Granted, there were curiosities from elsewhere. The recipes were not just European. However, no other book had quite the same trans-Atlantic elan. Cooking from Gourmet, Volumes I and II, defined you as a person of great sophistication. If you had an Italian coming for dinner, you could produce crayfish risotto. For a Pole, pierogi. For a Frenchman, coq au vin. What the recipes lacked in authenticity they made up for with the rakish glee of the day. Dubonnet, anyone?

The books went into so many reprints in the 1950s and '60s that a generation of baby boomers, including Gourmet's current editor, Ruth Reichl, grew up tracing their mother's fingerprints through the smudged pages. Today, as Conde Nast issues a completely revised modern successor, "The Gourmet Cookbook" (Houghton Mifflin, $40), Reichl makes no secret of the desire to tap into the nostalgia.

"As I hold this new book in my hands, I am seven years old again, standing in my mother's kitchen, enthralled with the romance of cooking, dreamily flipping through the pages of 'the Book,' " she writes. "I know that there are still people out there eager for adventure in the kitchen."

Yet more than times have changed. The books have too. The original book promised a kind of fine mischief, beckoning us from familiar foods into foreign worlds of untold glamour. The successor's posture is more world-weary, the affectation of a group that seems convinced it's been everywhere and tried everything and, in a semi-governmental manner, assumed the task of telling us what's good and why. Reichl even declares, "Our goal was to give you a book with every recipe you would ever want."

Gone is the sheer merriment at the prospect of an elegant dinner party. The original's chapter on hors d'oeuvres opens with the lip-smacking declaration: "To begin at the beginning, note this: Every meal deserves a good start." The new book opens the same section with a whine: "It's too bad we're stuck with this snooty French word."

Problems like that happen to books called Gourmet.

So often, where the original was effervescent, the modern book seems overwhelmed by its own place in history. The original vegetable section, titled "Greengroceries," begins, "Midway between Beau Brummel, who once ate a pea, and G.B.S., who can't see a filet mignon for the raw carrot under his nose, stands the Happy Gourmet." The new one, "Vegetables": "If you had shown our original subscribers recipes for grilled radicchio, stir-fried pea shoots, or yuca-root fries, they would have looked at you in sheer astonishment."

Perhaps, though it's hard to picture women unfazed by turtle steaks in 1950 being taken aback by the prospect of grilling a red cabbage. What is more questionable is whether these patronizing revisionists would trust modern cooks to know that G.B.S. was George Bernard Shaw.

In place of many of the original recipes are products of the 1980s' eclectic restaurant boom. It's mixed pickings. The duck "a l'orange" with a Southwestern ancho chile sauce proved delicious. However, the linguine with scallops and Thai spice is a recipe best reserved for the occasion when your spouse brings home a lover from the office for dinner: The spice paste clings to the pasta like a thick grit.

It's hard to see why Gourmet attempted this particular book. The originals were products of their time. But since they set the bar for 1950s elegance, so much has changed. Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Richard Olney, Alice Waters, Marcella Hazan, Diana Kennedy and Yan Kit So have exposed us to real French, Italian, Mexican and Chinese food. They've taught us how intricately the classic cuisines are tied up with place, produce and season, and they've changed the way we cook and eat. The idea that the world's food could be captured in one book seems as antiquated as Sterno-fired chafing dishes.

The conviction behind the old Gourmet cookbooks was that we could re-create the great buffet dishes of a Grand Tour in our own homes. It may have been misguided, but it was more than sincere; it was America at its most ebullient. The new Gourmet has no such glee.

In binding up a lot of recipes in a big yellow book, there are some flat-out winners. It does, as