by Julia Reed
NOTE: The trick to a good pecan pie is to salt, butter, and toast the pecans first. You may of course use bourbon with this recipe, preferably a good small-batch brand.
26
Visions of Sugarplums
Several years ago I went on a wishful shopping spree and ended up with a closet full of fabulous frocks and shoes and evening bags, all perfect for a holiday party. The only problem was that nobody was having one—or at least not the kind that demanded a black velvet YSL gown, a navy silk Oscar de la Renta cocktail dress, or a pair of purple satin Manolo Blahnik pumps. So I wrote a piece in Vogue bemoaning the lack of truly festive holiday entertaining and I got a boatload of letters back from people who were equally starved.
I said that what I really wanted for Christmas was a return to the glam parties of my youth. Not to an office Christmas party like in the movies, where everybody gets drunk and wears funny hats and somebody invariably gets caught with somebody else on top of the Xerox machine. Nor did I mean a real-life office party, one of those boring corporate affairs usually held in restaurants where they start setting tables for real customers at eight o’clock so that everybody has to clear out. (And the ones that drag on are even worse, full of all that obligatory camaraderie—there’s no romance, no glamour, not even the hint of surprise.) What I had hoped for that year, and pretty much every year since, was a real old-fashioned holiday party, one that’s big and lavish and even a little magical, where all the guests look beautiful and behave accordingly—a party like the one in the opening scene of The Nutcracker (my favorite version is Mikhail Baryshnikov’s, because the wife gets a diamond necklace just before the guests arrive).
When I was nine, my mother had three of these parties back-to-back, with at least a hundred people each, and I got to wear the blue velvet dress with the white lace collar I wore in my aunt’s wedding as I took the coats at the door. A sexy Englishman I’d never seen before tipped me with a two-dollar bill, which I kept for years as a souvenir, a link not only to this unspeakably handsome man but also to the soigné night in which I had played a tiny part. My mother had a different outfit for each party, and my favorite was a white silk crepe pantsuit, with narrow pants and a short-sleeved tunic that had a sort of Greek key neckline adorned with hunky glass sapphires, emeralds, and rubies. It was very Versace and very chic and I would wear it now myself, but for the fact that about two minutes before the guests arrived my little brother threw a cup of Welch’s grape juice from his high chair onto my mother’s snow-white front, and she had to change into the red-and-gold plaid hostess skirt and red satin blouse she’d worn the night before.
I will never forget the preparations that went into those parties, the garland everywhere and the enormous tree with what seemed like hundreds of strings of tiny white lights and the dozens and dozens of votive candles that had to be lit with long matches at the very last minute. There were bartenders in white jackets and hordes of people in the kitchen buttering homemade rolls and making horseradish sauce for the tenderloin, adding sherry to the Seafood Newburg. And the guests made an effort, too—they looked different, better, far more glamorous than they did at any other time in the year. The ladies wore hairpieces or even tinsel in their hair, and dark eye makeup and big earrings (this was the sixties); the men wore red vests and holly pants and ties with tiny Christmas trees. They laughed more and talked faster. Their cheeks were flushed and their senses heightened. Turned on by the brisk weather, or the pine scent, or the booze, or the sheer built-in anticipation of the season, they all acted as if they knew something exciting and wonderful was going to happen before the evening ended—they just didn’t know what it was yet. New Year’s parties are always awful because they are about pressure (to have fun, to get drunk, to be kissed); at their best, Christmas parties are about possibility. School’s out and work’s over and people’s houses aren’t their houses anymore—the furniture’s all rearranged to make room for the Christmas tree; angels fly from the ceiling. They’ve become sets, and the thing about sets is that whatever happens inside them is fantasy.
