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CHAPTER THREE

Grand Openings (Appetizers, Canapés, and Such)

When it comes to appetizers, you can be as plain or fancy as your talents and your budget allow. We are trying here, though, to keep the budget at a minimum, and in the case of appetizers that greatly simplifies things.

APPETIZERS & HORS D’OEUVRES

The simplest appetizer, served as a first course at dinner, might be nothing more than a small glass of well-chilled tomato juice served with a lemon wedge.

Another delightful opening to dinner is a shrimp or oyster cocktail, and involves no more than opening a can of shrimp or oysters (or thawing out a frozen package), and serving them in something as simple as a sherbet glass, topped with a prepared sauce.

The present tendency is to eliminate the appetizer course in favor of serving canapés or hors d’oeuvres, so that a number of delicacies that were formerly considered as appropriate appetizers are now classed as hors d’oeuvres. In the main these are rather complicated recipes. The beginning cook is going to have enough to do with the main part of the meal, so let’s keep things simple.

We must keep in mind that in general cocktails and such are a prelude to dinner—plan accordingly, so that guests are not overfed, or their appetites jaded by the time they arrive at table.

As a suggestion for something light, you might glance back at the section on vegetables and see which ones are edible as raw relishes. Two or three of these, cut to bite-sized pieces and arranged over shaved or cracked ice is a most attractive and delicious prelude. You might even arrange to have a dunk for the vegetables to be dipped in. Here’s a real simple one:

To one-half pint sour cream add one tablespoon chili sauce, one teaspoon dry mustard, one grated onion, one teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce, one tablespoon chopped chives, one-half teaspoon salt, and one-half teaspoon cracked pepper. Mix well and chill for one hour before serving as a dunk for raw vegetables.

CANAPÉS

In recent years I’ve noticed a trend away from the almost tasteless canapé that the Ladies’ Aid used to serve at their teas. I’m sure you’ve seen the kind—those little things made up of different kinds of bread arranged to form stripes, checkerboards, et cetera; and all pasted together with some tasteless variety of cream cheese. I’m sure there are few people that will regret their passing. I know I won’t hang a black wreath on my door.

Tell me I ain’t got no couth—but I like chips and dips. They’re easy, they’re cheap, they go well with almost anything, and I’ve never noticed any problem with leftovers.

With the number of crackers (mercy, have you seen the sizes, shapes, and flavors on your grocer’s shelf?), toasts, etc., available, you can have a wild time cruising the aisles for the chips part of your dish. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to consider potato and corn chips as a possibility.

And wild as you may get in your cruising (if it’s a good night), don’t get too wild on the buying. If your plan is to let your guest do their own dipping, I would recommend no more than two or three varieties. If you plan to spread crackers yourself as a sort of canapé, you may consider as many as eight (keeping in mind your storage space, your time, and your purse).

DIPS

The old standby among dips is the California or onion dip, made very simply by combining a package of dried onion soup mix with one pint sour cream and allowing it to mellow in the refrigerator for an hour or so.

This next one is easy too, but is a little too thick for dipping, so you should serve it with a small knife so your guests can spread their own crackers; or to be a little more elegant, you might spread the crackers yourself in advance, arrange on a tray, and cover until time to serve. Anyhow, all you do is mix one-half pound of liverwurst with one finely chopped onion and one finely chopped green pepper—add a dash or two of tabasco sauce and enough Burgundy wine to soften the mixture sufficiently for spreading.

If you do the spreading yourself, you might want to dress up these canapés by putting a little something on top: say, an anchovy (some people like them), a slice of stuffed olive, a shrimp or a small sprig of parsley. Can you think of anything else? Mary!!!!!!

There are many soft and flavorful cheeses on the market too that you can use in the same way as the liverwurst spread. Simply lay it on and decorate, with any of the foregoing suggestions or even a piece of tomato, a dash of paprika, or a few capers.

Another dip that will offer your guests a contrast in flavors is a minced clam dip—almost as simply made as the onion dip. In a small bowl mix one small can minced clams (well-drained), one teaspoon lemon juice, add one-half pint sour cream, one teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, one-half teaspoon salt, and a dash of pepper. Blend well and set it in the refrigerator to mellow for an hour. This is another one where you let the guests dip their own.

Mary Dugan! Look at that shopping cart. I told you not to get too carried away. We still have an entire meal to go, and we don’t want to ruin their appetites. And, besides, I’ve heard that when a person is overfed they are less inclined to have other appetites. Wouldn’t that be a shame?

