BOOK REVIEW : Cliff’s Notes for Cooks : GREAT FOOD WITHOUT FUSS. By Frances McCullough and Barbara Witt. <i> (Henry Holt: $25; 273 pp.)</i>

Remember when having people over for dinner meant cooking? The mood of the country was self-indulgent; we were younger and less encumbered, and serving friends anything less than five courses, all of them homemade, was tantamount to insult. Cheese and bread for an appetizer--even good cheese and bread--betrayed a cook’s lack of commitment. I recall one meal I made that started with baked ricotta, went on to pasta, a stuffed veal breast with a couple of vegetables on the side, salad and a fruit tart. I suppose a true obsessive would have grown her own lettuce, but I made up for the lapse and made chocolate truffles to serve with the coffee.

But that was then and this is now: a career, a 3-year-old (“Let me stir the soup”), and a leaner, meaner economic climate. Streamlined is in. I have traded in my dream of having my own prep chef for a new fantasy: I want to become the champ of the reasonable, 45-minute meal. One, I might add, that leaves respectable leftovers in its wake, since there are nights when even 45 minutes seems like too much. This is my only hope of avoiding this generation’s equivalent of TV dinners. As a bonus, it’s the politically correct position for the ‘90s: a pared-down, healthy respect for food replaces a magnificent obsession.

My bible is “Great Food Without Fuss” by cookbook editor Frances McCullough and food consultant Barbara Witt. Estimable food warriors, they understand that there are legions of lapsed home chefs who enjoy cooking but despair of finding time to make anything tastier than a quick turkey burger. McCullough and Witt have done what none of us has the time to do: Reviewed all the lovely cookbooks that are gathering dust on our shelves and lifted out the recipes that evoke our glory days but take little time and little effort.

Finding the recipe for Marcella Hazan’s delicious mushroom and cheese salad was like bumping into a long-lost friend. If I have a half-hour to turn out dinner, I don’t even bother opening a book, and certainly not for the salad course, which has become a fairly regimental bowl of greens with my husband’s garlic vinaigrette. But Hazan’s salad takes no more time. It is wonderful--sliced mushrooms and strips of Swiss cheese dressed with lemon juice and olive oil, salt and a lot of pepper. The authors offer serving suggestions and their own or other chefs’ variations, which often sound even better than the original. Joel Robuchon makes his salad with mushrooms, oil and lemon juice, to which he adds herbs and garlic--and shaved Parmesan cheese instead of Swiss.

Some of the best ideas lurk in the “Editor’s Kitchen” sections, where McCullough and Witt play around with someone else’s basic concept. Their recipe for garlicky baked chicken pieces, a short paragraph in an extensive section on poultry, sounded almost too easy. Chicken thighs or legs go into a five-ingredient marinade while you live your life, and then, 25 minutes before dinner, they sit in a 500-degree oven. They come out wonderfully tender, the lemon and oregano a nice foil for the garlic.

And then there’s torched turkey, which is my name for it, not theirs. McCullough and Witt prefer hot-roasted turkey--which is a nice solution for people who like turkey and don’t have all day to stand around basting it. A medium-sized bird goes into a 500-degree oven, and in less than two hours it’s ready to eat. The skin is crisp, the dark meat sufficiently cooked (because they’ve warned us not to bother trussing the bird) and the white meat is moist and very tender.

There are gaps, possibly because the authors’ concept makes them dependent on what their sources provide them. It would be nice, having been introduced to the speedy gobbler, to get some ideas about what to do with the endless leftovers. I’d like a sentence that explained exactly how that weird corn-bread recipe worked, the one where you add the cream to the batter but don’t stir it, which somehow turns into a custard-filled bread. And please, don’t tell me to toast peanuts, pecans or hazelnuts at 350 degrees until “they start to smell good.” Is that two minutes, 10 or 25? Can I brush my teeth, read a newspaper story, or soak in a hot tub?

But these are minor complaints. I forgot all about them once I tasted the oven-roasted green beans, the ones washed in herb- and garlic-scented olive oil. I began to wonder if all the complicated recipes of the last decade--those that always required a mad dash to an ethnic market for a single ingredient--were nothing more than a conspiracy on the part of the food establishment, a ruse to convince us that the only good meal was a complex, expensive one. I have come to believe in the dictum that no meal should take longer to cook than it takes to eat.

This is a wonderful, revitalizing book, the sort that makes a cook feel in charge of his or her own destiny again. Read it and reap.