BOOK REVIEW : When Cuba Was Cooking : MEMORIES OF A CUBAN KITCHEN <i> By Mary Urrutia Randelman and Joan Schwartz (Macmillan: $25; 334 pp.)</i>

For some years I’ve lived in the largest Cuban community north of Miami--a 10- or 12-mile swath rich in precios bajos signs and freedom-fighter aspirations. And great, greasy, untranslatable food, the kind of stuff that turns up on the wrong side of bilingual restaurant menus as “Fried Pork Chuncks,” “Optopus in Sauce Creole,” “Milk Crumbs” and “Potato Bowl.” (The last one appeared on a blackboard menu on a Tuesday; by Saturday it had ascended to “Potato Supreme.”)

Recipes? Forget it. People dump flour into the batter until they know it’s right, slice up pounds of onions and peppers without taking their eyes off the conversation. Asking how to make something tends to draw the same reaction as, “Say, which part of your nose do you use for breathing?” You get a powerful feeling that cookery as by-the-book discipline hardly exists in this culture.

Last year’s “A Taste of Cuba” by Linette Creen (Dutton: $19.95) promised to shed some light but proved nearly bare of the most important requirements for bringing any ethnic cuisine to an outside audience--broad culinary insight and bicultural connectedness. “Memories of a Cuban Kitchen” is something quite different. Avoiding claims of definitive coverage and sticking to what the title suggests, it radiates pride in the act of sharing a personal legacy.

The book is loosely constructed around a family-memories scrapbook complete with ancient snapshots of birthday parties and front-porch gabfests (and for good measure, historic photographs, going back to Spanish rule, from a University of Miami collection). Randelman’s family left Cuba in the last year of the Batista regime, when she was 10, and most of the eight main chapters recall some place with happy pre-exile associations. As she gently acknowledges, the “magical” Cuba that lives in her mind was an apolitical child’s-eye view of a certain privileged--not to say palatial--sphere.

A great-grandfather boasted “the first automobile in Cuba.” A small cousin in Havana presided over such a court of doting grown-ups and F. A. O. Schwartz toys that Randelman thinks of him as “the Last Emperor.” Their circle frequented places such as the Havana yacht club or “everyone’s idea of a fun-filled beachfront paradise” on the Caribbean-facing Varadero Beach. Both branches of the family had landed estates (a tobacco plantation, orange groves, a cattle ranch) in the western province of Pinar del Rio, and the extended family used to show up for lunch at one of these with “the men in their white linen suits and Panama straw hats and the women in their fine, simple white linen dresses.”

Randelman adroitly relates just enough of this swank to evoke romance rather than head-in-the-sand isolation from endemic poverty and hunger. As for her account of Cuban cooking, it has all the dimension so lacking in the Creen book. The difference comes from her insistence on an honest first-person perspective.

The older Urrutia siblings learned to cook as latchkey kids helping out their newly employed mother in Miami. (For a thought-provoking book on the food situation they left behind in Cuba, it’s worth searching for “No Free Lunch,” a $9.95 paperback from the Institute for Food and Development Policy in San Francisco.) After the process of adjustment to new foods (such as the baffling “square fish” dumped on her tray in the school cafeteria), the author ended up cooking a lively mishmash of dishes remembered from Cuba, hybrids popular in the Cuban-American community, and her own Cubanesque experiments such as “dip de frijoles negros” (with a dollop of tahini in the black-bean puree).

Recipe directions are detailed and well thought out (though you should keep an eye out for the odd glitch--the flour measurement in a ham croquette recipe looks as if “teaspoons” should be “tablespoons”). The approximately 225 recipes are arranged by orthodox menu catagories that sometimes make an awkward fit with the memoir-installments in individual chapters. But in their own right they tell a lot about the amazing melange of influences that converged on Cuba and then the Cuban expatriate community.

Here are the omnipresent sofrito , or seasoning base of ingredients from different continents (native tomatoes and peppers, Spanish onions and garlic, all sauteed in olive oil); the rice-and-beans combinations such as Moros y Cristianos or congri , with which millions kept body and soul together; the sweet-to-the-nth-power flans and puddings that were one legacy of the triangular slaves-sugar-rum trade; the African root vegetables (yams and taro) that came to be used the same way as local counterparts ( yuca and sweet or Irish potatoes); the lunch-counter grilled sandwiches with names such as media noche (midnight) or platillos voladores (flying saucers). True to her own experience, the author also points out what a fascination American role models and processed foods, seen in the recipes as the canned peas or asparagus that some people now take to be perfectly Cuban, held for women of her mother’s generation.

There are decisions about coverage to be made in any book of this kind, and some strike me as smarter than others. I could wish for more detail about important ingredients (in some neighborhoods you may not find the coloring agent Randelman calls bijol unless you know to ask for achiote or annatto) and for some informational drawings or photographs of tropical ingredients in place of the run-of-the-mill photographic window dressing we do get. It’s strange also to find no recipes for the universally loved nonalcoholic batidos (milkshakes, mostly of tropical fruits--though one popular variant uses puffed wheat) whereas Randelman spends a whole chapter on the tourist-trap cocktails of the pre-Castro nightclub and casino scene. On the other hand, there’s much to be said about her effort to do more in the salad line than Cubans--no lovers of greens or raw vegetables--generally would.

My few experiments--shrimp sauteed with garlic, a rice- and-beans-salad inspired by Moros y Cristianos and an unusual garlic soup thickened with bread--were all fine (though the soup wouldn’t taste like much without really good bread). Even at a glance, it’s clear that Randelman’s instincts as a cook are sounder than those that went into “A Taste of Cuba.” (She makes fish in escabeche by the marinating and pan-browning method her grandmother taught her, with meaty fish steaks and a proper sofrito ; Linette Creen uses cubed fillets and a strange selection of blanched or uncooked vegetables.)

People who crave deep-fried morsels could have a field day with her ample roster of fritters, chips, and versions of the immortal “pork chuncks” and “potato bowl”--more properly, masitas de puerco (which are close to Mexican carnitas ) and papas rellenas (mashed potato balls with a meat filling). On a less-caloric plane, the selection of seafood dishes covers an interesting range of approaches from salt cod pudding to baked whole snapper or bass with parsley sauce, while the soups and stews tend toward the glorious meal-in-itself kind with hearty accents of ham or chorizo and great assortments of vegetables.

In sum: A much-neglected cuisine finds an intelligent spokeswoman. And about time, too.