Alison Stewart: This is All of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. As we wrap up another week of All of It and head into the Memorial Day weekend, AKA the unofficial start of summer, we want to make sure you're equipped for whatever celebrations, parties, cookouts, barbecues, picnics, potlucks, and other summer festivities. If you've been invited to some kind of gathering, you know the cardinal rule. Don't show up empty-handed. A new cookbook centers around this rule, in case you've been known that you've got to bring something but you can't decide what. The book is called What Can I Bring? Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life. It's from food writer and cookbook author Casey Elsass, who is here now in studio. Hi, Casey.

Casey Elsass: Hi, Alison. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: One of the things that people think when they go to parties is they're fun, and you want to bring a dish that will add to the fun. There's a certain amount of pressure you feel about bringing a dish. What is that pressure that we feel?

Casey Elsass: Well, I say in the introduction, bringing something to a party isn't a competition, but it also is. Everybody wants to be that thing at the party that is finished first. Everyone's talking about it. I set out to write this book as a cookbook, but also as a self-help book. I think of these as 75 answers to the very stressful question we all have to ask. To me, they're very classic dishes that are familiar, but everything has a little twist to it that makes it feel extra special and brand new in some way.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, let's get you in on this conversation. If you have to bring something to a party, what do you usually bring? What thoughts on food should you or shouldn't you bring to a party? Our Phone lines are open. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. If you're going to a Memorial Day party or a gathering, or a cookout, and you want to have your questions answered, we've got Casey right here. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. You write that your decision about what to bring should be tied to the time that you plan to arrive at the party.

Casey Elsass: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Explain that.

Casey Elsass: Well, I think there's been a lot of information on being a great host, but not a lot of information on being a great guest.

Alison Stewart: That's true.

Casey Elsass: I think one of the biggest things as the guest is be aware of what guest you are. I say, right up front. If you're always on time, bring appetizers. If you're reliably late, bring drinks. If you're stopping by later, bring dessert. If you bring nothing else, bring a present.

Alison Stewart: All right. You advise bringing room temperature foods, which is interesting because it means, first of all, the host doesn't have to find space in her refrigerator for it. How important is the presentation of it? You could bring something that looks like it's all wrapped, all ugly. In terms of the presentation of what you bring, why is that important?

Casey Elsass: I think two things. First of all, I'm a huge advocate for room temp food, especially because some things like dips, salads taste better at room temperature. Fats and acids just sing a little bit better. Also, as someone who hosts a lot, I'm usually playing a game of culinary Tetris, and I don't want you coming in expecting a burner, the oven, a fridge shelf. Come prepared. Also, part of that is, bring everything you're going to need. Your host is not your Williams Sonoma. You need to have your serving bowl, your utensils, your cups.

I also advocate for packing things up separately. If you're bringing a salad, greens go in one container, croutons in another container, dressing in another container. Bring your bowl and throw it together there. Then you have the most beautiful presentation right on the fly.

Alison Stewart: This says, "Should we say anything to guests?" The text we got, "Should we say anything to guests who show up with nothing, even in jest? I've held grudges against folks who came to picnics empty-handed."

Casey Elsass: Oaf. That's not how I was raised.

Alison Stewart: What if you said, "Oh, you shouldn't bring anything," and then they don't bring anything.

Casey Elsass: I mean, if you told them not to.

Alison Stewart: Then you're sitting there and you're looking at them like, "Hey?" Is there a code there? I'm wondering.

Casey Elsass: What I've learned in promoting this book is some people have strict rules about, "If I've told you not to bring anything, don't bring anything." If there was a misunderstanding, it's a misunderstanding. I was raised that you always walk in the door with something in your hands. In my book, the last chapter is five short recipes that are just little food gifts, if you want to leave something behind for your host, but you're not imposing something on what they have planned.

Alison Stewart: For example?

Casey Elsass: Homemade hot Fudge. There's a hot sauce. There's seasoned oyster crackers. Really simple things for them to enjoy later.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new cookbook, What Can I Bring? Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life with food writer Casey Elsass. We want to know if you're going to some event this weekend, and you're trying to decide whether you want to cook or bring something along, and you have some questions. Our Phone lines are open. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. If you have any particular thoughts about guest etiquette, what kind of food you should or shouldn't bring to a party, we'd like to hear from you as well. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. Let's talk to Kion, who's calling from Old Westbury. Hey, Kion, you're on the air.

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Alison Stewart: He's listening. Hey, Kion, are you there? Oh, Kina, he's not there.

Kion: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Oh, there you are. Hey.

Kion: Hi. Hi.

Alison Stewart: Hi. Hi.

