by Julia Reed
Its utter deliciousness brings me to another important point: there is no shame in the occasional canned or packaged ingredient. Nora Ephron put packaged onion soup mix in her justifiably famous meatloaf, and hundreds of hostesses across the South were at a complete loss when Kraft quit making its jalapeño cheese roll (most often referred to as “nippy cheese”), the key ingredient in Spinach Madeleine. The spicy spinach dish was invented by St. Francisville, Louisiana, native Madeline Wright in 1956, and when it appeared three years later in the first edition of River Road Recipes, published by the Junior League of Baton Rouge, it immediately put the cookbook on the map. “If there were an Academy Award for cookbooks, the Oscar for Best Performance would go hands down to River Road Recipes,” pronounced no less an expert than Craig Claiborne.
Then, of course, there is the mighty Ritz cracker, without which at least half my mother’s entire repertoire would be decimated. She fries eggplant and green tomatoes in crushed Ritz crackers, uses them in place of bread crumbs or the lowly saltine in squash soufflés, and puts them on top of pretty much every casserole she makes, including her own now famous spinach dish, V.D. Spinach. So named because she served it to every “visiting dignitary” (from Bill and Pat Buckley to Ronald Reagan) who passed through our house, V.D. Spinach was chosen for inclusion in The Essential New York Times Cookbook, despite the fact that it includes frozen chopped spinach, Philadelphia cream cheese, and canned artichoke hearts.
I’ve also learned that Arkansas Travelers may well be the best tomatoes in the world, and all tomatoes are improved by peeling them. This latter point has been driven home to me all my life by my mother, who once peeled several hundred tomatoes for the Katrina refugees who had evacuated to Greenville’s convention center as accompaniments to—what else?—fried chicken. A couple of summers ago, my friends Ben and Libby Page hosted a brunch in Nashville at which they peeled and served huge platters of various heirloom varieties alongside their collection of Irish crystal salt cellars containing various salts from around the world. This added a decidedly chic element to every Southerner’s favorite summer pleasure. When I visited Ben and Libby at their Tennessee farm afterward, we had tomatoes from their garden with two or three different salts, as well as skillet corn and squash casserole, a revered summer trinity which leads me to my last point: Southerners have been doing “farm to table”—mostly by necessity—since long before the phrase was taken up by every foodie in the land.
There is a reason, after all, why Mark Twain sent a lengthy bill of fare home ahead of him after he’d spent so much time in Europe. Among the things he’d missed the most were: “Virginia bacon, broiled;… peach cobbler, Southern style; butter beans; sweet potatoes; green corn cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper; succotash; soft shell crabs.” I am reminded again of Wyatt Cooper, as well as of the fact that pretty much the only thing I remember from my aforementioned meals in France was a side of tiny haricots verts just picked from L’Oustau de Baumanière’s garden and drenched in fresh butter. And then there’s the exchange between Katharine Ann Porter and William Faulkner that occurred at a swanky French restaurant that was probably Maxim’s. They had dined well and enjoyed a fair amount of Burgundy and port, but at the end of the meal Faulkner’s eyes glazed over a bit and he said, “Back home the butter beans are in, the speckled ones,” to which a visibly moved Porter could only respond, “Blackberries.” Now I’ve repeated this exchange in print at least once before, and it is hardly new, but I don’t care. No matter who we are or where we’ve been, we are all, apparently, “leveled” by the same thing: our love of our sometimes lowly, always luscious cuisine—our love, in short, of home.
Since my own home was the site of many a festive dinner featuring V.D. Spinach, I include it below even though I’ve published it before. It is simply too good and too easy not to. I also include a reworked Spinach Madeleine, long a staple at my mother’s holiday parties. Mama serves it in a silver chafing dish surrounded by toast points, but it’s also pretty much the exact same dip that the Houston’s restaurant chain serves with tortilla chips and salsa to very good effect. After Kraft killed the crucial “nippy cheese,” the Junior League scrambled and posted a replacement recipe on its Web site substituting chopped fresh jalapeños and Velveeta. Word is that Madeline herself finds the Velveeta too watery and the version below features actual cheddar, plus a few of my own additions.
