Gene Hovis's Uptown Down Home Cookbook

A Southerner by birth and cooking style, Hovis, a Manhattan chef, charms readers with wistful remembrances of train rides and packed lunches, feasts at funerals, laundry baskets that doubled as picnic hampers at prayer meetings and special birthday fare. He offers delightful anecdotes of his granny and her tasty tea sandwichescurried egg, smoked pheasant with walnuts, fresh mushroom, mixed vegetable and rolled watercress. More enticing recipes include avocado mousse with shrimp, stuffed filet of beef with shallot sauce, shad roe souffle and lemon chess pie. The unpretentious fare holds few surprises, although he divulges the ""secret'' ingredient in a pot roast's double-rich gravy. He advises cooks that his recipes are intended as a guide rather than a formula: ``You have only to consider some of the great recipes that, like folk songs, have traveled around the world absorbing different nuances of flavors to appreciate that there is indeed more than one way to prepare a dish.'' Rosenthal wrote Live High on Low Fat. (May 20)