Kion: How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm good. How are you doing?

Kion: I'm doing very well.

Alison Stewart: Okay, good. What's your question?

Kion: There's this dessert called seka. It's part of my Persian heritage. It's an interesting dessert. It's foreign. I'm not sure if the people would really.

Alison Stewart: Would like it.

Kion: I don't know if they'd like it, yes.

Alison Stewart: What do you think about that? When somebody is bringing something that is special to them, but they're not quite sure if the host is going to like it or the guests are going to like it.

Casey Elsass: Those are my favorite things. To me, what's exciting about a party is the unexpected. I also think part of being a great guest is putting a lot of thought and effort into your contribution. When you bring something incredible, the host sparkles by association.

Alison Stewart: Nice. Let's talk to Diane, who's calling from Westchester. Hi, Diane, you are on the air.

Diane: Hi there. How are you doing?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing great.

Diane: I am co-hosting a graduation cocktail party for about 50 parents, but it's at someone else's house. I need something that travels well and that I can serve at room temperature. What should I bring?

Casey Elsass: I think drinks are always a good thing. A batch cocktail is always a great idea. I say in the book, I'm always a fan of a melting bucket of bottles and wine and beer. I think it's so chic to have a signature cocktail be part of the party. If you're the person that brought the signature cocktail, you're immediately the MVP of the party.

Alison Stewart: Good luck. Have a great time. Al is calling from Westchester. Hey, Al. Thanks for calling All of It.

Al: Oh, thanks for taking my call. A question. When I bring the food or the wine, should I put a card with it so they know it's from me? I feel like-- Is that tacky? Sometimes I try to find the host, so I'm actually handing it to them, so I know it's from me, if I put effort into it. I don't know how to do that. Should I put a card with the food or with the wine, or what's the best way to do that?

Alison Stewart: What do you think?

Casey Elsass: Yes, I think that's great. Also in the book, I talk about this lost art of saying thank you that I feel like we've left behind. If you're bringing a card to your host to explain what it was, also just include a little note about how much you appreciate this event and the effort that went into it.

Alison Stewart: There you go, Al. I hope that advice works out for you. My guest is Casey Elsass. He's written a book called What Can I Bring? Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life. Let's talk about a couple of your recipes. The first one I want to talk about is very easy. Maple miso cucumber, page 89. Walk us through this.

Casey Elsass: I love a cucumber salad. If I'm at a Chinese restaurant, a Polish restaurant, I'm ordering it. The problem with cucumbers, over time, is they're 90% water. Whatever sauce you're going to make with it is going to get watered down eventually. Maybe controversially for my version, I scoop out the seeds from the middle because that's where most of the water is concentrated. For me, I feel like I get a better crunch over a longer period of time. The dressing on these is a lot of ingredients you would expect. Rice wine vinegar, miso, sesame oil.

The twist is maple syrup, which, actually, in flavor, is not that far off from mirin, and plays a similar role of adding a sweet note. I think miso and maple are wonderful together. This dressing obviously goes with the cucumber salad, but hot tip, I also love it on roasted vegetables, too.

Alison Stewart: Do you wait and put the dressing on the cucumbers when you get there?

Casey Elsass: If you're bringing this somewhere else, yes. I would wait till the last second, because the minute the dressing touches those cucumbers, they're going to start releasing water.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Julia, who's calling in from Westchester. Hi, Julia. Thanks for calling, All of It. You're on the air.

Julia: Hi. Thank you. Thanks for taking my call. I am hosting a barbecue, and this happens to be one where I'm hosting a kosher barbecue. I have guests asking me what they should bring, and I feel a little awkward because I don't want to impose this barbecue dietary restrictions on them. I don't know what to say when they ask me what they should bring. I wanted to know if you had any recommendations when-- I don't want to tell everyone to bring a bottle of wine. I wanted to know if you had any recommendations when there's a dietary restriction involved.

Casey Elsass: I think the one thing every party always runs out of is ice, and you can never have enough of that. Especially if you know people are coming at staggered times. Assign out that ice so you have a new bag arriving every hour or so.

Alison Stewart: Good advice. We are talking to Casey Elsass. His book is called What Can I Bring? Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life. Our Phone number is 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Going to a party? You want to know what to bring? Give us a call. We'll have more of your calls and more with Casey after a quick break. This is All of It.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We're talking about the new cookbook, What Can I Bring? Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life with food writer Casey Elsass. All right, we're going to go back to your book. Zach, in our control room, they made these for our staff, and they were so good.

Casey Elsass: I heard.

Alison Stewart: These gochujang and cheddar scones.

Casey Elsass: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Apparently, you need to roll up the sleeves a little bit for this one. This one's a medium level of hard.

