by Julia Reed
Toss the shrimp and basil leaves in the salad.
NOTE: I used to add shelled boiled shrimp to the peas, but once I discovered my friend Virginia Willis’s method for cooking shrimp for a similar salad of corn in her excellent book, Basic to Brilliant Y’all, I do it her way. Salting and sautéing the shrimp adds an extra layer of flavor that is worth the tiny bit of extra work. You also have the bonus of the reduced shrimp stock. You can add a bit straight into the salad or really gild the lily by mixing a bit of it into homemade mayonnaise (see recipe here) and serving a dollop on the side. The trick with this salad—as with so many things—is to “toss and taste.” You might want more or less shallots; you might need more oil or vinegar. Sometimes I add chopped parsley if I have it. It’s up to you.
ROMAN STEAKS
( Yield: 4 to 6 servings )
2 ribeye steaks, cut about 1½ to 2 inches thick
Coarse salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary
2 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
½ cup good olive oil
1 lemon
Prepare a fire on the grill.
Season steaks generously with salt and pepper. In a small bowl, mix the rosemary and garlic with the oil, mashing with a spoon to make a rough paste. Spread on steaks and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours. (I try to do it on the morning before I cook that evening or, even better, overnight.)
Remove meat from the refrigerator in time for it to reach room temperature. Grill over hot coals until desired doneness, place on a cutting board, and squeeze the lemon over them. Cut into thick slices and place on warmed serving dish.
JOYCE’S FLAWLESS FLOURLESS CHOCOLATE CAKE
( Yield: 6 to 8 servings )
4 ounces fine-quality 70 percent chocolate
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter
¾ cup sugar
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and butter an 8-inch round baking pan. Line bottom with a round of wax paper and butter the paper.
Chop chocolate into small pieces. In a double boiler or metal bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water, melt the chocolate with butter, stirring until smooth. Remove top of double boiler or bowl from heat and whisk the sugar into the chocolate mixture. Add eggs and whisk well. Sift cocoa powder over chocolate mixture and whisk until just combined.
Pour batter into pan and bake in middle of oven for 25 minutes, or until top has formed a thin crust. Cool cake in the pan on a rack for 5 minutes and invert onto a serving plate.
NOTE: After being cooled completely, the cake will keep in an airtight container for one week.
LAVENDER MINT SYRUP
( Yield: 2 cups )
1 cup water
1 cup lavender sugar
1 bunch mint
Combine water and sugar in a saucepan and boil just until the sugar has dissolved. Remove pan from heat and submerge the mint in the syrup.
Let sit at least 30 minutes. Strain the syrup twice. When it has cooled, store in the refrigerator.
NOTE: Lavender sugar can be found in gourmet stores, including the wonderful Cardullo’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The brand I use, Little Sky, is available on their Web site, www.cardullos.com.
23
Shellfish Chic
The summer after my sophomore year in college, I gave a dinner for a visiting Georgetown classmate on the terrace in front of the pool house in my parents’ big backyard. I’m pretty sure it was August, so I can’t imagine why we ate outside, except maybe because my parents were inside, and I was pretending I had a life—and a house—of my own. Anyway, my friend’s name was Alexis and I didn’t know her well, but she was at such loose ends after a breakup with her boyfriend that I asked her to come home with me for a week. Then I wondered what in the world I was going to do with her.
She spoke fluent French and German, she already had a job offer at a Swiss bank (in Switzerland!), and she’d grown up in Los Angeles, where she’d gone to high school with the children of Hollywood royalty. It turned out that the comparatively exotic terrain of the Mississippi Delta was plenty to keep her entertained, but just to make sure, I made a guest list of the coolest people I could round up and a menu that was suited to the heat but also suitably elegant. Looking back, it cracks me up that I was trying so hard for this girl, but, really, we do this stuff mostly for ourselves. And since I was already an inveterate clipper of magazines, I had a sheaf of recipes from the old House & Garden food section that I was dying to try.
