New York - Rozanne Gold, a woman who has been putting her finger on the pulse of contemporary American cuisine since she was a 23-year-old private chef at New York's Gracie Mansion, has just fingered the culprit in the hassle that is holiday entertaining:

"Usually when you think about entertaining, you think about dinner," said Gold, now 44. "But during the holidays, we have people around all day. We really need to expand our cooking and thinking about food for a 24-hour day."

But that need not be as stressful as it sounds: Gold's new book is a virtual blueprint for surviving holiday entertaining - not by avoiding cooking, but by stripping it down to its essence.

The book is "Recipes 1-2-3 Menu Cookbook" (Little, Brown, 1998, $25), a follow-up to Gold's 1996 book, "Recipes 1-2-3," which presented the concept of creating sophisticated and delicious dishes with only three ingredients. (She doesn't count salt, pepper or water, where they are used.)

The new book offers two-, three-, four- and even five-course meals, divided into morning, noon and night. In addition, each menu has a theme, some of them based on Gold's travels.

There's a "Postcard from Portofino" breakfast, with baked eggs Splendido, Bel Paese and prosciutto bruschetta, and morning granita (grapefruit-Campari). There's a "Lunch for Picasso," with roasted pepper sandwiches, bay scallops with parsley puree, tomatoes Provencale, and poached oranges in lemon syrup with citrus granita.

And among dinners, there's a luxurious English-style holiday meal with smoked salmon tartare with dill mousse, prime rib with horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding, brussels sprouts with tangerine beurre noisette, and oven-roasted pears with Stilton and warm honey syrup.

Clearly, there's a difference between "essential" and "simplistic."

"It's all about harmony," Gold said in a recent interview at the Rainbow Room, atop Rockefeller Center (and from almost the same table where Meg Ryan dumped Bill Pullman in the movie "Sleepless in Seattle").

"It's about really understanding the principles of taste - the basics, sweet, salty, bitter, sour - and also the principle of umami [aroma and bouquet], which is the fifth [taste] sense that the Japanese speak about," she said. "When I create a recipe, I start with all of those elements, and I think about how they interact. In order for a dish to taste good, there needs to be a balancing act among those things."

Gold has some experience with putting together recipes and menus. After her stint with New York Mayor Edward Koch in the late '70s, Gold was hired by Lord & Taylor to oversee its three dozen department store restaurants.

Then, in the mid-'80s, she went to work for Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Co., restaurant consultants. (Whiteman is now her husband.) As culinary director, she helped the firm redo and update the Rainbow Room, and developed menus for the Hudson River Cafe and the Winter Garden Cafe, also in New York, among other places.

She insists that 1-2-3 Recipe menus are not for people who don't want to cook. She calls it not an "I-hate-to-cook" book but an "I-hate-to-shop book": "You can do a three-course meal and still go through the express line."

It's not necessarily a fast-food book, either. To make the most of minimal ingredients, Gold employs slow-cooking and reductions that help develop complex flavors. There are no conventional convenience foods, although she will use roasted peppers in a jar, frozen puff pastry and bottled salsa.

"There's nothing wrong with a really great-quality ice cream, for example," she said. "But I'll cut it in a wedge or a disc, something that's just so refined. It's like ikebana, Japanese flower arranging, where you take something so ordinary and change it in a slight way."

Of course, when you're working with only a couple of ingredients, substitutions are out, and quality must be high. "It helps you care about quality" to cook this way, Gold said. "It helps if you have this philosophy in your mind: If this is going to work out well, I have to find the best."

That's not as difficult as it used to be, Gold said. "I do think the quality and certainly the variety of what we can get is so superb in supermarkets these days," she said. "This is no longer an elite thing, a restaurant thing, this is how people shop today."

Gold has said she wrote the original "1-2-3" book to entice people back into the kitchen. It's easier to tackle a new cooking technique, or a new dish, if there's not a lot of shopping and laborious prep work.

The new book, she said, is "based on a lot of what I call 'hidden' technique. ... Things work for mysterious reasons, and sometimes I know why and sometimes I don't. Sometimes, it's really about discovery.

"No one would ever be intimidated by any of this," she said, "but there's some real cooking going on here. You cook your way through this book and you'll really understand how to cook."

One of the discoveries she made while working on the book was that many of the recipes turned out to be pretty low in calories.

"If you don't have the luxury of a fourth ingredient, very often the one I leave out is fat," she noted. "So it turns out that over half of the book is actually good for you."

But getting back to the holidays: Gold said "Recipes 1-2-3 Menu Cookbook" works especially well. "It cuts down on that valuable preparation time, on cooking time, and it certainly cuts down on shopping time."

