Only in the Kitchen Are There No Letdowns

SHEILA LUKINS fits best in the kitchen.

When she walks through the other rooms in her sprawling apartment at the Dakota, the ceilings are so very tall and she is so very short (five feet) you can easily imagine the place as a duplex. The formality of those rooms, despite their abundance of chintz, seems at odds with this intense, almost austere presence in black pants, white shirt and dark hair.

But in the kitchen, the woman who was a co-founder of the Silver Palate food shop in Manhattan, who conceived the recipes for five cookbooks that have more than 5.5 million copies in print, seems to grow. In spite of the requisite equipment -- professional grill, professional stove -- the room feels personal enough to be a teen-ager's bedroom. A picture of Elvis, a pitcher filled with sunflowers and two stuffed Campbell Kids dolls reside on the windowsill. On the counter is an array of bottles filled with olive oil, some greenish, some gold, some full, some not, clustered the way other women gather perfumes on the vanity; all at the ready, the perfect one waiting, to suit her mood. Or more important, her mouth.

''I feel so cozy in my kitchen,'' she says. ''It's so familiar.''

Cozy, however, is not the feeling Ms. Lukins exudes. It's more tense. Intense. Settled among the chintz in the living room, she shoots up when asked a simple question about why she covers the pan while frying chicken. Trekking down the hallway, she summons her assistant, Laurie Griffith, with an almost grim determination to prove, in stereo, that the chicken will not turn soggy. O.K., O.K. It was just a question.

''I take everything very seriously,'' Ms. Lukins says.

You would think that at 54, having established herself as a pre-eminent home chef and cookbook author (co-author of the Silver Palate books with her former partner, Julee Rosso), with her two daughters grown and happy and an apartment as big as Nebraska, she could take a little chicken in stride.

But things are not all they seem. In 1991, while Ms. Lukins was in her kitchen cooking a dinner for a charity event, she developed an excruciating headache, which caused her to lie down. She woke up in the hospital after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage so severe she was expected to die. The entire left side of her body was paralyzed and she developed an infection in her skull, which required a second operation. Finally, she landed at the Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains, where she spent three months relearning how to feed and dress herself.

The hemorrhage came while Ms. Lukins was in the midst of her first solo effort, ''All Around the World Cookbook'' (Workman, 1994), and although she could barely walk while recovering, she insisted on traveling to 33 countries to conduct research, accompanied by Ms. Griffith or her husband, Richard Lukins. She was in such bad shape that when she went to food markets in India or Morocco, she jokes, ''they didn't know whether to ask me for money or give me money.''