What’s your pleasure: sweet or savory?
When it comes to holiday foods, Team Sweet is a flashy favorite, it’s starting line-up filled with all-star cookies, candies, cakes and buttery cinnamon sugar. Chocolate provides the power, confident in its position as league MVP.
Team Savory is an older, more experienced squad that relies on tradition to fill in its roster: crown roasts and hams; latkes; baked breakfast casseroles; the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Italian Christmas Eve. While sweets are a fleeting pleasure, savory sticks with you, grounding the holiday with a seriousness that even the most decadent hot chocolate bomb can only aspire to.
Whatever your preference, this year will find many of us recreating these holiday food traditions on our own. Raise your hand if you’ve already emailed someone in your family to ask how he or she makes the appetizer, main dish, side, or dessert that you count on each holiday season?
Here’s a free gift idea, inspired by my own search earlier this season for a pumpkin pie recipe to replace my sister-in-law’s delicious contribution to our every-year-but-this-year Thanksgiving table: Gather your favorite family recipes, then decide on the best way to share them with your holiday squad. You can opt for an easy format, like a simple Google doc, or shoot for the stars with a Gourmet magazine-worthy printed version filled with recipes and beautifully lit photos of your finished creations.
A family recipe book makes a great keepsake gift any year, but in 2020 it feels more like a lifeline. As for me, I’ll be hunkering down with homemade macaroni and cheese and a handful of Hershey kisses. It’s the perfect savory-sweet combination.