There are a number of holiday meals in the book, she said, "but none of them has more than 15 ingredients."

Oven-Roasted Pears With Stilton, Warm Honey Syrup

Serves 4 (see note)

4 large, firm Anjou pears (2 pounds), with stems

6 ounces Stilton cheese, at room temperature

1/2 cup honey

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Wash pears and cut in half lengthwise. Remove the core and any seeds. Place pears, cut side down, on metal baking sheet. Bake 20 minutes. Turn pears over. Bake another 20 minutes, turn pears again, and bake 10 minutes longer. Pears should be golden brown and soft (see note). Remove from the oven. Let come to room temperature.

Meanwhile, cut cheese into 8 chunks. Using 2 small spoons or your fingers, make 8 quenelles, or oval shapes. Set aside.

In a heavy small saucepan, put honey and 1/2 cup water. Bring just to a boil, stirring until honey is dissolved. Lower heat to a simmer and cook 10 minutes, until syrup thickens. You should have 1/2 cup. Let cool 10 minutes.

To serve, put pears in warm oven (from cooking the prime rib and Yorkshire pudding), just to warm through. Place two pear halves on each plate with cut side up. Place a cheese quenelle on each. Spoon 1 tablespoon warm honey syrup over each pear half. Serve immediately.

Note: If serving 6 or 8, you have the option of serving one pear half each, or of increasing the recipe proportionately. Pears are notorious for still being rock-hard after they are roasted. Test them to make sure they are soft enough to cut with a fork.

Salt-and-Pepper Prime Rib With Horseradish Sauce, Yorkshire Pudding

Serves 6 or more

PRIME RIB:

3-rib prime rib roast (about 5 1/2 pounds), trimmed well

HORSERADISH SAUCE:

1 cup heavy cream

5 tablespoons prepared white horseradish

YORKSHIRE PUDDING:

2 cups milk

4 extra-large eggs

2 cups self-rising flour

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Make sure the rib roast is at room temperature before roasting.

Mix together 2 tablespoons kosher salt and 1 teaspoon butcher-grind black pepper. Rub well into fat on top of the roast, covering thoroughly. Place in shallow roasting pan, fatty side up, and roast for 1 hour and 50 minutes, or about 20 minutes per pound for rare.

Meanwhile, whip cream with electric mixer until thick. Gently mix in horseradish, salt and freshly ground white pepper to taste. You will have 2 1/2 cups. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Fifteen minutes before the roast is finished, increase oven temperature to 450 degrees.

During the last 15 minutes of cooking the roast, prepare Yorkshire pudding. Beat milk and eggs together in bowl of electric mixer. Add 3/4 teaspoon of salt and flour and beat until a smooth, thick batter is formed.

Remove roast from oven when internal temperature is between 120 degrees and 125 degrees. Place on cutting board and let sit, covered with foil, for 20 minutes, or

until Yorkshire pudding is done. Save a cup of drippings from roast and place in a 9-inch-by-11-inch shallow casserole.

Pour pudding batter into casserole and bake at 450 degrees for 20 to 22 minutes.

Remove pudding from oven and let rest 5 minutes while you cut the roast. Cut the meat away from the bone in one piece. You will have about 3 1/2 pounds of meat. Carve into thin or thick slices, as desired. Cut through the bones and serve separately. You will have three meaty ribs. (If too rare, you can put the bones under the broiler for 1 minute.)

Serve roast with any pan juices, warm Yorkshire pudding,

optional bones and cold horseradish sauce.

Smoked Salmon Tartare, Dill Mousse

Serves 4 (see note)

1 pound best-quality smoked salmon, sliced 1/8-inch thick

2 large bunches fresh dill

4 tablespoons olive oil

Meticulously cut smoked salmon into small dice (between 1/8 and 1/4 inch). Place in a medium bowl. Wash dill and dry. Add 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh dill and freshly ground black pepper to salmon. Mix gently and cover. Chill until ready to use.

To make dill mousse: Reserve some dill sprigs for garnish. Cut remaining dill to get 1 cup packed leaves with a little of the stems attached to the leaves. Chop coarsely and place in a blender. Puree dill on high speed, slowly adding 4 tablespoons olive oil and 2 tablespoons cold water. Add 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt, and puree until thick and smooth. You will have 1/2 cup.

To serve, form the smoked salmon mixture into 4 cakes, each about 2 3/4 inches in diameter by 1 inch high. Place in the center of four large plates. Spoon mousse on top of each cake to cover. Garnish with tiny sprigs of fresh dill. Spoon any remaining mousse decoratively around tartare.

Note: The recipe is easily increased by 50 percent for 6 servings or doubled for 8 servings.

Pub Date: 12/16/98