Passover Table: New and Traditional Recipes for Your Seders and the Entire Passover Week

The ideal audience for this generously illustrated cookbook may prove elusive. Friedland's short course on seder rituals and dietary laws, and her emphasis on traditional recipes, will bore all but the uninitiated (on the subject of matzoh balls, for example, she declares that ``the best recipe is the one printed on the box of matzo meal, and every brand has the same recipe printed on its side,'' then she reprints it without further comment). She ventures off the beaten path with recipes for layered meat-and-matzoh pies, tasty vegetable cutlets and Turkish-style sweet-and-sour artichokes; such novelties, however, are few and far between, and the cook looking for fresh ideas will be disappointed. A basic understanding of cooking is presupposed--although the elements of the seder are lengthily defined, cooking terms are not. The color photographs, similarly, forego showing cooking techniques and stages of preparation in favor of glamour shots of completed recipes. (Mar.)