The dinner began with a cold cream of cucumber and avocado soup garnished with lump crab, followed by Shrimp Malacca over rice. The latter was a recipe from Maurice Moore-Betty, the dapper Irish-born cookbook author and teacher who was a great friend of James Beard, and it turned out to be, I realize now, Shrimp Creole with a generous dose of curry powder. Häagen-Dazs had just reached the freezer case of our local grocery store, which was cause for great excitement, so for dessert we had lemon sorbet with Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies, then the height of sophistication (and still, let’s face it, pretty damn delicious). There was plenty of white wine to drink and the whole evening turned out to be a big success—despite the fact that it was very likely around 90 degrees well after the sun had gone down.
That long-ago dinner turned out to be a useful blueprint. These days, I do most of my entertaining in New Orleans, where it’s at least as hot as the Delta and where shellfish is so abundant it would be crazy not to serve it all the time. No matter what the temperature, I rarely start a party without passing some incarnation of fried oysters as hors d’oeuvres. For years, I plopped them on buttered and toasted slices of baguette with a dab of homemade tartar sauce. I still do, and they are delicious, but once I added Jason Epstein’s fried oysters in lettuce boats to my repertoire, people literally started chasing down the trays as they went by.
Not only are the oysters that good, they are extraordinarily easy to make. First, slice romaine lettuce hearts in strips about two inches long—just long enough to hold an oyster. Next, take some plain old Hellman’s mayonnaise and stir in some lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and chopped chives. Put a small dollop of the mayo in the “vees” of the lettuce pieces, fry the oysters in corn flour (Zatarain’s unseasoned Fish-Fri is perfect) until crisp and golden brown, sprinkle with salt, and plop them on top of the mayo. The juxtaposition of the hot crispy oyster with the cold lettuce and mayo is reminiscent of a BLT. In fact, I’ve had chef friends gild the lily by adding crumbled bacon to the mayonnaise. Don’t do it. And don’t make homemade mayo—in this case the doctored Hellman’s is better.
I still occasionally make the soup I made for Alexis—the cool pale green of the cucumber and avocado seems to somehow take the edge off the heat. But if you are feeling especially flush, the same effect can be created with a mound of jumbo lump crab on Boston lettuce leaves topped with a generous spoonful of green goddess dressing. That too, was inspired by a friend—in this case Suzanne Rheinstein, the gifted New Orleans–born interior designer and fabulous hostess, who served it at a Southern dinner in my honor. The colors—creamy, herby celadon atop a snowy mound—are as stunning as the taste.
For a main course, Shrimp Malacca remains a winner. You can make the sauce well ahead of time and the curry is an inspired touch. It is also helpful in the hot weather. The nineteenth-century English believed that heat slowed down the digestive system and the curry powders they learned to make from the Indians worked as a stimulant.
To end the meal, “cold” and “lemon” remain my warm-weather bywords. I love the soufflé below but lemon sorbet or ice cream would also be swell, accompanied by crispy cookies. You could do worse than hauling out the bag of Bordeaux, but you could also take another leaf from Suzanne’s book and make chocolate chip cookies without the chips. They are genius. So are the Pimm’s Royales (see here) that would be the perfect cocktail to start.<
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GREEN GODDESS DRESSING
( Yield: About 2 cups )
1 bunch green onions, roughly chopped with some of the green tops
1 garlic clove, crushed
1⁄3 cup parsley, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons tarragon leaves, roughly chopped
3 tablespoons chives, roughly chopped
1 cup mayonnaise, homemade or Hellman’s
3 tablespoons lemon juice, or more to taste
3 tablespoons anchovy paste
½ cup sour cream
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Mix all ingredients except sour cream and salt and pepper in food processor until green onions and herbs are finely chopped and the mixture is well blended. Place mixture in mixing bowl and fold in sour cream. Add salt and pepper and check for seasoning.
