Long before it was fashionable in highfalutin New York circles to do so, Julia Reed was serving biscuits and ham at parties and other retro favorites your mother might have passed around at hers: pimiento sandwiches and deviled eggs and squash casserole with loads of butter and saltines (Ritz crackers if you really want to go wild) and hot crabmeat canapes.

These days, comfort food is all the rage, but six years ago, for Ms. Reed's arugula-and-goat-cheese-weary guests, it was a revelation. The morning after one such gathering, the Mississippi-born, Manhattan-and-New-Orleans-based Vogue writer got a call from a New York Times editor inviting her to write about food, which she's done ever since, for the Times and, more recently, Newsweek -- and now, many of her essays are collected in a beguiling new book, "Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (With Recipes)" (St. Martin's Press, $23.95).

For all those hosts and hostesses out there obsessing about The Next Big Thing in holiday party food, it may be instructive to remember Ms. Reed's mother's common-sense dictum: "Why not serve something that tastes good?"

"I think a lot of people are used to eating dried-out snow peas piped with some weird-tasting fish paste, and here they were at my party eating biscuits and yeast rolls with tenderloin," said Ms. Reed.

A tall, striking woman with a smoky Southern drawl, Ms. Reed made a stop in Pittsburgh in October, appearing alongside gossip columnist Liz Smith and Judith "Miss Manners" Martin at the Governor's Conference on Women before several thousand women to talk about WowOwow.com, a Web site she and a bunch of other high-powered women (Ms. Smith, Joan Ganz Cooney, Marlo Thomas, Peggy Noonan, Candice Bergen et al.) founded.

But in a sit-down interview with Ms. Reed before her appearance, food and her philosophy of entertaining were Topic A.

She waxed rhapsodic about the virtues of a good Ramos gin fizz -- just the thing to liven up a party -- and the Sidecar, "one of the world's great drinks." She raved about spinach and artichoke casserole (with lots of butter and Ritz crackers), stuffed pork chops and bacon-braised mustard greens.

Many of the recipes in "Ham Biscuits" are quite rich, but the book is about party food, after all. And while they're mostly easy to follow, even Ms. Reed, a big believer in homemade, has her limits.

"In the South, every woman has her own recipe for homemade yeast rolls," she sighed. "Well, I'm not that much of a masochist."

Instead she orders them online -- and you read it here first -- from Sister Schubert's (sisterschuberts.com), a secret "my Yankee editor wouldn't let me put in the book because it would blow his own entertaining strategies."

Familiar in New York literary circles, Ms. Reed is making her mark these days as a Southern writer, author of one best-selling memoir, "The Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena," and "The House on First Street," which recounts how she came to live in New Orleans -- and stayed, post-Katrina.

"When the restaurants reopened in New Orleans, they did such a great service because it was about people having places to go. You'd walk into these warm rooms, where there was laughing and candlelight and eating and drinking with abandon. It was about the camaraderie and just the relief of seeing other faces and, I think, most of us feel that way after a bad week. You don't have to have a devastating hurricane to just want to kick back."

In the end, Ms. Reed's credo is simple: Serve your guests "straightforward, delicious food, not overwrought stuff on a plate. When I see one of those garnishes I just want to drop-kick it across the room," she said, letting out a big raucous laugh.

You won't want to drop-kick these dishes, even if you could.