ANNUAL HOLIDAY COOKBOOK ISSUE : World of Books

Probably the goofiest cookbook I own is a strange little thing I bought at a housewares shop in Lakewood, a book of Mexican recipes printed in Bombay and adapted for the Indian cook. Tacos are described as fried round puris , tortillas as rustic chapatis, and the chile verde seems more like an adaptation of a Kashmiri dish than something you might taste in a Mexican home. The author’s powers of description seem overtaxed in her recipe for a burrito, which comes out pretty much like a Bombay-style lamb frankie anyway. And every time I leaf through this book I wonder: do American books on non-American cuisines get any closer to the truth?

Some of the best “foreign� cookbooks in print are written by Americans: Paula Wolfert’s translation of Southwest France to American kitchens, Barbara Tropp’s China, Julia Child’s Paris. Many are better than anything that exists in the original language.

But with cookbooks actually from the country of origin, you get something of the pure experience of the cuisine, unfiltered by authors who worry about the availability of the Indian okra called drumstick or of Chinese bitter gourds, untrammeled by cookbook editors who refuse to condone recipes that demand metates instead of Cuisinarts. Sometimes it’s nice to read a cookbook written by somebody because he cooks this food every day.

I have spent a lot of time lately at Los Angeles’ foreign-language bookstores, looking for explanations of kaiseki dishes I have just eaten, searching for paella recipes, seeking a Virgil to guide me through the infernal circles of barely translated Korean menus. Here are a few of the bookstores I like.

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SUP Bookstore, just downstairs from the dim-sum-intensive Harbor Village restaurant in the heart of Monterey Park, is a splendid place, almost the size of a Barnes & Noble, with a well-balanced selection of Chinese-American literature, a full range of Chinese school supplies and several hundred Chinese cookbooks that few of us who learned the cuisine from Barbara Tropp and Nina Simonds are likely to own. A surprising percentage of these have at least rudimentary English text. You’ll find all the volumes of Pei-Mei’s indispensable series (she’s sometimes considered Taiwan’s answer to Julia Child), sumptuous and expensive compendiums of new-style Hong Kong cuisine and microwave-cooking manuals; a sleekly produced book devoted solely to lucky black and white dishes (fish with caviar; double-boiled black chicken with coconut); an interesting-looking, though untranslated, book on the Chinese tea cult. Still, what I find myself going back to SUP for are the bilingual paperback cookbooks of Chinese regional cuisines: Taiwanese, Chiu Chow, Shanghainese, Cantonese. Even if you never cook a single dish from them, these cookbooks will help you understand the food served at restaurants right down the street.

SUP Bookstore, 111 N. Atlantic Ave., Ste 228, Monterey Park, (818) 293-3386.

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It may be easy to find a Latino record store in Los Angeles--in some parts of town, the problem is finding a stretch of sidewalk unaffected by their blare--but Spanish-language bookstores are rare. The Spanish & European Bookstore is one of the best, with aisles of current literature, an immense children’s book section and 500 or so Spanish-language cookbooks, ranging from a Mexican manual of sugar sculpture to the cartoon-illustrated Everest series on regional Spanish cuisine, as well as a large selection of home-style recipe books for the Latin American and Spanish kitchen. When you’re ready to explore beyond Diana Kennedy or Penelope Casas, this is a good place to start.

Spanish & European Bookstore, 3102 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 739-8899.

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Chameli, of course, is basically a fancy northern-style Indian vegetarian restaurant. The place also serves the local Indian community as something of a one-stop Indian cultural center, with language classes, music tapes, a small clothing boutique and a wall of Indian-themed books (faith, fiction, sociology) that includes a good selection of novels by Rabindranath Tagore and R.K. Narayan. The two long shelves of Indian and vegetarian cookbooks are far from comprehensive, but you’ll find all the classics--Julie Sahni, Yamuna Devi, Madhur Jaffrey--plus food histories and dozens of small paperbacks from India. I’m fond of buying Indian cookbooks from the racks between the ghee and the lentils at Punjabi grocery stores in Artesia--a favorite cookbook, “Tasty Dishes From Waste Items,� may have more uses than you ever thought possible for banana peels and curdled milk--but Chameli is where I go when I need something on a specific dish.

Chameli, 8752 E. Valley Blvd., Rosemead, (818) 280-1947.

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Kinokuniya Books is among the best Asian-themed bookstores in the United States, a cavernous space in the New Otani Plaza crammed with Japanese comic books, business tracts, poetry and an English-language section that takes up nearly half of the store. And although most of the English-language cookbook stock may be available at other places around town, Kinokuniya alone seems to have just about everything in print on Japanese food, from both Japanese and American presses, including a zillion books on macrobiotic cooking, Tokyo restaurant guides, pickle-making manifestoes and scholarly books on the philosophy of foods. This is the only place I’ve seen “Practical Japanese Cooking,� a beautifully photographed manual of Japanese home cooking by Shizuo Tsuji, the author of the classic “Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art.�

Kinokuniya Books, 123 Astronaut Ellison H. Onizuka St., Los Angeles, (213) 687-4480.

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Dong-A Book Plaza is probably not the most welcoming place in Koreatown; if you are not Korean, the staff may truly be mystified by your presence. The store stocks many lovely books on Korean food, but few of them are translated. Still, if you persist, you’ll find half a dozen books, mostly from the Hollym imprint, on basic Korean cooking.

Dong-A Book Plaza, 3460 W. 8th St., Los Angeles, (213) 382-7100.

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Oriental Book Store is an amazing place on an anonymous Pasadena shopping strip, room after room of new and used books about Asia and the Near East in the sort of unassuming storefront where you’d expect to find a vacuum-cleaner repair shop. There are travel books, histories, academic tracts, music and literature, including what must be one of the best selections of Japanese fiction anywhere. Cookbooks are by no means a specialty, but there are hundreds, campy old things by expats, plastic-bound women’s club books, now-classic cookbooks in shopworn original hard-bound editions and several rarish copies of Marc Millon’s British-printed “Flavours of Korea,� the sharpest Korean cookbook available. You probably won’t find what you’re looking for, but it’s almost impossible to leave this store empty-handed.

Oriental Book Store, 1713 E. Colorado, Pasadena, (818) 577-2413. *

The French, if you ask them anyway, have a food culture far more developed than our own, and their cookbooks are among the most beautiful in the world. This store has pretty much the usual French stuff--cookbooks from the three-star gang (Pacaud, Chapel, Robuchon) to rudimentary cooking manuals, culinary dictionaries to cute little single-subject books on things like caviar and fish soup. But what La Cite des Livres seems to specialize in are fiercely expensive volumes--$80 and way up--that any serious cook will discover he or she needs, this very second , damn the limit on the Visa. If you have the cash, you’ll find master Belgian candy-maker Robert Linxe’s book on chocolate, cuisine-jus superstar Bernard l’Oiseau’s cookbook and a tremendous-looking $125 book from Michel Bras, the herb-loving chef from Laguiole.

La Cite des Livres, 2306 Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 475-0658.

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The Cook’s Library may not, strictly speaking, be an “ethnic� bookstore, but it is often the source for the most unlikely things--books on Nepalese, Ethiopian or Laotian cooking, bilingual Chinese-cooking paperbacks, obscure Middle Eastern titles and community cookbooks from all over the country. The shop gets frequent shipments from England (which will often contain titles from India and Singapore), seeks out scholarly books on food ways and stocks a fair selection of limited-run food periodicals, including the gorgeous, though prohibitively expensive, German biannual Op-Art.

The Cook’s Library, 8373 W. Third St., Los Angeles, (213) 655-3141.