ANNUAL HOLIDAY COOKBOOK ISSUE : PLUGGING IN : Julia Child Enters the Electronic Age

CD-ROM cookbooks have gotten a lot more sophisticated in the last year. No longer are they just recipes loaded into a computer database(a species of software technically known as “shovelware”), offering only a couple of advantages over a printed book, such as the ability to customize recipes by the number of diners and to print out shopping lists. Like last year’s “Four Paws of Crab,” they’re making more use of the unique features of the CD-ROM format.

This year’s crop tends to have musical soundtracks . . . and the option of turning them off if you get sick of them. The screens are more playful. Preparation time is likely to show up on a pocket watch instead of a dumb old information field labeled “preparation time.” Several disks have fun with the computer animation technique called morphing.

Many have fun with their click-here information screens. When you click on an ingredient, whether to find out more about it or to call up a list of recipes using it, quaint things tend to happen: The egg makes a quiet cracking sound, the nut jar changes into a chattering squirrel, the beefsteak chortles, the lobster waves its claw. A screaming spider may even scuttle from behind a tomato (no kidding; that happens in “The Four Seasons of French Cuisine”).

In addition to recipes and an index function for looking them up by ingredient, type of dish and nutritional or preparation time considerations, the disks feature explanations of cooking techniques (often with very helpful animated demonstrations), sections on ingredients and photos of the dishes.

And not just a few dishes; typically every single dish has its own color portrait. You can usually look through them at your own speed or have the program page through automatically. Either way, click when you see one that appeals to you and you’ll go directly to the recipe.

You’d think that by now programmers would have gotten the kinks out of their interfaces, but there are still occasional bugs, particularly in setup programs. While trying to install “The Art of Making Great Pastries,” we were repeatedly stopped with a warning that MCHICAGO.FON was being used by another program. It turned out to be no big deal; press IGNORE and everything continues smoothly.

As last year, the prices given here are only the suggested prices. Like everything else in the computer world, CD-ROMs can usually be found discounted.

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JULIA CHILD: HOME COOKING WITH MASTER CHEFS

Interactive Cooking Lessons From 16 All-Star Chefs

(Microsoft: $34.95.)

If this disk gives the impression of a cookbook combined with one of Julia’s TV series, it’s probably because she’s interviewed these chefs for TV. There are 16 of them, from all over the country, but California is particularly well represented with Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Nancy Silverton (bread recipes only, not desserts), Michel Richard, Susan Feniger and Mary-Sue Milliken, not to mention transplanted Louisianian Jan Birnbaum.

Click on the chefs’ names list (which slips down with a quiet metallic sliding sound), then on a name, and you go to that particular chef’s page (with a brief musical segue--Cajun for Emeril Lagasse, wind chimes for Jeremiah Tower). There you can read a bio, check out recipes and get cooking tips. Child narrates an introduction to each chef and each dish, and her infectious enthusiasm for all kinds of good food adds greatly to appeal of this volume.

Notes accompany the individual recipes, and they are pretty sophisticated for a CD-ROM production. The “chefs’ tips” will already be familiar to a moderately experienced cook, but some are quite good, such as Alice Waters’ suggestion to bake beets instead of boiling them. Of course, you can index recipes the usual way, print out shopping lists and so on.

And needless to say, the 100-odd recipes, coming from some of the most exciting chefs in the country, are terrific. This appears to be the class act among this year’s CD-ROM cookbooks.

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BETTY CROCKER’S COOKBOOK

(Lifestyle; $30.98).

In a Betty Crocker cookbook, you expect thoroughly tested recipes and lots of them. There are more than 1,000 here, and you can look them up using about a dozen search criteria (including both cooking time and total elapsed time), not counting the manifold dietary searches that are possible.

No surprise, the vast majority of the recipes have an American, and usually a Midwestern, flavor. The foreign dishes are mainly French. The other ethnic food choices can be a bit arbitrary: one Thai dish, one Irish dish, two “Jewish” sandwiches--both of them flagrantly non-kosher.