In these trying times, all of us are overdue for a touch of fantasy, not to mention possibility. We owe it to ourselves to do more than just get through with work and finish shopping and frantically send FedEx packages. I do not want to race to a finish line that involves sweaters and sweatpants and Netflix. I’m ready for some sugarplums to be dancing in my head; I want my pulse to quicken as I mount someone’s front steps and push open a door to discover something intimate and grand at the same time. I want to see people I love and people I’ll want to. And I want to dress up, a lot. One year for the annual holiday bash her parents used to throw, my friend M. T. bought a red taffeta gown with a full skirt and a tight bodice marked by a breathtakingly low ruffled neckline. Her grandmother took one look at it and told her that people would talk and she said, “Oh, Nana, if they only would.” Exactly.
The first clothes I wore to holiday parties were the ones I got for Christmas. We always had lots of people over on Christmas night, and my earliest ensembles at these events included an Indian-chief costume with full headdress from FAO Schwarz and a gypsy dress with a black velvet sequined bodice and a multicolored striped satin skirt. The other girls wore red or green velvet dresses and the boys wore matching jumpers or pants with white oxfords, and we would drink sparkling Catawba grape juice and pretend it was champagne, and set off Roman candles on the front porch, and eat dressing balls and bourbon balls, and spy on the adults, which we could not wait to be.
Since our house was the venue for Christmas, the McGees threw an enormous party on Christmas Eve. The first year I didn’t have to go upstairs and eat cookies and drink punch with the children was a major milestone in my life. Downstairs, the drinks were served in silver julep cups and there were all kinds of things in chafing dishes to eat with toast points, and red velvet cake and caramel cakes, and women with long legs and long necks sitting on the stairs, looking up with bright eyes and naughty smiles at the men they were talking to. One year at one of these parties I kissed a man on the roof of the house (it was Victorian, and you could walk right out the upstairs dormer windows and find a level place to stand); another year a man got locked in the bathroom (adorned with greenery and red and white bunting and scented Christmas candles) and there was so much noise that nobody heard him, so he called his babysitter at home and told her to call back and tell whoever answered the phone to come and find him. It took the babysitter three tries to find anybody who cared enough to stop what they were doing long enough to get him out.
A few years later at one of my parents’ shindigs, an old beau of mine—uninvited—walked through the front door at midnight, sat down, and started playing the piano. The next thing I knew someone had woken up my neighbor to get a guitar, and somebody else found a tambourine, and we stuck holly in our hair and drank gin and danced and made up song lyrics about, of all things, the fall of the Ceauescus and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. (This, obviously, was in 1989; one of the few lines I still recall is “Dubek is a redneck.”) I remember that I had on a very short iridescent green velvet dress and earrings so long they grazed my shoulders, and that my fiancé at the time had gone to bed extremely early. It was raining so hard when it was finally time to go that everybody’s cars got stuck in the front yard. So we ate breakfast and sang some more instead.
That was a long time ago and, unfortunately, one of the last great Christmas parties I’ve been to. Recently, I asked a friend of mine how long it had been since she’d been to a great one and she said never. I feel like I owe it to her and to me and to everybody else I know to step in and take up the banner once carried by my mother and all her friends. Their parties always included at least one chafing dish filled with the aforementioned Seafood Newburg and another with Spinach Madeleine (see here). My mother served tenderloin on yeast rolls with horseradish sauce, and paper-thin slices of the country ham my grandmother sent from Tennessee on biscuits or more rolls with hot mustard. I’m going t
o do all that and more, including passing plenty of hors d’oeuvres and canapés and making at least one of the holiday punches here and here. With any luck someone will end up smooching on the roof.
JULIA CHILD’S ROQUEFORT CHEESE BALLS
( Yield: About 24 balls )
½ pound Roquefort or other good blue cheese
4 to 6 tablespoons softened butter
1½ tablespoons minced chives
1 tablespoon finely minced celery
Pinch of cayenne pepper
1⁄8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Salt, if needed
2 teaspoons cognac (you may substitute 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce)
½ cup fine, stale, white bread crumbs
2 tablespoons very finely minced parsley
Crush the cheese in a bowl with 4 tablespoons of the butter and work it into a smooth paste. Beat in the chives, celery, seasonings, and cognac. If mixture is very stiff, beat in more butter by fractions. Check seasoning carefully, adding salt if necessary. Roll into balls about ½ inch in diameter.
