No-Nonsense Southern Comfort : NATHALIE DUPREE COOKS FOR FAMILY AND FRIENDS, <i> By Nathalie Dupree (William Morrow: $21; 364 pp.)</i>

If your idea of a decadent Saturday afternoon is sitting in front of the TV cramming yourself full of PBS cooking shows--from Jacques Pepin to the Frugal Gourmet to Louisiana’s Justin Wilson to grand dame Julia Child--then no doubt you’ve spent time in Nathalie Dupree’s kitchen.

“New Southern Cooking With Nathalie Dupree” was first broadcast on PBS in 1986, and on the show and in the accompanying cookbook, the chef from Atlanta brought a dash of nouvelle to Southern tradition with recipes such as grits with cream and cheese, greens with coriander seed and browned butter and beet and sesame oil salad.

But Dupree says she’s never wanted to become typecast solely as a Southern cook. “Southern cooking was never all I did,” she said earlier this year in an interview. “I have training at the Cordon Bleu, I go to France and Italy. I don’t like to be limited and I don’t like contriving. I could turn out a lot of books and say this is all New Southern, but that wouldn’t be true.”

In her next PBS cooking show, “Nathalie Dupree’s Matters of Taste,” and its companion volume of the same name, Dupree featured recipes both Southern and international. But what was most interesting and unique about the cookbook was the expansive stories Dupree told about her life and how food had played a part--from her childhood to her first restaurant job in Majorca, Spain, where she sent over-salted mussels out of the kitchen (she forgot to taste the broth), only to have the owners of the restaurant storm back in.

In her new cookbook, which once again is a companion volume to her latest public television cooking series, Dupree “Cooks for Family and Friends.” Although there’s more than a hint of Southern comfort in the 300-plus recipes, Dupree again seems intent upon proving that she knows more than grits and fatback and new ways to jazz up collard greens. It’s an extremely eclectic collection of recipes that range from the easy to the sophisticated. What binds them together is a belief that special food can be made with limited fuss for every dining occasion, whether it be a family dinner or a party for 12.

The book is divided into progressive sections: Everyday Fare; Simply Smart, and Putting on the Ritz. There are additional chapters on side dishes, desserts and breads.

Dupree should be commended for her attention to the concerns of the home cook: she writes that she arranged the book according to the way she believes people live and the way they cook and entertain. This is not about Martha Stewart Perfection (nor does the book have the sort of food-as-art photography that Stewart’s beautiful entertaining bibles do. Occasional sketches suffice.)

“I do not picture my readers surrounded by staff and imagine they perhaps don’t even have a helping hand in the kitchen,” Dupree writes. “So much of the food may be fixed ahead of serving time, like the cassoulet in stages, able to be reheated or perhaps frozen.”

Cassoulet, you say? If that’s too much effort, Dupree makes your life easier with grilled honey-ginger fish steaks or chicken breasts with mustard sauce. And if you equate Southern with calories and cholesterol, Dupree is fairly health-conscious. She offers, for example, an eggplant “lasagna,” a tangy yogurt cheese ball, asparagus salad with orange vinaigrette and diet mashed potatoes on the other hand, grilled French sandwiches redolent with cheeses and stuffed Cornish hens with basil cream sauce are also on the menu.

Although you may miss the long, homey tales Dupree spun in “Matters of Taste,” you come to feel you know something about her family and friends in her latest book. She gives us her friend Dudley’s lasagna recipe, which he presented when he started entertaining at age 45 as a “new bachelor.” And Dupree often drops odd little tidbits about her own emotional state, like this comment about sauteed calf’s liver and onions. “I crave it regularly, in fact. If I feel weepy I eat some liver and onions and feel better, somehow!”

Cooking for company--especially facing the dishes--can sometimes make any of us feel weepy. Even for the most accomplished cook, it’s like being on stage. Amid the 300 recipes here, there are many that should help you face your audience with confidence.