SHRIMP MALACCA
( Yield: 8 servings )
1⁄3 cup vegetable or canola oil
2 medium yellow onions, finely diced
1 large green pepper, seeded, cored, and finely diced
2 ribs celery, peeled and diced (about ½ cup)
One 16-ounce can peeled Italian plum tomatoes
1 cup tomato puree
Generous pinch cayenne pepper
Generous pinch dried basil
2 garlic cloves, mashed with 1 teaspoon of coarse salt
2 bay leaves
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons curry powder
3 pounds medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
Heat the oil in a large heavy saucepan. Add onions, green pepper, and celery, and cook until soft, stirring occasionally.
Add tomatoes, tomato puree, cayenne, basil, garlic, bay leaves, and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil and add curry powder. Lower the heat and simmer the mixture, covered, for about 25 minutes. If the sauce seems too thick, thin it with a little seafood stock or water. Add the shrimp and simmer about 10 minutes, or until just cooked through. Serve with rice.
COLD LEMON SOUFFLÉ
( Yield: 6 to 8 servings )
3 eggs, separated, plus 1 extra egg white
1 cup sugar
½ cup water
1 tablespoon gelatin
1⁄3 cup lemon juice
Grated rind of 2 lemons
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups heavy cream
Prepare a soufflé dish with an upstanding collar of folded wax paper (you’ll want to fold it into several layers) high enough to come halfway up again over the top of the dish. Brush the paper with vegetable oil (or spray with unflavored and unscented Pam) and tie securely around the dish.
Beat egg yolks with sugar (preferably with an electric mixer) until the mixture is pale, thick, and fluffy.
Put the water in a small bowl, sprinkle in gelatin, and stir. Put the bowl over a pan of simmering water until gelatin has dissolved completely. Add a couple of tablespoons of the egg mixture to the gelatin and then carefully mix the two together. Add lemon juice, rind, and vanilla, and mix well.
Beat the 4 egg whites until stiff and fold 1⁄3 into egg mixture, then fold in the rest. Beat 1½ cups of the whipped cream until soft peaks form and fold it in.
Pour into soufflé dish and chill for at least 3 hours. Meanwhile, whip the rest of the cream. When ready to serve, peel off wax paper collar and decorate with rosettes of the whipped cream. Candied lemon peel looks pretty on top as well, or you could gently press chopped toasted almonds around the sides.
NOTE: The preparation here is the most dramatic way to present the soufflé, but serving it from a nice glass bowl is fine.
24
Weddings, Royal and Otherwise
If the rich are different from you and me, then the British royals definitely are. Queen Elizabeth is not only the Head of State of the United Kingdom and fifteen other Commonwealth realms, she has a personal net worth estimated at $500 million, she gets an annual stipend of $12.5 million, and has the use of real estate valued at $15 billion. You would think, then, that the 2011 wedding of her grandson Prince William and Kate Middleton would have been an extravaganza far, far different that the nuptial events of us mere mortals. But based on my close attention to the official royal wedding Web site before the event, as well as to the reams of news coverage during and after, it appeared to me that the whole thing was sort of, well, normal. To borrow yet another overused literary reference, it seems that like all happy families, most weddings—and the dilemmas they present—are very much alike.
First, let’s examine the guest list. The royal family, like most families with a divorce or two in the mix (which would include a huge majority of American families, since more than 50 percent of everyone on this side of the pond who gets married also gets divorced), is saddled with some former in-laws with whom there is some seriously bad blood. In this case, the pesky in-laws were the family of Princess Diana, who normally would have been seated on the groom’s side. But in a brilliant move that we should all use henceforth as a model, they were safely seated across the vast Westminster Abbey aisle with the family of the bride instead. Then, there were the required invitees. Among the many who could not be snubbed were the governors general who represent the Queen in Commonwealth realms outside the U.K., a group that includes the Right Honorable Sir Anand Satyanand of New Zealand, for example, but not, of course, our own president. Other must-have guests were members of various religious organizations, representatives of William’s charities, and members of the diplomatic corps—a situation not all that dissimilar to Elizabeth Cordes’s wedding to which she was forced to invite every single customer of the Bank of Leland, Mississippi, where her father served as president. Likewise, just before I canceled my own wedding of 1,000-plus guests, invitations had already been addressed to the entire congregation of the local First Presbyterian Church, most of my father’s political and business colleagues, and all of the bridesmaids and groomsmen from my parents’ own nuptials. Considering the fact that the Windsors have a few more responsibilities, their guest list of a mere 1,800 seems comparatively modest.