Toss bread crumbs and parsley in a bowl and turn out onto a plate. Roll the cheese balls in the mixture so they are well covered. Chill.
WATERMELON PICKLE HORS D’OEUVRES
( Yield: About 20 pieces )
One (10-ounce) jar Haddon House Sweet Pickled Watermelon Rind
10 pieces bacon, cut in half
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Drain watermelon. Roll bacon around each piece and secure with a toothpick. Place on ungreased cookie sheet and bake until bacon is well browned, about 20 minutes.
NOTE: This is the world’s easiest hors d’oeuvre and people go crazy for it. For the bacon, use plain old Oscar Mayer or Bryan or a similar brand—this doesn’t work with thick-cut bacon and you don’t need applewood smoked or anything else remotely fancy. For the pickles, if I’m eating them plain, I like a less sweet (read homemade) watermelon pickle. But for this recipe, the syrup of the Haddon House pickle is the perfect foil for the salty bacon, and the result is a caramelized piece of perfection.
SEAFOOD NEWBURG
( Yield: About 8 to 10 cups )
1½ sticks butter
4 tablespoons minced shallots
5 cups cooked shellfish, cut into ½-inch pieces
1 cup sherry or Madeira
3 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon white pepper
Cayenne pepper
4 tablespoons of flour
3 cups heavy cream
3 egg yolks
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 cups sliced button mushrooms, sautéed in butter and seasoned with salt and white pepper
1½ teaspoons paprika
In a large saucepan, melt 1 stick of the butter, add shallots, and cook for 1 to 2 minutes over low heat, until just softened. Add shellfish and wine and bring to a simmer. Raise heat slightly, and cook until liquid has almost completely boiled away. Season with salt, white pepper, and a pinch of cayenne, and set aside.
In a large saucepan, melt the remaining half stick of butter, sprinkle in the flour, whisking constantly, and cook slowly for 2 or 3 minutes. Do not allow to color. Remove from heat. Bring 2 cups cream to a boil and stir it into the flour mixture. Bring mixture back to a boil and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.
Beat egg yolks and remaining cup of cream in a bowl. Remove sauce from heat and beat it into the bowl in ¼-cup increments. Return to saucepan and boil, stirring, for 1 minute. It should be pretty thick.
Stir in lemon juice and paprika. Fold in mushrooms and seafood and check seasoning.
For cocktail parties, serve in a chafing dish with toast points (triangles of Pepperidge Farm or similarly good white bread, crusts off, and baked in a 250-degree oven until completely dry but not brown). For a main course, serve over rice or puff pastry shells.
NOTE: I usually use a combination of shrimp and crabmeat because that’s easiest to put my hands on where I live, but lobster is wonderful in it, of course, as are scallops. Mix and match or use all four. Some people like a bit of nutmeg and I usually add a bit of cognac or Worcestershire in the end, and maybe a touch more sherry too. As always, the trick is to taste. It should be rich in flavor and luxurious in texture.
BOURBON BALLS
( Yield: About 36 balls )
One 12-ounce box Nilla wafers, pulverized to a fine crumb in a food processor
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 cup powdered sugar, plus more for rolling
1 cup finely chopped pecans
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
½ cup bourbon
Combine all ingredients in a large mixing bowl and mix well. Form into 1-inch balls and roll in powdered sugar. Stored in an airtight container and refrigerated, the balls will keep for up to 2 weeks.
27
Green Day
One of the things I like most about the Mississippi Delta in general, and my hometown of Greenville specifically, is that it has always had a cosmopolitan mix of cultures and nationalities. When the city was incorporated after the Civil War (during which it had been burned in the Siege of Vicksburg), the first elected mayor was Jewish, as were the owners of the first businesses to open. Since 1900, the majority of the citizenry have been African American, but there is also a sizeable Syrian population, as well as large numbers of Chinese and Southern Italians. What we have never had in any number significant enough to mention are Irish Americans.
