Instructions: CHICAGO - Chef Art Smith has cooked for the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart, but names he prefers to drop include Grandmother Georgia, Aunt Evelyn and Grandmother Mabel.

Smith credits these family members with creating some of his most cherished memories, the food and traditions from the family dinner table in rural Florida where he grew up.

After all, he says, recipes "are like a window to the past," telling us about the people and the ingredients they used.

Smith, 41, has turned his love for food and family into a career. For four years, he has been personal chef to Winfrey, and now he has written a best-selling cookbook, "Back to the Table: The Reunion of Food and The book offers more than 150 recipes for dishes as diverse as the families and friends he hopes will renew a disappearing tradition: gathering for dinner at the table.

His recipes range from Southern classics, such as chicken and dumplings and yellow squash casserole, to ethnic creations, including golden challah, Cuban paella and naan, a Pakistani flatbread.

The recipes are as accessible as buttermilk-fried chicken and as elegant as baked cod with thyme-walnut butter and baby spinach.

"Everyone loves delicious food," Smith says. "But it doesnt mean that it has to be something so complicated that you had to shop forever for it and then you cooked forever, and then by the time youre ready to serve it, youre just so tired. So, what happens is, you really lose why youre there.

"And why youre there, No. 1, is to nourish yourselves, but No. 2, youre there for your families."

Recently, he took his own advice, getting chicken salad and fresh fruit catered to his friends Victorian mansion on Chicagos Lake Shore Drive, where he served lunch.

He personalized the meal with his own mulled apple cider and pecan shortbread cookies, which he sliced and baked while fielding a reporters questions and a photographers flashing camera.

Smith seems to enjoy talking and laughing as much as cooking. He talks about the comforting power of food ("When things are not so great, I think a good meal has the ability to heal") and about the women who cooked that food when he was young.

He recalls his mother, Addie Mae, telling him, "Thank you for remembering the good." And that he does.

In his cookbook, he writes about eating Sunday dinner after church each week at his Grandmother Georgia Smiths house. Hers was a table set "with endless bowls of homemade put-ups - relishes, jellies, chutneys and jams with farm-raised meats, fresh vegetables and all manner of baked goods and sweets."

She was famous for the biscuits she stacked "in tall heaps" at her boarding house, and she always had plates of juicy sliced tomatoes sprinkled with salt on her table.

Smith says his mother, whom he calls a great cook, probably prepared at least 12 dishes for him on a recent visit. He laughs about his precious Aunt Evelyn, whose cure whenever he isnt doing well is to mail him a cake. And Grandmother Mabel Jones, he writes, is "a no-fuss kind of cook" whose no-knead dinner rolls turn out light and fluffy.

Smith expresses gratitude for the opportunities Winfrey has afforded him: He cooked recently on her TV program, is a contributing editor to her "O"

magazine and writes a column for Oprah.com. But he prefers not to comment on her favorite recipes in the book.

That, of course, hasnt kept Winfrey from bragging about him. "I tell him all the time theres a colored woman living somewhere inside him because he can cook Southern, he can cook Italian, he can cook anything in the world you can imagine," she declared on TV.

Smith, whose own cookbook joins 500 or 600 others in his collection, was 24 when he was hired by then Florida Gov. Bob Graham, now a U.S. senator, as executive chef of the governors mansion. Smith also has worked as a chef on trans-Atlantic motor yachts and on the American European Express Train.

"I love great food, but I also like it when its in transit, when youre able to bring something so unexpected," Smith says.

"It was so fun to cook on a train. We would be going 80, 90 miles an hour down the tracks, and wed be making souffles."

Smiths book is a plea for families and friends to return to the dinner table. Considering todays lifestyles, he says, at least once a week would be a good goal.

"There are many things that we hold sacred," he says. "The table needs to be looked upon as one of those because, when you think about it, historically the table has always played a part in that, from biblical writings to mythology with King Arthur. The table has been that instrument that we have used to build a community."

So, instead of going to a movie, Smith suggests, "Why not just have a cup of soup together and some bread and chat?"

For a chef with such a star-studded resume (he also has cooked for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush), Smith is modest and down-to-earth.

"Im not a brain surgeon. Im just a cook. I think that people need to realize, too, that just a simple meal can do a lot of things. It doesnt have to be anything complicated."

One more bit of advice from this single man with a big extended family:

"When you cook, you always cook with love, because Im telling you, food thats not cooked with love just dont taste good."

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