"Big Night," Less Stress: Pointing the Way to Doable Dinner Parties
Big Night: Dinners, Parties, & Dinner Parties
What would a big night in with friends look like to you? A perfectly clean house, with a fabulous centerpiece on a table set with linen napkins and perfectly matched china, silver, and crystal—and you at the door, likewise fresh and tidy, greeting guests with an ice-cold cocktail?
If so, Big Night: Dinners, Parties, & Dinner Parties is not your book. But if you agree with author Katherine Lewin’s sentiments—“I don’t know how to ‘entertain,’ and I don’t expect you to know either…entertaining is something you do for people. Experiencing is something you do with them”—and Brooklyn hipster vibes grab you, it’s time to get some big nights on the calendar.
This is a book that may leave readers a bit conflicted—the breezy tone plus attractive book design pulls you in. But Big Nights, named after Lewin’s “dinner and party essentials” store opened in Brooklyn in 2021, undercuts its almost-anything-goes message somewhat by page 15, with two pages of Lewin’s suggested brands for various ingredients. No local supermarket canned tomatoes here—to stick with the Brooklyn specialty store vibe, her preferred brand will run you about $5 per 28-ounce can; her recommended olive oil for cooking clocks in around $18 for 25 ounces. It’s true, as she says, that the best ingredients make the best meals and can transform a dish—but that may leave less-wealthy readers wondering whether to bother cooking her recipes with, say, their bottle of Trader Joe’s oil.
Stick around for the recipes, though. Pricey ingredients or not, Lewin’s flavor combinations and pre-planned menus set readers up for doable, delicious dinners for anywhere from six to 12 people (plus one two-person date-night menu).
Organized by season, each chapter opens with a list of several recipes above three “bigger nights” menus. It’s unclear at first glance whether the opening recipes are meant to compose a menu. Turn the page, though, to see that these recipes suggest several “pair with” recipes elsewhere in the book, and will note what elements can be made ahead.
Some of the bigger night menus feel like cop-outs—do you really need to be told to throw a party with a hot dog bar at the center, with no recipes, just instructions to grill the hot dogs and serve them with several types of mustard, ketchup, raw onions and pickles? Likewise, another menu’s main is just a platter of smoked fish, cream cheese, bagels, and a few accompaniments, such as sliced onion and cucumber. Even new cooks don’t need a page just for instructions to serve fresh-squeezed juice (“Any-citrus juice” that here is a mix of orange and grapefruit), or a “recipe” for a platter of BLT ingredients for guests to make their own.
These constitute a minority, though. Holding greater appeal were recipes such as Party Chicken with Feta & Fennel. This sheet-pan recipe combines chicken parts with fennel, cannellini beans, scallions, za’atar, gochugaru or Aleppo pepper, olives, feta, peas, and mint, to be served with bread or rice. Although the directions could use a few tweaks for ease and less mess, this produced a riot of flavors with interest in every bite.
What of those tweaks? A big bowl or roasting pan instead of a low-sided sheet pan would have been great, given the multiple times a cook has to mix the ingredients in the pan. Fennel and chicken (thighs were used in the recipe test) go in first, drizzled with oil and tossed in the pan; after brief roasting, they’re mixed in the pan with the beans and scallions, then “showered” with more oil, za’atar, salt, gochugaru, and pepper. Trying to cover everything well with the oil and herbs felt slow and messy. After further roasting, the pan comes back out again for the cook to add peas, olives, and feta and “carefully toss” with the rendered fat in the very full pan for even coating—no fun when guests are watching or about to arrive.
But served with Lewin’s fluffy focaccia, this was a popular entrée that needed nothing else served with it. The bread had an interesting tweak of its own: No oil goes into the initial dough, but it’s set into a pool of 4 tablespoons of olive oil to rise. Once risen, it gets four folds while still in the bowl—that is, just pull up the dough from underneath and fold it over itself —during which the dough absorbs much of the oil. Scooped onto a sheet pan coated with three more tablespoons of oil, left to rise, then dimpled and drizzled with yet one more tablespoon oil, it bakes into a loaf with a rich, crisp crust encasing a fluffy crumb. While focaccia is always better fresh, these leftovers survived well for another day.
Other tested recipes also pulled disparate flavors together. A tahini and miso sauce mixed in lemon juice, sriracha, soy sauce, and honey, plus optional kimchi, for a pleasantly salty dip for crackers and raw vegetables. More ideas for how to use the sauce would have been nice, as the yield of two cups of somewhat runny sauce goes a long way.
In keeping with the retro look of the book, many of the recipes hearken back, with gentle twists, to the 1960s and ‘70s, including hot spinach-artichoke dip, deviled eggs, Chex mix, and pigs in blankets. The pigs get cozy in puff pastry with a smear of fig or apricot jam and Cheddar or Gruyere; the deviled eggs, while plain on their own, get topped with furikake, za’atar, Baharat, gochujang, roe, kimchi, or other suggestions. Trendy chili crisp spikes the Chex mix.
Lewin proposes the artichoke dip—with the inclusion of trendy tins of smoked trout—for an entrée, served with raw vegetables, bread or tortilla chips, and a simple salad. While dip for dinner should never be shunned, this was a bit too rich for an entrée, with its cream cheese-sour cream base combined with multiple cups of mozzarella and Parmesan. As one element of a casual dinner, though, it shines with the extra dimension of trout.
Dessert recipes generally offer less interesting flavor combos and tend toward the very sweet. But a test of the family-style crème brulée produced with ease a just-right dish of rich, smooth custard (spiked simply with vanilla paste in testing). Just watch it carefully toward the end of the baking time, which Lewin gives in the very broad range of 35 to 50 minutes because she calls for a 1 ½-quart baking dish with no other dimensions.
Along the way, Lewin drops in recipes and tips for cocktails, glassware, amounts of some typical foods to figure out how much to cook, and a few extra menus and uses for some of the side dishes and sauces throughout the book. One glaring omission: Ingredients are generally listed by volume (cups) only, not by weight.
Quick takes:
Big Night: Dinners, Parties & Dinner Parties, by Katherine Lewin. 288 pages. Published by Union Square & Co.
Photos: At least one photo runs alongside nearly every recipe, in saturated, heavy-on-red color schemes with deep shadows.
Organization: By season; each season includes three “Bigger Night” menus
Index: Fairly comprehensive.
The Spice of Life
Everything is better with Pepper
You can keep your crème brulée—Pepper has pork.
