🗂️Keep in Mind What Martha Stewart's 'Entertaining' Taught Me About Hosting Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving might be on your mind right about now. If you’re hosting and cooking this holiday meal for the first time, bless your heart. There are a lot of things we’ve put together to help you cheat some dishes. And even if you have hosted this dinner before, there’s a good chance you’re feeling a lot of pressure. In order to give you quality advice on hosting, I decided to turn to to the Queen of Entertaining, Martha Stewart, and her first cookbook, Entertaining. If you’re a first timer or generally anxious about cooking Thanksgiving dinner, here are my biggest takeaways from the book so you can get to it.

Entertaining is Martha Stewart’s very first cookbook from 1982, and while some recipes are decidedly out of fashion, its functional ideas for supplying food to loads of people are strong. The book has multiple chapters on hosting large parties, from a dinner with eight guests to a full-blown wedding lunch (although she calls it a luncheon, which I cannot bring myself to do). Unfortunately, this book is out of print now and considered a collectible item. (You can bid for it on Ebay.)

The following tips are things I noticed throughout nearly every chapter of Stewart’s premier cookbook.

Write out your menu (for yourself)​

Each chapter of the book starts out with a list of 10 to 15 dishes. While the intention is to give you her actual menu from the event and supply a small table of contents to the chapter, I find this to be a great organizational move for the host, new or practiced. I don’t know about you, but I have wrapped up a dinner party, sent everyone home, and begun cleaning when I’ve opened the fridge and said, “Oh. I forgot to make the ... [fill in the blank]." Or the more stressful realization that you’ve forgotten an integral ingredient while you’re actively cooking that dish.

Writing out the menu for yourself is a good way to see if you’re making accidental duplicates in your side dishes. Last year I wrote down a roasted tomato side and also a tomato salad. I noticed the dupe and swapped in a green salad. Having your menu written also allows you to recognize gaps. Maybe you’ll see you have three meat dishes and nothing vegetarian for your cousin. Did you forget the mashed potatoes or the cranberry sauce?

The big takeaway. The menu is your first step to making sure your dinner party goes smoothly and you’ve covered all your bases; everything else follows from there. It allows you to write out a shopping list, and then it provides the structure for planning out your day—when you’ll cook and how long it should take. You can even print out the menu if you’re into that sort of thing.

Keep the dishes simple​

I’m guilty of getting carried away with jazzing up classic sides, but Martha keeps things simple. Instead of overcomplicating each recipe with a large list of ingredients, she focuses a lot on simple dishes and leans into French titles (which automatically makes them fancy). Corn muffins, mushroom vichyssoise (a creamy mushroom soup), shrimp wrapped in snow peas, and string beans vinaigrette are good examples. The string beans dish is actually my favorite. It’s literally blanched string beans tossed with vinaigrette and piled with thinly sliced red onions. While utterly simple (you could even buy the vinaigrette), I would absolutely grab a heap to have on my plate.

The big takeaway. There’s a balance to strike when preparing a dinner party. Big feasts like Thanksgiving emphasize a bountiful selection, so keep them simple. You’ll be making several different dishes and the best way to prevent an overwhelmed palate (and overwhelmed person) is to let those dishes shine in their purest form. Blanch vegetables to bring out their sugars and maintain crisp textures, make simple, elegant soups, and keep breads neutral so they can sop up many different juices and sauces without contradicting them.

Use sauces and spreads​

In Entertaining, Martha almost always has a menu item that’s a sauce, dip, or dressing. The sauce or spread always accompanies another menu item—meats might be served with a mousse, or spread, veggies with a dip or vinaigrette, and sometimes she’ll just suggest a big bowl of dip nearby that plays well with everything else on the table.

The big takeaway. I’ve always felt that sauces and condiments play a crucial role in making the Thanksgiving meal work for everyone at your table. It’s the easiest way to allow guests to personalize their flavors and they can make the simplest dish feel special. A slice of turkey breast among guests becomes turkey and gravy, turkey with chili oil, or turkey with sage and browned butter sauce. If you’re keeping the dishes simple (as suggested before), then the dressings allow your guests to get a little wild, should they so choose.

Small bites are better​

Whether it’s a crudité party or a farmhouse Thanksgiving, Martha is never serving large portions. Instead of making one whole baked russet per person, she’s setting up a platter of baked new potatoes (these are roughly a third the size of russets). It’s common to see individually wrapped, appetizer-like bites so guests can choose as many as they like.

The big takeaway. This is my biggest lesson because my eyes are always bigger than my stomach, even when I cook. The Thanksgiving meal features countless side dishes. some of which certain guests won’t touch, others that everyone will have a bite off. The point is that smaller bites make more sense for the guest. They want to try a bit of everything and are more likely to sample a skewer of shrimp than a large shrimp cake. Keep the servings small. Though it may seem slightly contrary, using family-style platters of these small bites present the feel of a festive mound but your loved ones can easily grab a small sampling.

Make a signature drink​

Surely we can’t forget about a drink—Martha hasn’t. Raspberry cordials, mulled ciders or wine, a Bloody Mary, or holiday eggnog—these are all alcoholic, sure, but they’re purposeful drinks for the occasions they match up with. It’s never a simple “pop open a bottle of wine.” Though sometimes “open bar” is mentioned, but that goes without saying. The cocktails in her chapters are fruity and fresh for the summer, or warming and hearty for the winter.

The big takeaway. Have a signature drink for the evening that brings in a bit of the season. It’s certainly the last thing on the priority list, and the drink doesn’t have to supply an ABV, but I think providing a special beverage is a thoughtful touch to the entire event. To prevent being pulled in too many directions, check out this guide to batching cocktails so you can mix ahead of time and leave your guests to do the pouring.
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