Casey Elsass: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What's special about these scones?

Casey Elsass: Well, they're scones in name, but I would say they're biscuits and spirit.

Alison Stewart: All right. Yes.

Casey Elsass: I grew up in New England, so I think antagonizing British people is part of my heritage. I think scones are always so dense and so dry. I wanted a version that has a ton of flavor, but more importantly, has those really flaky, soft layers that a biscuit has. There's a ton of butter. Heads up. What I think is great is the play of gochujang and cheddar, which are both very sharp, pungent flavors. Gochujang, if you don't know, is a fermented Korean paste that is a little bit spicy, but I would say is more savory and has a lot of depth of flavor. Cheddar's really salty, but also has a lot of flavor, too. The two of them together make this super savory, rich-feeling, delicious biscuit.

Alison Stewart: I can imagine if you brought these and they didn't get finished, they would be great the next day.

Casey Elsass: Well, if they don't get finished, they're coming home with me.

Alison Stewart: Oh, okay.

Casey Elsass: They're not yours anymore.

Alison Stewart: Oh, you don't get-- You get to take [crosstalk]

Casey Elsass: I mean, they're that good. I'm not letting you keep them. Yes, those with a fried egg on top would be amazing.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Mark, calling in from Rye Brook. Hi, Mark. Thanks for calling All of It.

Rye: Hey, you guys. I have a question. I go to a monthly potluck picking party, if you know what that is. Everybody brings guitars and banjos and crap like that. I tend to just stop at a deli and buy a couple of pounds of bow tie pasta salad they have that I like, throw it in a bowl, and bring it. Is that pretty lame? Should I be doing more?

Casey Elsass: I think that's great. Lucky for you, I do have a pasta salad recipe in this book. For this party, I think the recipe you need is my recipe for picklebacks, which is a jar of pickles. The way you serve it is with a bottle of whiskey. You do a shot of whiskey followed by a shot of pickle juice. The pickle juice just erases the whiskey like it never happened. If I were at that kind of party, that's what I'd want.

Alison Stewart: All right, you might have traded in the pasta for some pickle juice and whiskey. Good luck to you. Let's talk to Linda from Long Island City. Hi, Linda. Thank you so much for making time to call All of It today.

Linda: Hi, thanks so much for taking my call. I'm hostessing a dinner over Memorial Day weekend, and I want to know if it was polite for me to ask my guests to bring certain things. Can I put it up for somebody to bring an appetizer, somebody else to bring a salad, somebody else to bring dessert, or somebody else to bring the wine? I don't impose on my guests.

Casey Elsass: No, I think that's great. I think a communal dinner is such a nice thing. To me, what's exciting about that is as the plates are going around or as everyone's taking a portion, everybody gets their moment in the spotlight as they get their compliments on the thing that they brought.

Alison Stewart: You have in here, pickled potato salad. We're going into dangerous territory talking about potato salad.

Casey Elsass: I know. A lot of opinions on potato salad.

Alison Stewart: A lot of opinions about potato salad. Tell me about the pickled potato salad.

Casey Elsass: Well, I'm Irish, so if you give me a potato, I'm going to love it.

Alison Stewart: Fair. Go. You go.

Casey Elsass: I do have my own rules about potato salad.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Casey Elsass: We've all politely pushed some around a plate and smiled through it, and I don't want to do that to anybody. I would say the keys are a lot of acid. Potatoes are very bland, but they soak up flavor super well. There's pickle juice and pepperoncini juice, and vinegar to give them a really punchy flavor. A little bit of heat, I think, is super great. The pepperoncini gets chopped up with the pickles, too, so there's a lot of crunchy, spicy little flavor in there. A lot of fresh herbs do a lot to help balance it out and make it feel really fresh. Also, my number one rule is no raw onion. It's always stinky. It hurts my esophagus. I don't like it. There's no onion in this potato salad.

Alison Stewart: You have brown sugar angel. It's listed as hard in this book.

Casey Elsass: Yes.

Alison Stewart: It's a brown sugar angel food cake. First of all, how does the brown sugar change angel food cake, which is light and airy?

Casey Elsass: Yes. It is still light and airy. I will say this recipe almost killed me. It almost did not make the book, but I figured it out finally. The problem with brown sugar is it's very dense. I had to figure out how to get it in without deflating all the careful work of whipping the egg whites. The solution was blending it up with the flour, which helps aerate it and soften it. The nice thing about brown sugar is, like the difference between brown sugar and regular sugar, there's so much more flavor because there's molasses in it.

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes.