There will be times when you’ll be having a cocktail party without a dinner following, or perhaps just a simple buffet and then you can go hog-wild. But then you’ll probably have a whole library of cookbooks, and lots of friendly sisters, tricks, and dolls (dirty, old lecherous ladies). There is the chance that you may want to try your hand at one before this, on a small scale, as a sort of rehearsal for the grand opening.

HORS D’OEUVRES

Many popular hors d’oeuvres are made of meat. We all know why that’s popular. Other bases are fish, cheese, eggs, and vegetables. Let’s start with a couple of the meat ones.

MEAT HORS D’OEUVRES

Here’s one that Alvin Shadow introduced to the three Furies, and even War and Konky enjoyed them. Take a pound of ground round-steak and roll it into little balls about an inch in diameter. Then, in a heavy skillet put one-fourth cup of grape jelly and the contents of an eight- to ten-ounce jar of chili sauce. Add the meat balls and simmer for about half an hour. If the sauce gets too thick, thin it out with a little water. (It’s not my recipe, or I might be tempted to add a little wine at this point.) Let it cool down, and then put it into a bowl and let it set in the refrigerator overnight. Reheat to the simmering stage preparatory to serving, and serve in a heated casserole, or if you have it, a chafing dish with a supply of toothpicks on the side, and let your guests spear their own.

At a cocktail party at Casa Gee one of the guests liked these so much, that after her first martini she filled her glass with these little goodies and seemed to enjoy them more than the booze. It’s a good thing they had made a super-abundance of them. She was a big girl.

Here’s another one of Jackie Holmes’ favorites. He takes two pounds of pork and cuts it into strips. (He’s not available for questioning now, but I imagine he uses pork steak and that the strips are about one-half inch thick and one-half inch wide.) Then he marinates them in a casserole in a mixture of one and one-half teaspoon salt, one tablespoon sugar, four to five tablespoons soy sauce, two cloves of crushed garlic, two tablespoons honey, two tablespoons sherry, and two tablespoon Hoisin sauce. (There is a note here that tells me that that last is a Chinese vegetable sauce—confidentially, I’ve never seen it, but maybe if you go to the Chinese section of your present big town, you’ll be able to find it there, maybe. I’m sure Jackie would insist that it’s a must. He lets it stand in this mixture for at least two hours, and says that overnight is better.) The whole thing is then baked in a 400-degree oven for ten minutes (Make sure your oven reaches the 400-degree mark before putting your pork in. We want to be sure that pork is thoroughly cooked.), then reduce the heat to 250 degrees and continue baking for thirty minutes more.

Served with the proper vegetables, this can make an interesting entrée as well. And there’s an additional notation here...if the sauce does not have a rich enough color, you might add a few drops of red food-coloring. Gotta keep things pretty.

FISH HORS D’OEUVRES

Fish hors d’oeuvres are very popular, too, although I could never understand why. I never was able to get past the smell. They are very simple though, and you can always handle the little monsters gingerly and wash your fingertips later in lemon juice. This cuts the odor to some extent.

Any number of fish are available in cans, and all you have to do is drain and serve them. Here’s where style shows up. Serve them nicely arranged on a platter, each atop its own little cracker or piece of toast (strip or square), and garnish the platter with lemon wedges and parsley. Very attractive!

The kinds of fish that you’ll find available at your market will most likely stagger you if you’ve never checked this department. Some of the more popular varieties for canapés are anchovies, smoked oysters, smoked salmon, and sardines.

And here’s a little idea for a fish spread. Drain oil from one six- or eight-ounce can of sardines, and blend together with one three-ounce package of cream cheese and one teaspoon grated onion, and a dash of Tabasco Sauce. Continue blending while adding sufficient Rhine wine to soften for spreading. Serve on toast wedges or crackers.

CHEESE HORS D’OEUVRES

The simplest way, and quite frequently the most attractive way to serve cheeses, is just to arrange an assortment of them on a tray, with small knives for slicing and spreading, and an assortment of cocktail crackers.

You may not be satisfied with this after a while, and will want to try stuffing two-inch lengths of celery with softened cream cheese, or scooping out the tops of those tiny tomatoes and stuffing them with a mixture of blue cheese and sour cream, then topping them off with chopped chives.

Outside of these very few recommendations as to what to do with cheeses in hors d’oeuvres, the best way to get ideas is to pick up those little free recipe books that you’ll see from time to time in the liquor and other stores. I wouldn’t bother too much with the ones by the cheese counter—the liquor people seem to have much more imagination than the cheese people.

