Comments: Richard Jones grew up in the South, but opened his restaurant Richard's Place in the borough of Queens in New York, where he introduced Northern palates to a broad range of cooking styles, including soul food, Cajun and Creole cuisine, and traditional Southern comfort food. But he refers to his cooking as "New Southern," in that he has taken some steps to cut down on fat, to keep from cooking the vegetables to the pudding stage, etc.

Unfortunately, sloppy editing, or carelessness in translating these from restaurant recipes to home recipes create serious problems. A muffin recipe with 5 cups of flour serves 8? That should turn out about 60 full-size muffins, or 7-1/2 muffins each. Seems pretty generous to us. Jones' showcase recipe for fried chicken doesn't tell you to roll the marinated chicken in the flour mixture. The recipe for pound cake doesn't include sugar in the ingredients, and doesn't tell you when to add sugar in the instructions or when to combine the liquid and dry ingredients. The Chocolate Frosting makes 8 servings. What does that mean? It frosts a one-layer cake? A two-layer cake? It's a pretty small recipe, from the looks of it. There are also quite a few references to measuring ingredients by weight – two ounces of sour cream, for example – when most home cooks in this country use measuring spoons and cups. If those are errors that jumped out in a first reading, how many others are lurking within?

From the flavor Jones serves up, we rate his book pretty highly, but you should read the instructions carefully before beginning a recipe and be prepared to improvise here and there to compensate for possible errors that got past the editor.