Food

After all, tradition is a tangible, undeniable force in the holiday season. And nowhere is this more evident than in the kitchen. While many will happily dial their favorite caterers, there are traditional favorites for these annual gatherings of friends and family that must be incorporated into the menus of most.

Some are barely legible through the grease stains on tattered, flour-smudged index cards. However, favorite recipes for holiday entertaining don’t necessarily stretch back for generations. “I love to cook, so I’ll come up with a lot of foods that I want to eat and invite people over just so I can eat the food,” says hostess Lori Morris Whitten. During the holidays, she always incorporates ham biscuits in the menu, but her decisions about what foods to offer her guests are also based on things like finding a plate or bowl she really likes and then coming up with a recipe for something that she could serve in it. “I usually try to have something beefy — like the tenderloin — that is a great pick-up entrée, and then easy pick-up foods like cherry tomatoes with vodka,” says Whitten. One of her and her guests’ favorites is Lulu Paste. By all accounts, the unusually named concoction offers up a little slice of heaven when it’s riding on a corn chip. While there is more than one Lulu Paste recipe, the version she prepares was, until recently, a secret. “That is the best recipe of all for popular appeal,” she says.

At a time of year notoriously packed with opportunities for eating and drinking, a dish that stands out above the rest has got to be pretty darn good. Popularity definitely has its place on the sideboard. So a holiday favorite that has guests standing in line is one to hold on to.

Elizabeth Bramble Brown remembers as a child when members of St. James’s Episcopal Church along with friends, family and ‘anybody who wanted to come’ would line up around the corner of the church on West Franklin Street on a chilly Richmond night in December just to have some of her grandmother Alma Glazebrook Huntley’s oysters. Although served alongside Smithfield ham biscuits, the baked oysters were the stars of a church dinner that followed St. James’s annual Christmas bazaar.