From the Salem County Cookbook, these dishes prime us not only for a cocktail party of far too strong drinks, but also the sometimes gross mix of recipes within the remainder of the cookbook.
When I think of the 1960’s I think of loud, clashing patterns filling rooms paved with mustard colored shag carpet. These rooms are hosting parties and each guest that enters adds more colors and patterns - and typically a jello mold dessert. A table to the side of the room fills with tiny hors d’oeuvres while someone in the kitchen pours cocktails with no care for measuring alcohol content. The flairs of the party goers’ pants get to know each other while they dance to the latest Stones vinyl, the cocktail shakers empty, and the weenies slowly disappear from their platters. When I fact-checked this image with my mom she laughed and said, “Those parties really did happen. I’ve been to a few.”
When beginning my drive through the Salem County Cookbook I was stuck on first. Which recipe should I start with? Which recipe will best set the stage for the entirety of the cookbook? Does the first recipe hold special meaning at all?
I imagine that for most cookbooks, quick thought is put into deciding which recipe gets to be listed first. First is an important place, sure, but for a cookbook, I don’t think the placement of recipes holds much value past assembly. Recipes are not placed from worst to best like the bands at a weekend-long music festival nor are they placed from best to worst like a list of the Top Ten Worst Sandwiches to Grace Humankind list on Buzzfeed. They are scattered throughout in a way that, if done right, emphasizes the greatness of them all as a single dish and as a collection and hopefully categorized for easy searching. What I do know is that the first recipe in a book is rarely the first recipe the reader sees.
When I receive a cookbook, as a gift from another or myself, I open it haphazardly to the middle- somewhere along the centerfold. I read the recipe titles, look at the pictures, and scan the ingredient lists of the recipes that initially draw my eye. If I’m face-to-face with a gift giver, I will then put the book down and thank them profusely, getting back to a more detailed scan of the book later. If I am by myself, in a bookstore or at my desk, and find myself intrigued by this initial review, I will flip to the front and engage in yet another scan. Once I know what general recipes I’m working with, the table of contents and glossary do wonders to remind me what’s in the book and help me identify which recipes I should look to if I’m interested in, say, cooking a family-sized portion of paella, something that I am always interested in. All of this to say, I’ve never read a cookbook front to back. Which is one of the reasons this blog exists. Cookbooks deserve to be read with as much detail as the great american novel, in many ways they are more beautiful and artfully crafted. The first recipe is the first for a reason and I’m going to honor whatever that reason may be.
Lucky for me, the first recipes of the Salem County Cookbook fit directly into the 1960s cocktail party theme I concocted, as well. I chose to start with the entire first page of hors d’oeuvres, the first recipes in the book. Each one is a dish I can imagine crowding a table of gelatin-laced, bite sized appetizers.
(Glorious cutting board made by Gary Pivovarov :))
Pre-cooking
Avocado Dip
I’m pretty sure this recipe is one of the great steps in adopted American cuisine that led to the stage of guacamole evolution we are consuming right now. If this recipe is the first step, and the guacamole we know and love today is the next, considering the state of “trendy food” today and allowing for more bizarre innovations with time, I think the final evolution of guacamole we will live to see is dehydrated, osmosis-purified, soy milk-rehydrated guacamole in a tube. You can quote me later.
I found it rather appropriate that the very first recipe of this book includes Ac’cent. For those of you who are not familiar, Ac’cent is a controversial ingredient that we know more familiarly as monosodium glutamate (MSG). MSG is a flavor enhancing powder that was found in a lot of chinese food and is an ingredient that many Americans tend to avoid due to the “scientifically recorded” stomach bloating (read: hot gas) of one man. Read more about that debunked study here. Before that study in 1968, Americans were tossing MSG in recipes with no concern. With science and a pre-MSG mania cookbook on my side, I will do the same. My only concern will be where to acquire said Ac’cent. The smallest size I can find online is a two-pound package.
Cheese balls
I’ve eaten cheeseballs to the point of physical injury. Though those cheese balls were made in a factory, not by hand nor for any special occasion. And I’m not convinced they contained any amount of real cheese. The cheese balls I ate were neon orange and came in a large plastic barrel. I would put them in my mouth one by one, suck the air out of them, and chew the remaining bit. Gross, I know. The end result was a scoured mouth roof and stained fingertips.
I’m excited to try my hand at the more sophisticated cheese ball. The kind of cheese ball you make for company, not store on top of the fridge in a massive tub.