Casey Elsass: There's also so much more moisture, which is really nice, especially with an angel food cake. It has that lightness, but there's also a spongy density that I love.

Alison Stewart: The moisture doesn't drag it down?

Casey Elsass: No. It took me a lot of tries. I got it right. A friend tested it. Another friend tested it. The day we shot it on set for this book, I didn't even want to look. I was so nervous. It works, but it takes some time. It takes some technique. It's definitely not a beginner recipe. I will say if you try it and it flops, just tell everyone it's pound cake and they won't know the difference.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "I'm going to a barbecue this weekend and I'm bringing two of her favorite [unintelligible 00:17:11] and white crumb cakes. She moved away, so she doesn't enjoy them often. One to serve, one for the freezer so she can enjoy it later." That's a great idea.

Casey Elsass: That is the best idea I've ever heard.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Nancy on line seven, calling from New Canaan, Connecticut. Nancy, thank you for taking the time to call All of It.

Nancy: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Hi.

Nancy: I'm going to my friend's house for the weekend, and we're going to go out one night and cook one night. I'm wondering, is it tacky to just treat them to dinner for the night we go out, or should I pay for groceries, and do I still bring something besides that?

Casey Elsass: Yes. I love to cook, so if I'm at someone's house for the weekend, that's my job while I'm there. The night we're cooking, I'm taking over. I'm in charge of the menu. If you're not super comfortable and confident, then yes, pay for dinner. I don't think you need to bring something additionally. Once you get home, just mail them a really nice, thoughtful thank-you card to thank them for the weekend.

Alison Stewart: If you're bringing food to a party, you have to have the food that can get to the party. What should you have in your arsenal so that your food gets from your kitchen to your party kitchen?

Casey Elsass: I tried to make these recipes as transportable as possible. A lot of them are fine to go in the bowl you're going to serve it in, or packed up in Ziploc bags or Tupperware. I keep a lot of those deli containers in my apartment, and that's my favorite thing to pack in. For specific things like desserts, if you're cooking a pie often, it's worth investing in a transportable case for that. Same thing for cakes. I would say don't pick a recipe that you're not ready to bring from point A to point B.

Alison Stewart: In your book, there's lots of instructions. They're very super detailed. It reminds people to set timers when they put on aprons. You include different options for substitutions and when it's okay to leave out a certain ingredient. Why did you want this book to include as much detail as possible?

Casey Elsass: I think there are some ways where cookbooks fail us. Recipes assume a lot of knowledge or a lot of experience sometimes. I wanted this book to be approachable to anybody at any level. Every recipe is marked by effort level, so you know right away what you're getting into before you get your heart set. For things like timings, like the minute I set a timer on my phone, my mind is already somewhere else. I didn't want to generally say, "15 minutes later." I want to remind you, set a timer. Things like that are where a recipe will run off course quickly.

Alison Stewart: Before getting into the recipes, you talk about the importance of tasting as you go and thinking about flavors in layers. Why is this such an important part of cooking?

Casey Elsass: These recipes are my palate and my point of view, and they're not yours. I need you to be tasting everything as you're making it, because what tastes good to me might not taste good to you, and there's still time to save it before you're finished. It's important to, every step of the way, take a little taste and make sure you feel like you're on the right track with this recipe.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "Pickle juice. Pickle juice. What the heck is pickle juice? They don't sell it at Shoprite. Thanks, Roger."

Casey Elsass: It's the juice that the pickles come in. The brine. Just buy a jar of pickles, and that's your pickle juice.

Alison Stewart: What's your favorite recipe?

Casey Elsass: Everyone asks me that, and I don't have a good answer because I love each of them in different ways. Everything in this book is either something I've been bringing for a long time or that I made specifically for this book. They have very specific memories attached to them.

Alison Stewart: I did want to ask you about Subway cookies.

Casey Elsass: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What are Subway cookies?

Casey Elsass: They are not the Subway Sandwich Shop cookies. Spoiler alert. I'm sorry to disappoint everybody. These are cookies that I made years ago. I had tried a few versions. I felt like I had the final ones. I was on the way to see some friends, and I packed up a Tupperware to bring them on the subway. The woman sitting next to me-- They're very-- They use black cocoa, which is what's in Oreos, so they're super dark, and then chocolate chips. The woman next to me was like, "Oh, those are so beautiful." I was like, "Would you like one?" I gave her one.

Then, when I opened the container, the woman on the other side of me was like, "Oh, my God, those smell incredible." I gave her one. Then we were all just eating cookies on the subway together.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is What Can I Bring? Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life. It is by Casey Elsass. Thank you so much for joining us, Casey.

Casey Elsass: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: That is All of It for this week. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

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