The second best way is to see what other people serve. It’s not usually too difficult to see what’s been put into an hors d’oeuvre, and even if you should misjudge, who knows, you may turn up with a different and even better recipe.

EGG HORS D’OEUVRES

If you’ve already used eggs for garnish on another dish, you may not want to consider them as an hors d’oeuvre, but if you do, one of the best is this refugee from the picnic basket. Now I’m just going to give you a basic recipe, and your friends are going to tell you what they put in theirs, as my friends will all be jumping on me (figuratively, of course) and asking me why didn’t you use MY recipe. Because, dear girl, I wasn’t planning on writing an entire book about deviled eggs.

Hard-boil six eggs, cool, shell, and cut into halves the long way. Remove the yolks and place in a bowl with three-fourths cup mayonnaise, one-half teaspoon dry mustard, one teaspoon chopped chives, and one tablespoon finely chopped parsley. Taste for seasoning and add salt if necessary. Blend well, and stuff into whites and garnish with a dash of paprika. Chill before serving.

VEGETABLE HORS D’OEUVRES

Vegetable hors d’oeuvres, you say? Well, we’ve already mentioned the raw vegetable platter at the beginning of this chapter—but there are other little tidbits that should be mentioned in passing.

Have you tried stuffed artichoke hearts? You can buy the tiny, canned hearts in the delicatessen section of your super market, then stuff them with a seafood salad. Try tuna salad.

Try the recipe for stuffed mushrooms in the vegetable section of this book—but use mushrooms no bigger than an inch across.

We’ve already mentioned stuffed tomatoes and celery when we talked about the uses of cheese. But while we’re on the subject of vegetables, I think we ought to include one more dip to offer a contrast to the ones already discussed. That is the bean and bacon dip.

Combine one can condensed bean with bacon soup with one-fourth cup chili sauce, two tablespoon minced green pepper, one teaspoon minced onion, and one teaspoon Worcestershire sauce. You may serve it as a dip, or spread it on crackers as canapés.

Eventually you’re going to be graduating from this phase of cooking school and trying all sorts of other marvy things like: Melon au Jambon de Bayonne et au Cointreau, and Shrimp Rémoulade, or Pâté de Liégois—but let’s not even consider that here. There are many other suggestions that too require the use of a blender, grinder, or chopper, and if you have only the basic utensils listed earlier in this book, those aren’t in your possession yet.

You will encounter people from time to time who will tell you about their favorite ways to prepare eel, squid, and octopus, or snails, rattlesnake, or grasshoppers. If the ideas are not appealing to you, I suggest that you excuse yourself under the pretext that you have to go to the bathroom (which by this time may be no pretext). I only mention them in passing, because if I don’t, someone is going to say, “You didn’t mention so-and-so.”

CAVIAR

One thing that I have glaringly omitted is caviar (which I personally put in a category with anchovies and most of the items listed in the last paragraph). All right, we’ll talk about caviar.

First of all, it’s expensive—that is, if you want the real good stuff, Caspian Sea sturgeon eggs. And if you should serve caviar, it’s just possible that you might have a guest who can distinguish between the real and the imitations. There are many.

Caviar lovers will not appreciate being served the so-called “red caviar” either. These are salmon eggs, and much looked down upon by connoisseurs. To get good caviar you’re going to have to be ready to pay from twenty-five dollars to seventy-five dollars (or more) per pound.

Tradition dictates that caviar be served from icy bowls to be spread on buttered thin slices of black bread. All the other gobbledygook came along when caviar crossed the sea.

Finally, caviar is not an hors d’oeuvre to be served with cocktails. It can only properly be served with icy cold dry champagne. I always find that’s the saving grace at a party where they are serving caviar. I can at least drink the champagne. (Note: it is also fine to serve caviar in the Russian style with shots of icy cold, as cold as you can get it, vodka. But you don’t want to serve too many of these if folks have to walk to the dinner table. VJB)

One more thing—you may not like caviar, and many of your guests may not like it. Before going to all the expense, it may be well, discreetly, to check your prospective guests’ tastes in this regard. Better than having your favorite potted palm smelling like fish two or three days after the party.

Now at the other end of the spectrum of entertaining, it is quite permissible, when you are hosting a small group of intimate friends to do something very simple.

Like, open a can of peanuts and pour them out in a bowl, or a bag of potato chips or corn chips.

And don’t forget, if your choice of drinks is beer—and there are many people who honestly enjoy beer (I for one)—it’s perfectly proper to serve popcorn or pretzels.