable television grocery-shopping and hormone-driven milk cows, Shacochis wants to get back to the earth, or, in his particular case, the sea, establish an intimate relationship with whatever’s freshest or indigenous to the region, and then devour it.

“Our most damning crime against nature,” he writes, “is not progress but disassociation.” He intends to reinvent our relationship to food--in much the same way that he has worked, over 17 years, to reinvent the notion of romance.

He and the divine Miss F. (as he calls her in print), with whom he has cohabited for 17 years, are stuck to each other like two chummy grains of risotto. He wants to see food new too, to refresh the way we nourish ourselves.

Each column comes complete with recipes, and while Shacochis’ idiosyncrasies and mine rarely intersect, I found that I read every one; they were vivid enough to taste. I think he’s wrong about bacon in the carbonara, but maybe he doesn’t live near a store that sells pancetta, bacon’s sophisticated Italian cousin.

I think that most working folks lack the time to hunt down some of the ingredients he calls for, let alone to cook the dishes. But who cares? The recipes, to my mind, are a nice little sidelight. What lingers is what Shacochis has to say about eating. He makes it a passionate endeavor: Damn the food pyramid; and who cares about what’s in foodie fashion?

The one essential ingredient he calls for is someone to share his food with. Remember the tree in Philosophy 101, the one that either did or didn’t make a sound if there was no one around to hear it? Shacochis believes that its collapse is silent. When Miss F. isn’t around to eat with him, he loses all interest in ingestibles. The magic is gone.

“When I’m alone,” he writes, “the place food occupies in my life is very compressed and functional. It is simply base fuel, primitive, and it never satisfies as it does in company because the hunger it suppresses lacks, I suppose--or has forgotten--its own eloquence. It expresses little of what I need it to express, those essential desires. Home. Love. Passion.”

A recently wed long-time bachelor friend would disagree. He always cooked himself solitary meals as a measure of his self-respect--after all, he considered himself as worthy a human being alone as with company, so why not feed himself as well, even when it was dinner for one? But I prefer Shacochis’ social analysis: We are not only what we eat, but whom we eat it with. It isn’t always easy--one of the funniest columns, surely familiar to anyone who loves to cook, is about the territorial battles he and Miss F. engage in, in the kitchen. But they always seem to end up happy at the end of a meal.

I imagine he and Miss F. are having a lovely Valentine’s Day. I only wish that the semi-cook and I had been invited to eat whatever they’re dishing up.