September 11, 1991

OVER the last two decades, the red sauce river has flowed like a natural boundary between the pristine gourmet state and the less discriminate masses. Red sauce constituted treason under the gourmet flag, recalling the archaic days of breaded, deep-fried veal, leaden meatballs, limp spaghetti or -- quelle horreur -- an easy, inexpensive meal from a can. "Insecure foodies sneer at anything swamped in tomato sauce," said Raymond Sokolov, whose social history of food, "Why We Eat What We Eat," will be published by Summit Books next week.

The body of an 8-year-old Bronx girl, missing since Sunday morning when she left her uncle's home to return to her own apartment a floor below, was discovered yesterday afternoon in a bag that had been stuffed into a niche of a seawall below the Triborough Bridge, the police said. Dozens of police officers, as well as scuba divers, vessels from the department's harbor unit and a bloodhound -- who had traced the little girl's scent to a picnic table near the river -- had searched all day Monday and throughout the morning yesterday.

It began as a simple incident: a few syringes washing up on a beach in July 1988. But it developed into the big environmental scare of the summer, closing New York and New Jersey beaches and costing the states about $1.5 billion in revenue. To the public, it seemed that the beaches were being overrun by bushels of medical waste, possibly contaminated with AIDS, that had been dumped at sea by less-than-scrupulous hospitals and disposal companies. But the reality was different, health and environmental officials say.

A leading minister in the new transitional Soviet Government has endorsed Japan's claim to several Soviet-held islands in the Kurile chain, heightening speculation that a deal might be possible in return for Japanse economic ad. Grigory A. Yavlinsky, vice chairman of the Soviet State Council's economic management committee, said the islands, seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, seemed to properly belong to Japan under the terms of a treaty signed in 1855.

The former head of Salomon Brothers' Government securities trading desk, whom the firm has blamed for ordering the illegal trades that have shaken the firm, was paid more than $11 million in the last three years, Salomon disclosed yesterday. The trader, Paul W. Mozer, saw his compensation climb rapidly in that time, and received $4.75 million in 1990 alone, the firm said in a letter to Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who has held hearings on the scandal.