Cheese straws
I was raised better than to serve Cheez-Its at a cocktail party, (who do I think I am imagining throwing a cocktail party at age 24?) but I know that the meticulation of creating all of those little hors d’oeuvres with a complete face of makeup and pinned curls to maintain would lead me to think, “Fuck it! Why don’t I just go buy a box of Cheez-its instead!?” Here’s hoping this is a simple and fancy alternative that even my grandparents could be proud of.
Post-cooking
Avocado Dip
My theory was wrong. So, so wrong. This dish turned out to be a gray pudding of lumps and horseradish.
Breaking the rule I established for myself only a few scrolls of the page higher, I saved making this recipe for last out of the three. This recipe requires no actual baking or cooking so I figured I could whip it together while the balls and straws were in the oven and cooling. As I was baking, I also found myself looking forward to this dip as a colorful splash in an otherwise brown and white cheese dough haze. The avocado would be my saving grace.
Unfortunately, the stings of onion and horseradish overpowered any surviving avocado flavor and the water from grating the onion (not a step I recommend for most dishes) allowed this to stray far from any guacamole relation.
If I were to do it again, I would dice the onion and halve the amount of horseradish. This would prove for better dippage and less wincing and coughing from Gary. We thought that the gray lumps might be salvaged as a light spread on a breakfast sandwich, but in the morning, the gray mess was grayer and more watery. We let the trash have it.
Cheese Balls
½ pound of sharp cheese, flour, and butter - that’s all that this recipe asks for. While I was making it, Gary and I kept exclaiming, “Three ingredients? Does this even qualify as a recipe?” But we knew they would be great because, well, it's only butter, flour, and cheese.
They were flakey and just chewy enough. The crisp on the bottom of the balls gave each piece the texture it needed to be interesting enough to serve to company. They were delicious and addictive, I think because the cheese had the right amount of salt.. Overall, they didn’t have a lot of depth of flavor or color. To help combat that, I sprinkled some Trader Joe’s Everything but the Bagel seasoning on a few. The dried garlic in the seasoning got a little charred in the oven and overall didn’t assist the dish. This did not stop me from popping another into my mouth every time I walked past their bowl. They also got flatter on their bottoms than I was hoping for. The final products looked more like McDonald’s chicken nuggets than balls.
Final rating- Taste: 8.0, Look: 5.0, Ability to not eat them: 1.0.
Cheese Straws
Essentially, the cheese straws are made of the same dough as the cheese balls, but with more flour, salt, and red pepper flakes to spice it up a bit. So, they’re delicious. “A little too salty for my taste,” says Gary. That’s fair. I think the cheese I chose for this dish was already salty and then the recipe called for 3 more teaspoons of salt on top.
The first few batches didn’t get as browned as I would’ve liked, but I was worried about burning them since Elizabeth F. Action, the recipe creator, mentioned in her recipe “(These bear close watching.)” Interesting that she decided to include this, but not an approximation for how long they should be in the oven.
Notes like these are what I find most endearing about the Salem County Cookbook. I’ve never seen such personality in a set of recipes. In typically no more than a paragraph, the cook provides their voice through small remarks and what they determined necessary (or unnecessary) to include in their notes. The latter also pays mind to the area and time period in which these recipes were perfected. I’m sure there are plenty of things that I need to research or do my best guess with that would’ve been second nature to the cooks of Salem County when this book was first copy written.
To my point, it wasn’t until the afternoon after I baked these that I realized they should’ve been crispy. Talking to my mom on the phone telling her about the bake, the first thing she asked was if they were crispy. I stopped dead in my tracks and had a Jimmy Neutron-style brainblast to a memory of pulling cheese straws out of a food basket package during Christmas a few years ago and having them crumble in my mouth and coat my pajama pants in flakes. I knew something wasn’t quite right with my execution. Mine ended up looking like under-cooked french fries.
I did, however, try twisting a few of the straws and adding egg wash to them before baking. They were a little more presentable, but could use some work. Luckily, this recipe made a huge amount of dough. I have a softball sized ball of it in the freezer for me the next time I want to try my hand at cheese straws.
These three recipes were a fun foray into the Salem County Cookbooks and the kitchens of Salem’s best cooks. I got to test my cheese grating, dough kneading, and my fake “It’s actually not so bad!” voice. Gary also got to test out his food photography and slow-motion video taking. On to the next one!