Despite the huge number, Elizabeth’s nighttime event was really beautiful and really, really fun, featuring a lavish cocktail supper and a great dance band. Unfortunately for her, she missed most of it—by the time she and her husband finished greeting the masses in the receiving line, it was almost ten P.M. and time to head off to the airport and their honeymoon. Again, I have to say that the royals have come up with an ingenious solution to the receiving line dilemma. Since William and Kate’s ceremony took place in the morning, they held a noontime reception featuring champagne and canapés. Not only is this elegant combination one of my favorites (when I finally did get married, the champagne was Churchill’s favorite, Pol Roger, and the canapés included both cucumber and watercress sandwiches and blini with ossetra), it allowed the new couple to get all the official greeting and hobnobbing out of the way before attending a more intimate dinner dance with real friends and family on the same evening.
After the dinner dance, Prince Harry took over some rooms at Buckingham Palace for a late-night disco party. Again, I am reminded of Elizabeth’s reception, which, despite the departure of the bride and groom, continued with great gusto into the not-so-wee hours of the following morning and cranked up again at an impromptu lunch, which in turn stretched into the evening. By that time, we’d run out of food and Elizabeth’s sister McGee and I were dispatched to the Wendy’s drive-through to pick up a few hundred dollars’ worth of burgers and baked potatoes for the grateful hangers-on, who were in need of restorative doses of grease and potassium, respectively. I don’t know what Harry featured on his own menu, but ours was not a bad combo to emulate. In fact, Elizabeth took it up a notch when she served late-night hamburger sliders and cones of fries at her eldest daughter’s debutante party.
Other similarities between the royals and commoners abound. In addition to the traditional tiered wedding cake, William requested his favorite chocolate biscuit cake
, which sounds a lot like our typically chocolate grooms’ cakes (though his was, thankfully, not in the shape of an armadillo, a particularly obnoxious Southern custom my friend Bobby Harling immortalized in his movie Steel Magnolias). The groom’s cakes at my own wedding were elegant petit fours iced in chocolate with my husband’s initials in white, and the wedding cake itself was a white cake flavored with almond, a simple but delicious choice we finally hit on after I made at least half a dozen more complicated samples in my mother’s kitchen, including a Lady Baltimore Cake and another with lemon curd layers.
The great thing about getting married at forty-two is that pretty much all the choices are your own, including the menu, and you are not obligated to ask a thousand of your family’s closest friends. We served our 100-plus guests the aforementioned canapés, along with an elegant jambon persille and Julia Child’s chicken mousse with foie gras. There was rare tenderloin and lots of shrimp and crabmeat and cold asparagus and celery root remoulade. It’s a menu I seem to come back to in some form or another with regard to nuptial celebrations. For my friend M. T.’s rehearsal dinner (held at my parents’ house a few months after my own wedding there) we made daube glacé and served it with asparagus vinaigrette and a huge platter featuring shrimp in a mustardy Creole remoulade sauce alongside celery root in a classic white one. There was no receiving line at either event and, unlike poor Elizabeth and her husband, we stayed—and stayed—to enjoy our own after-parties.
JAMBON PERSILLE OR PARSLEYED HAM IN ASPIC
( Yield: 10 appetizer servings )
1 bottle dry white Burgundy
¾ cup chicken stock
4 shallots
2 garlic cloves
