Liberace’s Caviar Cheese Dip

Liberace Cooks!, the awesome 1970 cookbook by Carol Truax, is divided into seven chapters, one for each of the dining rooms in his mansion (well, there are eight chapters if you include “Sauces, Sauces Everywhere”).

Chapter VI, Room with a View, centers on the “blue room,” an L-shaped glass room featuring “an around-the-corner bar of quilted blue leather. The matching bar chairs are the most luxurious imaginable, with soflty padded seats and comfortably molded backs,”

Well, just look at it.

According to the book, this is where Liberace liked to entertain the “gentlemen of the press,” so the Room With a View chapter is all about little munchy, nibbly bits and casual party fare.

Casual party fare is what’s always in order when I go over to Manny’s house for Sunday Funday, so it was a no-brainer for me to bring along a dish from this chapter.

Why Caviar Cheese Dip?

Why not? If there were a Liberace cheese ball, I would have made that, but there wasn’t. So a fancy (yes, caviar makes it fancy!) cheese dip, fit the bill.

Liberace’s Room With a View Caviar Cheese Dip

• 8-oz package cream cheese
• 3 tablespoons heavy or sour cream 
• 2 tablespoons minced chives or onions 
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire suace
• 3 tablespoons red caviar
• Paprika

Blend the cheese and the cream. Add chives, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce and mix well. Gently stir in the red caviar, put into a serving bowl, and sprinkle on top with a little Paprika. Serve with crackers or Melba toast.

My substitutions for this recipe: I swapped out Greek Yogurt for the heavy or sour cream and used green onions in lieu of chives. Everything else I followed as directed.

Well, with the exception of the caviar. I had to go to two different grocery stores for the jarred caviar, and they only carried the black. I wasn’t going to schlep all the way to another store to find red caviar.

Although I did end up going to a third grocery store to find chicken livers. But that’s a whole other story.

The sad thing is that the black caviar, regardless of how gingerly I folded the eggs in, gave the dip a khaki color. I am sure that the red would have imparted a lovely salmon shade, which I imagine would be rather festive. Oh, well. I just threw on a bunch of Paprika to liven it up!

After making this, I realized that I just throw Paprika on top of lots of foods to give it color–twice-baked potatoes, chicken, cheese balls, deviled eggs, pork chops. My friend Kevin says that Paprika makes food deluxe. Which I think is my new favorite word. And yes, this creamy-cheesy -caviar-laced tidbit is rather deluxe.

I bet that Lee loved that word, too.

Tomorrow I’ll share with you the other little Liberace nibble that I made for Sunday Funday. To tide you over, here is the man-of-the-week and Cher:

There are no words.