December 30, 2024

Inspired by Nevada

THE MEAL

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Despite living next-door to Nevada most of my life (and my family having lived there for a little while when I was a toddler), I’ve never been to Las Vegas or visited anywhere else there really. I was so curious to see what people considered iconic Nevada food, and I wasn’t surprised that many answers were just “buffets and booze,” but I was interested to learn that there’s a large Basque population in Nevada too! This seems like a random plate of food at first glance, but I swear I did have a good reason for it all.

Shrimp Cocktail

Cocktail sauce was invented in San Francisco in the early 1900s, eaten with oysters primarily, and obviously shrimp aren’t a local product of Nevada. But in 1959, the Golden Gate Hotel in Las Vegas started selling shrimp arranged on a cocktail glass with the sauce in the middle, for a quick and easy appetizer that back then only cost 50 cents! It became a permanent offering at the hotel and a trendy food that could only be found in Vegas, incredibly popular with visitors. It spread to other hotels and resorts, and now Las Vegas sells 60,000 lbs of shrimp every day!

(I didn’t have a cocktail glass, so just imagine the sauce in a cocktail glass with the shrimp hanging on the rim. 🙂

Cocktail sauce is really easy to make from scratch, and I already had everything I needed on hand! Why do we buy it?? I didn’t prepare the shrimp on my own, though. I briefly considered peeling and deveining and boiling the shrimp myself, but frankly, I didn’t want to handle them that much, and it was Christmas break—I didn’t want to spend that much time on it. So store-bought it was! And they were pretty good! I did end up pan-frying them after taking these photos, though, because I much prefer crispy shrimp.

This is definitely an appetizer, not a main dish, but the only other thing I could come up with was prime rib, and I’m not made of money, so…

Caesar Salad

Again, this wasn’t invented in Nevada. It was developed in Tijuana, Mexico, by an Italian immigrant named Caesar Cardini (hence the name). His restaurant specifically catered to Americans fleeing Prohibition, and on the 4th of July, 1924, they had so many customers that they ran out of their usual food and had to throw something random together. Thus, the caesar salad was born. Originally, it was a finger food, with whole lettuce leaves dipped in the dressing. Later, anchovies were added to a lot of caesar salad dressing recipes. Whether with whole leaves and anchovies or not, caesar salad is one of the most common salads in the United States now. And I made it for the Nevada-inspired meal because there’s a restaurant in Nevada called the Golden Steer that’s the oldest operating steakhouse in Las Vegas that is famous for making tableside caesar salads using the original recipe.

I didn’t have the same flair as the Golden Steer chefs when making my caesar salad at home, but it was fun to put together. This was my first time making croutons from scratch, and it was so easy and so much better home-made!! I loved being able to decide how big I wanted them, and I didn’t cook them so crunchy that they hurt my mouth when eating them (the reason why I usually don’t get caesar salads at restaurants). They were still crispy, but the insides were chewy, just the way I like them. And I was glad to learn that anchovies aren’t required to make an authentic caesar salad, and that I could control how much dressing to use. Much easier to make than I expected, and really delicious!

Shirley Temple

The thing Nevada is most known for is Las Vegas being a party city with lax alcohol laws, so the most-recommended beverage for a Nevada-inspired meal was a Picon punch. Rather than try to make a mocktail version (which would’ve been pretty much impossible), I decided to just make what I order when I’m at a bar with coworkers: the classic Shirley Temple. This drink has no ties to Nevada whatsoever besides being a mocktail, and it has no ties to Shirley Temple herself, either, despite the creators claiming they made it specifically for her. I love cherries and grenadine, and while I’m usually in the mood for something caffeinated at the tail end of a long work day, I’ve found that a Shirley Temple is the easiest thing for me to order. It’s just Sprite and grenadine with a cherry on top!

Gateau Basque

I was happy when my search for authentic Nevada foods led to something that DIDN’T center on Las Vegas. Today I learned that northern Nevada had a lot of immigrants from Basque (an area in northern Spain and France) in the late 1800s and early 1900s, so Basque food is still really popular in Nevada. One of the desserts brought over was the Gateau Basque. Though “gateau” means “cake,” it’s really more like a pastry dough, and it’s usually either filled with pastry cream or cherry preserves (or sometimes a combination of the two). As previously mentioned, I love cherries, but I decided to try my hand with the pastry cream and was really happy with it. The pastry dough was trickier, especially since my springform pan was bigger than the recipe called for and I had to stretch it thin, but it turned out okay! The pastry cream has a great texture, and the cake itself is light and not super rich, so it doesn’t give me an unpleasant sugar buzz like regular cake. I honestly liked it much more than I expected.