LA FRANCE GASTRONOMIQUE

LA FRANCE GASTRONOMIQUE Anne Willan (Arcade/Little, Brown, $35) Willan, a British-born-and-raised American citizen who founded La Varenne cooking school in Paris, writes about French food in English. Willan's interest here is in exploring the local specialties that still survive throughout the country, and she writes extensively on her own food-touring finds and how other travelers might retrace her path through 10 distinctive regions from Brittany to Provence. She offers recipes, about 10 from each region, that serve as fine advertisements for local foods and local cooking. The book will probably see more service as a coffee-table thumper than as a kitchen aid or portable travel guide. To that end, the travelogue-style photographs by Michael Boys treat castles, cliffs, and open-face fruit tarts alike as splendid visual attractions. B+ -SF