The squash casserole is my mother’s, based on a version made by her childhood cook, Eleanor, and the blackberry cobbler, adapted from Chez Panisse Desserts by the brilliant Lindsey Shere, is the best I’ve ever had. If the blackberries are especially beautiful, I use them exclusively. But the cobbler is also delicious with a mix of blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries, which lends a patriotic touch for Memorial Day and Fourth of July celebrations.
V.D. SPINACH
( Yield: 6 to 8 servings )
1 tablespoon butter, for greasing the baking dish
Two 10-ounce packages frozen chopped spinach
½ cup butter, melted, plus 1 tablespoon butter, melted, for the topping
One 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
One 14-ounce can artichoke hearts, drained and halved
1 cup coarse Ritz cracker crumbs
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a shallow 2-quart casserole.
Cook the spinach according to the package directions. Drain well, pressing hard against the strainer or colander to get as much water as possible out. Place in a mixing bowl and add the ½ cup of melted butter, the cream cheese, and the lemon juice and mix well.
Place the artichoke heart halves evenly over the bottom of the casserole. Cover with the spinach mixture and smooth the top.
Cover the top with the Ritz crumbs, drizzle with 1 tablespoon (or more if needed) of melted butter, and bake on the middle rack until bubbly in the center and lightly browned on the top, about 25 minutes.
SPINACH MADELEINE
( Yield: 6 to 8 servings )
2 packages frozen chopped spinach
4 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
½ cup evaporated milk
¼ cup finely chopped onion
2 teaspoons finely chopped jalapeño peppers
1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
2 garlic cloves, pressed
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1½ teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 pinch cayenne pepper
Cook spinach according to directions on the package. Drain and reserve ½ cup of the liquor.
Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat. Whisk in flour until blended and smooth but not brown. Add onions and cook until soft. Slowly add milk and spinach liquor, stirring constantly to avoid lumps. Continue stirring and cook until smooth and thick.
Add remaining ingredients to the white sauce and stir until the cheese has melted. Taste for seasonings—you may want more heat in the form of the chopped jalapeño and/or cayenne, as well as more salt.
NOTE: This may be served immediately, as a side dish or a dip. If the latter, you may want to double the recipe, place in a chafing dish, and surround with toast points. Or, it can be placed in a buttered casserole or gratin dish and topped with buttered bread crumbs, or a mixture of buttered bread crumbs and grated Parmesan cheese. Put the dish in a 350-degree oven until the crumbs are brown.
JUDY’S SQUASH CASSEROLE
( Yield: 8 servings )
8 yellow crookneck squash, about 2½ to 3 pounds
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, plus 1 tablespoon for greasing casserole and 3 tablespoons for topping
1 sweet onion, finely chopped
½ teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon dried basil
2 hard-boiled eggs
1⁄3 cup sour cream
1⁄3 cup heavy cream
1 sleeve Ritz crackers
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a shallow 2-quart baking dish.
Scrub and trim squash and slice thickly. Place slices in the bowl of a food processor, and process until diced fairly finely. (You will likely have to do this in at least two batches.)
Melt butter in large heavy skillet and sauté onion until translucent. Add squash, sugar, salt, pepper, and basil. Cook until squash is tender and transfer to a large mixing bowl.
Push eggs through a sieve and add to squash with sour cream and heavy cream. Mix well.
Crush crackers. (You don’t want to get them too fine—the easiest way to do it is to roll up the cracker sleeves in a dish towel and pound with a rolling pin.) Melt 3 tablespoons butter and toss with crumbs. Pour squash mixture into baking dish, top with the buttered crumbs, and bake for about 45 minutes, until the squash is bubbling and the topping is nice and brown.
