Dinner with Tennessee Williams

Dinner with Tennessee Williams is a deliciously gorgeous book. Produced by Troy Gilbert, Chef Greg Picolo of the Bistro at Maison de Ville and Williams scholar Dr. W. Kenneth Holditch, it contains essays about the food and alcohol Williams wrote into his plays, interspersed with recipes inspired by the plays and the famous characters themselves. A study of the relationship between sweet and savory and a treatise on the concepts of too much and plenty, this is a great read and perfect for planning a dinner party.

I do have one immediate objection to Dinner with Tennessee Williams as a cookbook: the spine is too tight to lay the book flat while referring to it in the kitchen. Though the cover is simply too pretty to put in danger of grease or splatter, the recipes make the danger worth it.

If you are anything like me, your kitchen will feel inadequate for the cooking dreams Dinner with Tennessee Williams invokes. While I can whip up a satisfying Thanksgiving dinner in spite of my kitchen—a nightmarish little cubby rather than a homey, cozy space—I realized quickly we were not up to the task of testing the recipes in this book. So I called Jamey Hatley, a writer and foodie from Memphis. Like me, Jamey is a graduate of LSU’s Master of Fine Arts program in English.

Jamey and I decided to hold a dinner during the Tennessee Williams Festival weekend in New Orleans and invite other writers to taste these recipes with us. With a tight budget and timeline, we selected three of the simplest recipes in the book, with the fewest ingredients and steps. We took care to build a menu of complementary dishes: a salad, main course and vegetable.

Quickly, the ingredients and measurements felt suspect. Each recipe called for what seemed like disproportionate amounts of oil, butter and sugars. Chef Picolo has created recipes that would proudly grace the tables of fine dining establishments, but they are not quick or light affairs, even for two Southern girls. I would’ve thought vast quantities of butter had lost the ability to shock either of us, but no … not quite.

Our guests arrived while the Chicken Bonne Femme and Brussels sprouts were still cooking. I served as hostess to New Orleans writer and attorney Maurice Ruffin and Kiki Whang, a University of New Orleans student, as Jamey quickly assembled the BLT salad and a tasty dressing. We discussed the last day of the festival, since Maurice and Kiki had just left the Stella! Contest, and before we knew it, the BLT salad was gone. Luckily, we remembered to save a serving for our chef.

We plated the Chicken Bonne Femme and Brussels sprouts and tucked into our feast, sitting together around the table in Jamey’s kitchen. Because we had a party of four rather than six, we had halved the amount of honey in the recipe for the sprouts. I found the sweetness satisfactory, but Maurice said that he wouldn’t have minded if they were sweeter. Because one of our party has a peanut allergy, we substituted the peanut oil in the chicken recipe with vegetable oil. These were the only changes we made, and we were delighted with the results. “I feel like a tourist in a foreign country,” Wang said at one point, rapidly snapping photographs of the food on our plates.

After testing three of the recipes in Dinner with Tennessee Williams, I suggest that the ideal user is an intermediate to advanced cook who enjoys modifying and engaging with recipes and has a well-stocked kitchen. If, like me, you have a bare-bones kitchen and less experience, these recipes would be too expensive, too heavy and too complicated for everyday use—but perfect for special occasions.