January 8, 1986

In little more than six months, terrorist attacks on travelers have shaken the volatile travel industry and altered patterns of international tourism, according to industry and government representatives. Around the nation, travel agents say, clients are calling to ask whether it is safe to take trips. Some fearful customers, they say, have canceled overseas trips and others have shifted their destinations to places considered potentially less dangerous, choosing in some cases, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. Immediately after the terrorist attacks on Dec. 27 at the Rome and Vienna airports, for example, Trans World Airlines lost about 4,000 bookings, according to a reliable airline source that T.W.A. spokesmen did not dispute. President Reagan, in his news conference last night, was asked how safe he thought it was for Americans to travel in Europe in view of recent terrorist attacks.

Aided again by declining interest rates, the stock market yesterday scored its best single-day gain in nearly a month as indicators on all the major exchanges surged to record levels. While the Dow Jones industrial average closed at a record 1,565.71, an 18.12-point gain on the day, the price rises in stocks that trade on the American Stock Exchange and over-the-counter were a better indication of the depth of the market's recent rally. Indicators that measure stock prices on those exchanges rose sharply, shattering records that have lasted for two and a half years. The Amex index gained 2.52 points, to 249.89, and the Nasdaq index was up 3.75, to 329.74.

As the scent of biscuits, country ham, fresh greens and candied yams rose over the region during this holiday season, the South's strongest biracial tradition, cooking, grew older and newer by a year. Born on farms and plantations, shaped by poverty and by the hands of people who could create dishes from nothing more than meal, milk, vegetable leaves and the hot ashes of a rude fireplace, Southern cooking was often passed from one generation to another simply by example. Today, its image spread by national fried chicken franchises and by expensive restaurants, its family secrets raised to new heights of inventiveness by young professional chefs and reduced to recipes in local church-group cookbooks, Southern cuisine both endures and proliferates. Its old ways are subtly adapting to the modern idiom. From this city, symbolic capital of the New South, the cook and author Nathalie Dupree last Saturday began a half-hour show called ''New Southern Cooking.'' Produced by Georgia Public Television and underwritten by the White Lily Foods Company, the program will be broadcast in parts of five Southern states for 13 weeks. Miss Dupree hopes it will then be carried on national public television.

The situation is nothing if not confusing. Last year Mayor Koch predicted so ''rosy'' a future that he continued to improve services, promised to do more of the same in 1986 and as recently as two months ago talked of tax cuts. This year, with the release of his preliminary financial plan for the next fiscal year, he foresees a freeze in services, wants a tax increase because of Federal budget cuts and is complaining about ''treading water.'' The two contrasting messages would be difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile except for one overriding reality: city budgets -in their preliminary forms and in the final versions approved every spring - are political as well as financial documents.

A front-page picture caption on Jan. 1 about a year-end celebration at the New York Stock Exchange misstated the market's 1985 performance.