THE BEST BLACKBERRY COBBLER
( Yield: 6 to 8 servings )
4½ cups blackberries
1⁄3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon flour
FOR THE BISCUIT TOPPING
1½ cups flour
3⁄8 teaspoon salt
1½ tablespoons sugar
2¼ teaspoons baking powder
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
¾ cup whipping cream
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Toss berries with the sugar and flour and set aside. (If the berries are especially juicy, add another half tablespoon of flour.)
Mix the dry ingredients for the biscuit dough. (If you use salted butter, add only a pinch of salt.) Cut in the butter with two forks or a pastry blender until it looks like coarse cornmeal. (You may also use a food processor.) Add the cream and mix lightly until the mixture is just moistened.
Put the berries in a 1½ quart gratin or baking dish. Make patties of the dough about 2½ inches in diameter and ½ inch thick. Arrange them over the top of the berries. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes until the topping is brown and the berry juices bubble around it.
2
The Society Diet
In Nan Kempner’s coffee-table book on entertaining, R.S.V.P., there is a luncheon menu from Marie-Chantal, the wife of Crown Princess Pavlos of Greece. It consists of: a soup made of grapefruit juice with pureed cucumber, celery, and tomato; a soufflé made with low-fat cheese, no butter, six egg whites, and only two egg yolks; and “individual lemon tarts” that are devoid of pastry crusts and billed as “no-guilt sweet treats.” In the photographs, the hostess and her guests are all very stylish and very skinny, and the French chef who dreamed up the “spa menu” is especially attractive. But the whole thing brings to mind Ruth Draper’s priceless monologue “Diets and Doctors,” in which a woman and her three guests get a much-coveted table at an extremely fashionable restaurant and they each turn out to be on a rigid diet. The hostess/Draper character must then ask the French waiter for such off-the-menu items as a single cold, boiled turnip (“Will you make it your personal choice and serve it attractively?”), raw carrots (“Just wash them, she wants the whole bunch”), and the juice of eleven lemons (“She’s on the one hundred lemon cure.… What courage!”). She then trumps them all by ordering nothing for herself (“No thanks, I don’t take anything”).
Now, in these days of routine juicing, cleansing, and all-vegan, gluten-free diets, Draper’s monologue has morphed from send-up to borderline serious, and I feel sure that Marie-Chantal’s guests were all of like minds (except for their children, who were allowed to eat spaghetti). But in general, I have a thing about hosts imposing their diet regimens on their guests, and about guests who make outrageous requests that don’t have anything to do with a life-threatening condition. (This may well come from the fact that when I was in boarding school at Madeira, in Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., the headmistress, Jean Harris, put the entire, already culinarily deprived student body on the Scarsdale Diet. We did not know until she subsequently shot and killed Dr. Herman Tarnower in his bed that she had been romantically involved with the diet’s creator.)
Revlon founder Charles Revson’s dinner was invariably a single can of water packed tuna unmolded on a plate. If he were dining out, his chauffeur would deliver one to his hosts in the afternoon. After one of then Vice President Dick Cheney’s heart episodes, I attended a dinner at the British Embassy and noticed that Cheney was served a plate of pineapple and blueberries for dessert while the rest of us got a gooey chocolate mousse. The embassy’s social director told me later that the kitchen had made the choice for him, to be thoughtful, so we’ll never know for sure if that’s what he really wanted. I’m betting not, but then I’m a big believer in free will at the table—something that has occasionally been in short supply in Washington, particularly at the White House.
