Written by Marianne MansfieldThe clock is ticking and the race is on. Partygoers and party givers alike are engaged in a wild search for the ‘in’ recipe for this holiday season. I once competed with the best of them. I’d scour magazines and glue myself to TV cooking shows desperate for that most exotic combination of ingredients to wow those who ingested my latest concoction. Once or twice I even dreamed up my own. And to those who gamely sampled my offerings, I continue to extend my most heart-felt apologies and hopes for an eventual full recovery.
For me, it started nearly 35 years ago with cheese balls. You remember those baseball shaped delicacies injected with red port wine and rolled in chopped nuts. A year or so later, we were mixing our cheese spreads with cream cheese and yogurt, and chopped pecans had given way to macadamia nuts, when our budgets allowed. From cheese balls we advanced to cheese logs, cheese straws, cheese puffs and my personal favorite, the ever-popular cheese curds. (What were those things, anyway?!)
Next came the Chex mixes. We made them sweet and we made them sweet and sour. We flavored them with Tabasco sauce and called it TexMex mix, and with Soy Sauce and called it Asian Mix. We made up something we called Puppy Chow with butterscotch and chocolate chips, but if we happened to run out of butter and substituted lard, even the dog wasn’t fooled.
On the heels of the mixes we discovered the slow cooker and WallAhhh! Fondues! We found that we could melt cheese (Again, with the cheese!) and chocolate. And we learned to look the other way when Aunt Helen used Cousin Enid’s fondue stick to scratch a hard-to-get-at spot between her shoulder blades.
When the time came to pull the plug on the fondues, we were unable to give up our slow cookers entirely. Instead, some brilliant and resourceful cook came up with the idea of the Holiday Meatball. With abandon we expanded our culinary horizons. We made our meatballs Swedish, Italian, Latin and Chuck wagon. We flavored them with ketchup, beer and horseradish. We even threw a nod to the Animal Kingdom and made them Porcupine. Note: I did not write we made them OUT of porcupine. Even then we knew where to draw the appetizer line.
Somewhere in the 80s, just as we sensed that we were nearing the end of the reign of the meatball, someone discovered a new, here-to-fore untapped ingredient in the holiday appetizer game. Jelly, for Joy To The World. We and our slow cookers were back in business.
We used grape jelly and mint jelly and currant jelly and boysenberry jelly to flavor the meatball and its new-to-the-scene competitor, the Cocktail Frank. We simmered them in our beloved slow cookers and set out darling little containers of decorative toothpicks nearby. Those were the same toothpicks we later found buried in the ficas tree’s planter when we repotted it the following summer. Fortunately for the ficas all but the brightly colored cellophane curlicues glued to the tops of the picks seemed to be biodegradable.
In the 1990s we worked our holiday magic on dried beef roll-ups, pinwheels, rumaki and the ever-popular spinach dip in the round loaf of Russian rye. The Halloween give-away dreaded by children near and far, the Popcorn Ball even made a brief holiday appearance. It lasted until we realized that guests, loosened up by a few pulls on the rum-spiked eggnog, could use them for a game of hoops with the ice ring in the punch bowl as their target.
The turn of the century brought us the rise of the tapenade. This is a word from some language other than English referring to a mishmash of ingredients mixed together and dumped over a block of cream cheese. Crackers or hunks of bread should be served along side. Recipes for tapenades generally include anchovies, pine nuts, pine needles, sun dried tomatoes, capers, extra extra extra Virgin olive oil, feta cheese (need I say more?) and occasionally silken tofu, organic peanut butter and diced yams. In my experience the less appealing they look, the more authentic they are.
Unfortunately, just about the time we learned to say and spell tapenade, it was last week’s news. Lately, the quest has been not only for the unusual, but also the healthy. Let me introduce you to truffle oil, kale chips, edamame, bronze fennel and cloumage cheese, which are really just those strange little cheese curds reimagined. Of course.
It’s likely I’ve missed more than a few members of the trendy appetizer hall of fame, but then, I gave up the search for the unholy grail of impressive munchies around the era of Popcorn Balls.
The good news is there will always be another one that comes along. You will almost never get to it first, but as long as you make the same decade, consider it good. And even better news is that when you are desperate and revert to one of the old standards, your guests are likely to compliment you on your ‘retro’ hors d’oeuvres.