For cooking information, you go to a section titled Betty’s Got It. There you can enter a question (“What does it mean to fold in eggs?”) and probably find the answer. A database program seizes on the words fold and eggs and lists every answer that contains either one. You click to see the answers, some of which are illustrated by animated videos.

There are some glitches here. If you click on the entry “pie crust edges,” you get the error message “Index word not found” (the information is available, but for some reason you have to click on “pastry edges” instead). All the explanatory videos are viewable by clicking on Cooking Terms as well, but if you scroll down through the videos you may get an “Out of memory” message, even if you have all the memory the CD-ROM calls for.

In the section called Scrap Book, there’s a walk down memory lane, where you can hear about the history of General Mills and how Betty Crocker came to be (as the result of a 1924 puzzle contest; the puzzle is also provided). On the last page of the nostalgia ramble, you can click on Betty’s 1936 face and watch her morph through half a dozen incarnations to the early-’90s version.

You have to hand it to Betty, she’s a modern gal. A feature called On Line With Betty gives you a form for filing an e-mail cooking question with General Mills. You use your own online service to send it to the Internet.

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THE ART OF MAKING GREAT PASTRIES

(Arome International; $41.95 )

This disk, part of the Art de la Table series assembled in conjunction with the French magazine Thuries, is extremely European. It illustrates the idea of gelatin, for instance, by showing sheets of gelatin, not the packets of powdered gelatin usual in this country. On the preparation screen, you can click on a button to switch between the American and British values for measurements.

It’s also a bit oddly organized but very serious. You could really learn pastry-making from it.

It opens with a little show of various dishes morphing into each other. When you’re tired of watching it, click on Continue and you can choose to go to Recipes or Techniques or to the obvious ingredients info screens or to a gorgeous slide show illustrating the 101 desserts included.

Desserts is the correct word, by the way, not pastries . Despite the title, these are recipes for all sorts of French desserts. They’re categorized, a little oddly, as either cakes, dough (viz. all other kinds of pastries), cream (custards, mousses, etc.) and fruit-based desserts.

On the recipes screen, you choose one of those categories, pick a recipe (a photo appears to help you make up your mind) and when you want to see the recipe, you click on bake--whether the dish is actually baked or not. The techniques screen works the same way, but you click on Learn to see one of the 180 video demonstrations, say, on how to make puff pastry.

The recipes are very attractive, all the great French classic desserts plus a number that are clearly the sort of thing ambitious French home cooks are making today. And those videos are outstanding. Despite the slightly awkward design, this is an excellent volume.

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THE FOUR SEASONS OF GOURMET FRENCH CUISINE

(Arome International; $41.95)

There’s some overlap between the preceding disk and this one, also part of the Art de la Table series. Even though a few of the pastries will look familiar, though, you’ll know it’s not the same disk. The background music is “The Four Seasons,” not “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” and the screens look like picture frames, rather than like baking sheets.

Here we’re talking about all sorts of French dishes, from bouillabaisse to chocolate mousse. Again a lot of veal marengo-type classics are here, also tres moderne things like oyster terrine, lamb rosette with miniature apple pies and caramelized peach on thyme granita. Clearly even the French are feeling the influence of Italian cuisine.

Since this volume covers all parts of the meal, it’s organized differently but again in a somewhat clunky way. The slide show works the same as on the other disk (the photos aren’t as uniformly gorgeous, though), and clicking on menus is unproblematic; it gives you two or three suggested menus for every month of the year, and you can click straight to the recipes from it. The main way of looking up recipes, though, is through a screen misnamed courses (“dishes” is what they meant). Here you select individual dishes by season (when based on seasonal ingredients), by main ingredient, by the course of the meal the dish would appear in or by its name, if you know it.

However you look a recipe up, you click to a preparation screen, which includes the usual recipe info, with one interesting wrinkle: Click on the French name of dish and it will be pronounced for you. It’s not as much fun as that screaming spider, but it is a little more practical.