In FDR, A Centenary Remembrance, Joe Alsop, the columnist who was a cousin of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as a great gourmand, writes that Eleanor “had imported a nutritionist to be the presidential housekeeper, and year after year this woman showed that nutritionists may well know how to make food healthful, but scorn to make it appetizing or even edible. The salads were especially deplorable … and might even conceal bits of marshmallow in their dreadful depths.” It was so bad, reports Alsop, that Martha Gellhorn, invited to dinner along with her fiancé Ernest Hemingway, ate a plateful of sandwiches prior to the party—“nor was she the only precautionary sandwich-eater among those accustomed to the White House cuisine … I suspected then that this extreme Puritanism about food in a house whose master liked to eat well … was another manifestation of Eleanor Roosevelt’s detestation of anything savoring of worldly ways. She equated plain living with high thinking, so it was moral to eat badly.”
As it happens, the chicest, thinnest people always seem to serve the best, most luxurious food. My maternal grandmother, who was a frequent guest at Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance Beauty Spa, could live for weeks on some combination of jellied consommé, gin, and cottage cheese. But on the cook’s night off, she always made my grandfather creamed chicken on toast, one of the two things she knew how to make. (The other, made with similar amounts of butter and cream, was a delicious hot chocolate sauce.) During the Duchess of Windsor’s first marriage, she was too poor to hire a cook, so she taught herself from the fairly hearty Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Even after she married the Prince of Wales she was known to serve fried chicken, and included a recipe for it in her own book, Some Favorite Southern Recipes of the Duchess of Windsor, whose proceeds from its sales went toward the war effort. Renowned hostess Pat Buckley once told me she thought of her typical ladies lunch entrée of “filet of sole or soft shell crabs meunière,” as light fare. When I pointed out that both dishes are swimming in butter, she said, “Well, I don’t serve them salads. I like to think of myself as a purveyor of good food.” The rail-thin Buckley also professed not to be able to live without two desserts a day, nor could she imagine a soufflé without cream or butter. “They don’t taste like anything.”
The great fashion designer Bill Blass might have made clothes for “social x-rays,” but he made a point of serving what he called “real American food” like corn fritters, pineapple upside-down cake, and the meatloaf that became his signature. A 1970s ad for his perfume featured a list of his “likes” and “dislikes” with regard to women, and the first entry in the “dislikes” column was “A woman who talks about dieting all the time.” The first time I had lunch with him, in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, he chastised the waiter for being chintzy with the white truffle he shaved over our fettuccine. At my last lunch with Blass, in his Connecticut country house just a month or so before he died, we had an heirloom tomato salad with red onion and purple basil, along with a heaping platter of egg salad sandwiches, salami sandwiches, and roast beef and Brie sandwiches, accompanied by his favorite sweet pickled green tomatoes.
Sadly, too many hosts and hostesses are not nearly as adept (or fearle
ss) as Blass and Buckley and they end up putting their guests on a sort of accidental diet. After Evangeline Bruce’s husband died, she took to entertaining via regular Sunday brunches—except that they weren’t really brunches at all, but stand-up midday cocktail parties with entirely unappetizing things like plain, hard-boiled quails’ eggs passed on trays decorated with enormous “nests” of seaweed. In Sally Quinn’s book The Party, she recalls one of these affairs at which poor Princess Margaret kept knocking back bourbon and refusing what she took to be the “hors d’oeuvres” in favor of the sit-down meal that never came—much to the distress of her increasingly nervous escort.
After the Princess Margaret episode, Quinn’s husband, Ben Bradlee, refused to attend any more of Bruce’s midday parties, which is actually more polite than going and refusing what is offered. Since ancient times, food has been “the symbol of fellowship with the host,” writes Margaret Visser in The Rituals of Dinner. “To refuse food is to reject the fellowship, and also to prevent the host from playing the hostly role, which is to confer honor.” Visser quotes one Baronne Staffe, who is especially firm on the subject. “If dishes are failures you do not notice. You eat bravely what is offered as if it were good.” Baronne Staffe’s example of a perfect guest is “a heroic Frenchman visiting England who drank … and pronounced excellent a ‘frightful beverage’ offered to him as a rare wine,” only to learn that he had been served medicine by mistake.