Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.
The very best dinner party starters aren’t just there to buy you time to get the rest of dinner buttoned up (or, conversely, to absorb the drinks while the rest of dinner remains un-buttoned).
No, the very best ones act as ice-breakers in themselves—a little surprise to kick-start the conversation, some hands-on fun to set people at ease. And better still if they require about four ingredients and zero time, but look casually cookbook-cover gorgeous, all the same. (Also if they—despite some fancy-sounding components—cost less than making DIY onion dip, simply because of the modest number and sheer power of the ingredients.)
I was lucky to come across one of these specimens at a dinner party recently, when Farideh Sadeghin, culinary director of Munchies, set out a plate of tiny radishes pulled from their rooftop garden, alongside a bowl of vanilla butter and a smaller one of crunchy salt. The idea was so novel, the vanilla butter so hauntingly delicious that once the radishes were gone, we dipped ruffled potato chips in the butter instead. This all gave us a lot to talk about.
Farideh told me that she’d learned this vanilla-butter-as-party-starter trick from chef Alex Raij, who had stopped by the Munchies test kitchen to bust out a roof garden-inspired dinner. But when I reached out to Raij about the recipe, I learned there was much more behind her thinking (and vanilla butter’s allure) than a simple combination of good ingredients.
Raij was initially inspired by a snack at delicatessen in Rome called Roscioli that combined salty Spanish anchovies with curls of cold vanilla butter. “I was so enchanted with it, I came home and put it on everything now,” Raij said. Her take on Roscioli’s dish, a deliberately plain cracker with a thin tube of vanilla butter and a very good-quality Spanish anchovy, has been on the menu at her NYC restaurant El Quinto Pino ever since, and she riffs on it often for parties, big and small.
Her connection to this dish isn’t an accident. For one thing, raised in an Argentine family, she grew up on compound butters (at steakhouses, it was common to be served butters mixed with anchovy and hard boiled egg or Roquefort along with grilled meats).
The next part of her story took me by surprise. “What’s important is the temperature of the butter,” she told me. “It should be plastic and cold.” This sounds nothing like what I’d expect to hear from a chef or others who spend their time fixating on ideal states of food—which, for butter, I thought, was creamy-soft and spreadable. What else explains the booming butter keeper industry on Food52? And yet: “I have this thing about it being chilled,” she said. “I’m obsessed with it.”
This, too, stems from her childhood, when butter was always kept in the fridge, never left out to soften. “My cinnamon toast was always torn, with chunks of solid butter,” Raij explained. “Like crystallized honey, over time that came to be the way I liked it.” And I finally understood. I like those that way, too. I too aim for the unmelted spots of heavily buttered toast, before they disappear. But I’ve never talked about it with other people, let alone read validating instructions in a cookbook: Serve the butter cold and plastic.
Even if you grew up, like some of Raij’s childhood friends, in a soft-butter household, there are other good reasons to keep the butter cold here. When confronted with a bite of sharp radish and a concentrated hit of salt, the butter cools them both, letting the 170 or so aromatic compounds in vanilla release as the butter melts on your tongue.
Here, out of all the ways Raij described using vanilla butter in our conversation (1), we have two almost-equally simple ways to serve it at a party: one rustically beautiful with a pot of butter and whole radishes piled on a board, à la Farideh; one fancied up a little, with slices of butter and radish on crackers, à la Raij. Both served cold.
Choose your own adventure, then see what conversations it kicks off.
| 4 | tablespoons unsalted butter, softened |
| 1 | whole vanilla bean (or 2 teaspoons vanilla paste, Raij’s preference) |
| 1/2 | teaspoon superfine sugar, or to taste (omit if using vanilla paste, which is slightly sweetened) |
| Flaky salt, like Maldon or fleur de sel | |
| 1 to 2 | bunches small radishes (with pretty fresh tops, if serving with tops in option 1) |
| 4 | tablespoons unsalted butter, softened |
| 1 | whole vanilla bean (or 2 teaspoons vanilla paste, Raij’s preference) |
| 1/2 | teaspoon superfine sugar, or to taste (omit if using vanilla paste, which is slightly sweetened) |
| Flaky salt, like Maldon or fleur de sel | |
| 1 to 2 | bunches small radishes (with pretty fresh tops, if serving with tops in option 1) |
(1) For the record: on French ham and butter sandwiches (or Southern tomato and butter ones), with artichokes, with sweet soppressata or other charcuterie that isn’t seasoned with paprika, on cinnamon toast, browned and drizzled over red mullet like sole meunière. And anytime she leaves some behind at a party, “Someone invariably bakes something out of it the next day and brags about it,” she said. “It next-levels everything.”
Photos by Ty Mecham
Got a genius recipe to share—from a classic cookbook, an online source, or anywhere, really? Please send it my way (and tell me what's so smart about it) at genius@food52.com—thank you to Munchies Culinary Director Farideh Sadeghin and her rooftop radishes for this one!
From our new podcast network, The Genius Recipe Tapes is lifelong Genius hunter Kristen Miglore’s 10-year-strong column in audio form, featuring all the uncut gems from the weekly column and video series. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss out.
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Written by: Kristen Miglore
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