Holiday Appetizers & Desserts
Flavorful Before-and-Afters
By Chris Kassel
It’s the 4-H Club of the holidays: home, hearth, hospitality and happiness. Go ahead and tack on another H — for hedonism. After all, haven’t you spent the year as a worker bee, hunched over a computer, slinging sweat from your StairMaster Plus, living a life as lean as a runway model? Okay, maybe not. At any rate, the point is — come the holidays — most of us are ready for a little culinary self-indulgence.
Appetizers and desserts are the alpha and omega of a great holiday meal, typically the richest items on the table. As such, they represent the decadent side of that most wonderful time of the year. A chorus of "Silent Night" may be good for the soul, but when faced with a platter of freshly baked Brie or a custard trifle, heaven can wait.
Appetizers, of course, often play solo at informal holiday gatherings and office parties, and represent as much of a social icebreaker as they do a nibble. Technically, this type of stand-alone finger food is better classified as an hors d'oeuvre in order to distinguish it from an actual ‘starter’: a voluptuous overture of flavor intended to titillate the palate prior to an interlude of main courses.
Wine may play a slightly more subdued role when paired with particularly unctuous appetizers, or it may not. Sauternes wine is a classic accompaniment to foie gras, primarily because it’s similar in weight and richness. Still, Champagne serves equally well with liver pâté, and since many wine connoisseurs prefer to move in a gradated direction (from simple to complex, dry to sweet), in this case the appropriate nod would go to a high-quality sparkling wine.
Appetizers serve several functions, not the least of which is offering a bit of free reign to the creative cook who may feel otherwise locked into a traditional main course lineup. A Thanksgiving spread without roast turkey and predictable sides is all but un-American, but who’d object to beginning with a selection of tapas, the classic Spanish appetizer? These bite-sized, intensely flavored morsels are a wine lover’s dream since they are meant to be served with crisp, dry whites. In fact, the word "tapas" refers not to food at all, but to the small ‘tops’ that the Spanish use to cover their wine glasses when dining outdoors.
Like tapas, any communal layout of appetizers where a number of folks can pick and choose from a central platter demonstrates an often-overlooked social advantage to a first course. There’s nothing wrong with individually plated appetizers, of course, but I suspect that the fun side of sharing the wealth, noshing from the common trough as it were, has been an important part of our psychological makeup since day one. This seems especially true at holiday time.
Appetizer wines should be delicious, but they need not be extravagant, especially if several types will be enjoyed throughout the meal. Frequently, soft, fruity, light-bodied wines like Chenin Blanc are ideal. Sparkling wine is a can’t-miss choice, and Manzanilla sherry pairs particularly well with salty starters.
As for dessert, even the most voracious calorie-counter will concede that a holiday dinner is not complete without a final blow-out of indulgence. And as a wine lover, I suffer the holiday blues if I haven’t cracked open at least a half-bottle of something dulcet and decadent — whether it’s harvested late, nobly rotted, fortified or picked frozen from the vine, I’m content so long as it has enough cleansing acid to balance the cloying nectar.
Not every wine served with dessert needs to be super-sweet and high in alcohol. Cabernet is frequently a perfect match for chocolate-based dishes, and a lively demi-sec (half-sweet) sparkling wine can settle in comfortably with all things tart and lemony.
At a traditional holiday table, dessert can be the most heartwarming (if not always the most heart-smart) course, but there’s nothing to say that they all have to be molar crumblers, either. Fall fruits in their many guises are an ideal conclusion to a seasonal menu. Whereas many families have dessert recipes passed through the generations, the creative cook offers several selections, some old and rich, and some lean, flavorful and new. A nibble of this and that, offered in the same communal setting as the appetizers, offers a finale of toasty camaraderie to a memorable holiday meal.
Chris Kassel is a certified sommelier, author, and wine columnist whose work appears weekly in the "Detroit Free Press."
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