Talk about a tempest in a salad bowl.
The New York Times’ public editor on Thursday repudiated the newspaper’s selection of grape salad as a staple of Minnesotans’ Thanksgiving tables.
In a blog post titled “A Recipe for Wrath (Grapes Optional) in Minnesota,” Margaret Sullivan wrote that the newspaper’s effort to provide recipes for the quintessential Thanksgiving side dishes in all 50 states was “impressive, and engaging, and — in at least one case — bizarrely wrong. The epic recipe fail came in the Minnesota entry: Grape Salad.”
The grape salad recipe used in the newspaper came from a “Minnesota-born heiress” who reportedly told writer David Tanis that it was always part of the holiday buffet in her family. “It couldn’t be simpler to prepare and has only three ingredients: grapes, sour cream and brown sugar,” she said.
Thus launched #grapegate and #embracethegrape on Twitter.
“Greetings, Minnesota!” Tanis wrote later on the New York Times Facebook page. “We’re still hoping you’ll give our grape salad recipe a try. It was a staple of 1950s and 1960s spiral-bound Lutheran or Junior League-type community cookbooks, even featured in the Redwood Falls Gazette, right alongside tater-tot-topped hotdish recipes. The friend who gave it to me (a lifelong Minnesotan who also made a lot of Swedish pancakes with lingonberries) would be dismayed to know it has caused such ire. Grape salad may be out of date, but is so delicious it could stand a revival.”
There’s no need for a revival in the Swiss-themed Matterhorn Room at the Lowell Inn in downtown Stillwater, where Grapes Devonshire has been on the menu since 1960.
But it’s a dessert, not a salad, said Barb Cook, who worked at the Lowell Inn for 50 years.
Grapes Devonshire is part of a four-course prix fixe fondue dinner that starts with escargots loaded with garlic and butter and ends with seedless green grapes lightly rolled in sour cream and topped with brown sugar. The dinner is available every Friday and Saturday night for $35 per person; reservations are required.
“It’s pretty simple,” Cook said of the grape dessert. “It’s very, very plain. It tastes good, but any kind of fruit mixed with sour cream and brown sugar tastes good. They say it was a salad? It was never served as a salad at the Lowell Inn.”
Cook, 75, of Somerset, started working at the Lowell Inn when she was 16 years old. She retired three years ago.
Mike “YC” DeCamp, chef de cuisine at La Belle Vie in Minneapolis, said he first tweeted as a joke that he would put a grape salad on the menu, but now he’s seriously considering it.
“It’s still up in the air, but we probably will now, since everyone is expecting me to,” DeCamp said.
He hasn’t made the recipe the Times published, but he thinks grapes can make an OK salad.
“I’ll probably play around with it this weekend and see where we’re at,” DeCamp said. “We don’t put anything on the menu just spur of the moment; we have to test the recipe.”
DeCamp did say he thought it was strange that a grape salad ended up representing Minnesota.
“Grapes barely grow here,” he said. “So it’s just a really weird thing.”
Jess Fleming contributed to this report. Mary Divine can be reached at 651-228-5443.
Follow her at twitter.com/MaryEDivine.
