Mediterranean Harvest

This excellent addition to the growing number of sophisticated, meatless recipe collections focuses on the cuisines of Mediterranean countries, emphasizing Italy, France and Morocco. There's a wide variety of unusual dishes (braised spicy octopus, fried sage leaves, omelets with tapenade) and delicious ways of preparing more popular ingredients (baked whole garlic, artichokes with egg-lemon sauce, shrimp pancakes). Some specialties, such as paella, are familiar to American cooks, others like tagine, a Moroccan stew, are seldom prepared here. Directions are detailed and many recipes are preceded by a brief introduction: ""The best garlic soup we ever had was in a small restaurant in Seville. The secret, we discovered, after much trial and error, was the quality of the stock. . . .'' One can only envy the culinary adventures of the authors as they discover that ``the best mozzarella comes from an area south of Naples and is made with milk from the European water buffalo.'' Scaravelli and Cohen, her husband, are the authors of Cooking from an Italian Garden. (November 19)