American Ethnic : BOOK REVIEW : Testing the Merits of Sheila Cuisine : SHEILA LUKINS ALL AROUND THE WORLD COOKBOOK, <i> By Sheila Lukins</i> ; (<i> Workman Publishing Co., Inc.: $18.95; 591 pp.</i> )

Reading this cookbook is like traveling with a breathy, energetic, chronically enthusiastic, but disorganized companion. At first, the frothy prose, madcap graphics, endless sidebars and dippy handwritten postcards present a seemingly impenetrable surface of cuteness and clutter. I spot recipes that intrigue me, but promptly lose them in the visual stew. I begin thinking that a more appropriate title might be: “Sheila Lukins All Over the Map Cookbook.”

To beat a path through the jumble, I had to sit down, concentrate, and consciously figure out how the book worked. Once I located the page numbers (they were under my thumbs) I felt a little better. I also learned to insert a bookmark whenever I came across a recipe I wanted to try.

Lukins writes in the introduction, “I have arranged the book somewhat traditionally.” But this is true only in the loosest sense: Recipes are organized by type--appetizers, salads, soup, grains and breads, etc. Recipes, however, make up approximately half the material in this cookbook. Other material consists of 1) essays by Barbara Ensrud on the wines and beers of the world; 2) short specific travel experiences Lukins writes about and lumps under the heading “Souvenir to Savor”; 3) food tips that appear in boxes entitled “My Kitchen Diary”; 4) too-often inane postcards (“Rock,” reads one, “This was the King of Siam’s summer palace just outside of Bangkok--shall we dance? Love, Sheila”). There are also 5) Lukins’ longer essays on breakfasts, marketplaces, cheeses and teas; 6) many photos and snapshots and 7) “palettes,” one-page, cartoon-illustrated diagrams of a country’s predominate foods, spices and cultural icons (Russia’s palette, for example, shows an onion-domed church, beets, horseradish, vodka, sour cream and a woman in a babushka).

The recipes may be in some kind of order, but all this additional material is inserted in a scattershot fashion. Palettes for some countries are placed near the beer or wine essays for that country, while other palettes are more randomly located. The Moroccan palette is closest to “The Wines of Chile” essay, and the Chinese palette immediately precedes “The Wines of Italy.” In short, the book is a big lively mess. By the time I figured this out conclusively, I also had a tuft of bookmarks sticking out the top of it and was ready to start cooking.

Making food from this cookbook is what finally wore away the crankiness engendered from reading it. The spirit of this food is consistent with what we’ve come to expect from the “Silver Palate” cookbooks and “The New Basics,” which Lukins co-authored: There’s a gloss, a flourish to this food. Recipes do not involve tricky or complicated techniques, but they do often call for many ingredients and a fair amount of “prep work.”

There is, generally, a good return on the effort involved. The finished product usually looks terrific: a pissaladiere , or onion tart, has a cunning lattice of anchovies; beet bread pudding has a golden crust with gorgeous magenta beets bubbling at the sides.

This is not, however, a cookbook of authentic ethnic recipes. The book’s cover promises “Global cuisine, one-world cuisine, fusion cuisine--Sheila cuisine,” of which “Sheila cuisine” is the most apt description. This is one distinctive, talented American cook’s take on things. Lukins essentially went around the world and ate for inspiration; she collected recipes when possible, then came home, worked with them, amped them up or toned them down to accommodate mainstream American tastes, gave them a twist here and a flourish there until whatever dish bore her now-unmistakable touch. The cookbook index lists food by country in the following fashion: “Swedish and Swedish-inspired dishes . . . Thai and Thai-inspired dishes . . .”

“One-world cuisine” by a Jamaican cook, or “fusion cuisine” by a Chinese cook would be significantly different from the food Lukins presents in this book.

As a friendly move and possibly a publishing necessity, Lukins includes her own version of many old standbys American cooks have come to expect in an international cookbook: ratatouille, moussaka, coq au vin , even Swedish meatballs. (“I scoured Sweden for the real McCoy but, alas, all I found were meekly spiced meatballs with no sauce . . . so I made a version that will send you searching for that chafing dish.”)

One need only consult “Betty Crocker’s New International Cookbook” to get an idea of how Lukins works. Betty Crocker’s recipe for spinach pie, or spanokopita , calls for spinach. Lukins, in an attempt to replicate Greek cooks’ use of wild greens called horta in this dish, calls for a combination of chard, dandelion greens and fennel in place of the spinach.

Those cooks who want only truly authentic ethnic recipes still need to look to other cookbooks. But those who want to bring more ethnic range to their contemporary American cooking will be well served by this book. Lukins demystifies some of the most exotic cuisines; now, virtually anyone from Fairbanks to Lake Charles to Bar Harbor, given patience and a reasonably well-stocked grocery store, can make a reasonable facsimile of Thai fish sauce (five ingredients), three different Indian masalas , or spice mixes (four to nine ingredients), Indonesian peanut sauce (16 ingredients) or Jamaican jerk sauce (18 ingredients). Thus, this cookbook is a great way to ease into cuisines that one finds intimidating. I, for example, who had never before attempted Thai food, made the Thai seafood salad. (While I made my own fish sauce, I did need to go to a Thai market for fresh lemongrass.) The finished product, a mound of lightly poached and seasoned shrimp, clams and bay scallops, bore but mild resemblance to the juicy, fiery seafood salads I love at my local Thai restaurant, but this gentler, blander version will definitely please less jaded palates. I did, however, get my foot in the door of Thai cooking, and next time I make a Thai seafood salad, I’ll squeeze in more lime, spoon in more fish sauce and be less chary with those red hot chiles.

I did find a few small technical problems and inconsistencies. In making the small potato croquettes, I put the grated potatoes into boiling water to cook for two minutes, as per instructions. But the potatoes so reduced the water temperature that the water was barely boiling again when two minutes were up, and it was unclear if the potatoes needed to actually boil for two minutes or if they only needed this brief parboiling. As it happened, they did require more cooking in order to be softer and more pliable in forming the croquettes.

In the recipe for the orange-rosemary mayonnaise, the instructions say it takes about 10 minutes to reduce one cup of orange juice to 1 1/2 tablespoons. As I found out, this is simply way off the mark, a fact that is reflected in the recipe for orange flan, where the instructions say, more accurately, that it takes 15 to 20 minutes to reduce 2/3 cup of orange juice to two tablespoons.

Despite these little trouble spots, the small potato croquettes are wonderful--garlicky, crispy, spiked with rosemary. The accompanying orange-rosemary mayonnaise is so rich and tasty it’s a bit like gilding a lily, but neither I nor any of my tasters actually refused it. I also had great luck with the beet bread pudding whose recipe Lukins revised from a Russian recipe card.

Caribbean-inspired mambo fruit salad is a luscious combination of dressed greens and juicy ripe fruit. Flavorful and tender Hong Kong chicken is first marinated in Lukins’ excellent teriyaki sauce, then dusted simply with corn starch, salt and pepper and pan-fried.

In the long run, after weathering countless superlative adjectives in Lukins’ prose, losing my place at least a hundred times, buying bales of cilantro, pounds of shallots, and manufacturing miles of citrus zest, I finally surrendered and began to enjoy the whole darn mishmosh this cookbook offers. It was like giving into the languor and disorientation of jet lag, or finding out that the person with the funny voice actually has some good things to say. OK, OK: Some of those photos are pretty entertaining--and I did learn how to sex an eggplant.