CD-Rom -- ''Four Paws Of Crab''

"Four Paws of Crab" Live Oak Multimedia (800) 454-7557 Macintosh $59

"Four Paws of Crab" is a unique experience - an introduction to Thai cuisine and culture that is part cookbook, part travelogue and part personal history.

The new CD-ROM comes from a three-person start-up company called Live Oak Multimedia in Emeryville, Calif., and displays a kind of quirky creative energy rarely seen in multimedia titles.

"Four Paws" grew from a 1989 trip by Nora Bateson, one of Live Oak's founders, to Bangkok where she met Bancha "Bird" Leelaguagoon, a budding chef and restaurateur.

"We always ended up in the kitchen," Bateson explains in the disc's introductory screen. "Cooking and telling stories. Our stories gave us glimpses into the parallel worlds we lived in. We cooked each other's foods so that we would know where we had come from."

After the introduction, "Four Paws" divides into four sections: "Recipes," "Happy Market," "Mirrors" and "Time Romp."

The recipe section presents instructions from Bird for preparing 45 Thai dishes, everything from the relatively familiar chicken soup with coconut milk and phad thai to more exotic choices such as "looking glass noodle salad."

The recipes are clearly written, easy to print out and illustrated with high-resolution color photos. Some of the recipes also feature video clips of Bird that aren't as useful; the grainy clips run only 30 to 90 seconds and focus more on Bird's comments

about Thailand than actual cooking demonstrations.

The "Happy Market" section is a perfect complement to "Recipes," with descriptions and photographs of 63 common ingredients in Thai cooking, accompanied by the sounds of Bangkok's main market.

The "Mirrors" section serves up text, audio and photographs of Nora's visits to Thailand and Bird's trip to San Francisco last year. The "Time Romp" section offers side-by-side capsule histories of the United States and Thailand.

There are a few disappointments, however. The CD-ROM runs very slowly, with long pauses between screens, and doesn't offer an index.

Live Oak also overpriced the disk at $59. The small company hasn't found a distributor to put "Four Paws" in stores, so the CD-ROM - available now for Macintosh with a Windows version promised later this year - can only be purchased by calling direct to Live Oak.