El Paso Chile Company

It may seem tired to talk of yet another form of regional American cooking, but the recipes of the Texas-New Mexico-Old Mexico hybrid known as New Southwestern cuisine are worth exploring for their natural mixing of the hearty and the exotic. A recipe for El Paso chile hamburgers, for example, combines standard ingredients like ground chuck and hamburger buns with chilies, jalapenos, and smoked jalapeno-lime mayonnaise. Native recipes like salpicon (shredded beef salad with chipotle dressing) and cream of green chile soup, along with a chapter on game cooking, set the book apart from other contenders in its Tex-Mex/Mexican/Chili Pepper cookbook subgenre. Less appealing, however, is the writing, which is sincere but at times cute and banal (``Opening a jar of one of our products is like taking a first bite; opening the pages of this book and heading for the kitchen we hope will make you really wnat to tuck in''). The Kerrs are founders of the specialty food company that gives the book its title; McLaughlin is the founding chef of the Manhattan Chili Company, a restaurant in New York City. Illustrations not seen by PW. (June)