This fact did not stop my mother (who, like the rest of my family, is predominantly English) from throwing me a St. Patrick’s Day party when I was in the second grade. She hung beribboned construction paper shamrocks from the dining-room chandelier, commissioned a sheet cake with green and white icing from Mrs. McGraw’s Bakery, and made cucumber sandwiches on rounds of white bread with homemade mayonnaise. There’s a picture of me drinking punch made of lime sherbet and ginger ale, and I remember being quietly pleased that I had the kind of mother who would throw what was surely the only St. Patrick’s Day party in town. It was also the last—for whatever reason, the Celtic spirit never moved her again.
More than a decade later, I acquired a far more experienced tutor in the art of St. Patrick’s Day enjoyment, my Georgetown roommate, Anne Marie Elizabeth Flaherty. Anne (nicknamed “Flaradise” by my youngest brother, who is still much taken with her paradisical charms) grew up in Boston, a city where almost 20 percent of the citizenry still refer to themselves as Irish and where close to a million people turn out for the city’s St. Pat’s celebration (which has included dying the Charles River green). Anne has a sister named Kerry and a brother named Danny and is so devoted to the patron saint of her home country that she imports the customs of his feast day wherever she goes.
The first time I witnessed this in action was during spring break of our sophomore year, when she accompanied me home to Greenville. Given the aforementioned population breakdown, she clearly needed to arrive well armed and she did. Not only did she pack an entirely green wardrobe, she brought an extra-large bottle of green food coloring, a useful prop that enabled her to dye every draft beer in every bar we visited. The more beer we dyed, the more popular we became, and that particular St. Pat’s Day still lives on in the memory of many a townsperson.
Since then, I’ve made numerous trips to Anne’s mother country, where I learned to appreciate the slightly more sophisticated pleasures of Black Velvets and Irish whiskey, preferably consumed in the exquisitely proportioned No. 27 Bar in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. A stunning view of St. Stephen’s Green is afforded through the enormous Georgian windows and a perfect lunch can be had in the form of a dozen briny West Coast oysters followed by a plate of luxurious smoked salmon. Add lamb to the mix and you have pretty much the national diet of Ireland, as well as three of my very favorite foods of all time.
As the always hilarious—and spot-on—Dave Barry once wrote, “Geographically, Ireland is a medium-sized rural island that is slowly and steadily being consumed by sheep.” The answer, obviously, is
to consume them instead, a habit Americans have been embarrassingly slow to embrace. We eat less than a pound of lamb per capita a year, compared with a whopping 66 pounds of beef and 51 pounds of pork. The Irish, on the other hand, eat a lot of lamb—14 pounds per person to be exact, which is the same amount consumed by the English and the Spanish.
They all know what we’re missing: lamb is high in protein, iron, and B vitamins, and low in fat; unlike beef, lamb contains almost no internal marbling. Not only is the majority of the fat the “good” polyunsaturated kind, it’s on the outside and easily trimmed. More important, it is delicious—and the perfect centerpiece to a St. Patrick’s Day feast.
To begin, I start off with a salmon rillettes recipe from another Irish Anne, Anne Kearney, the former chef at New Orleans’s much-missed Peristyle, who is now chef/owner of Rue Dumaine in her native Ohio. Anne still makes this lush blend of poached and smoked salmon, but fortunately she shared her recipe with me before she left town so I don’t have to fly to Dayton to enjoy it. The lamb shoulder roast that I serve as the main course is perfect for dinner parties because you can make it ahead of time and let it sit in its sauce, which is lovely on the plate mingling with a dollop of buttery “champ.” The latter is a beloved Irish dish of potatoes mashed with scallions (as well as the derivation of the phrase “as thick as champ,” a description which is never meant as a compliment).