Around this time every year, I text my friend Hannah Lavey — née Turner in Demopolis, Alabama — and ask her to send me, once again, the recipe for Spinach Madeline that I seem to lose every year. The original recipe for this beloved Southern dish comes from River Road Recipes, published by the Baton Rouge Junior League and created by Madeline Reymond. But Hannah's variation is a tad spicier and a tad cheesier. The snapshot she sends each year of the well-worn cookbook page on which the recipe is printed tells me it was shared with the ladies of St. Paul's Episcopal Church by a Mrs. Clarence W. Curb of Greensboro, Alabama. I'm grateful to Mrs. Curb for sharing it down the generations.

I cook Spinach Madeline for every Thanksgiving and every Christmas, and I serve it on toast points for winter parties. Its cheesy, garlicky, slightly spicy flavors pair perfectly with turkey or rib roast, and it adds a little something extra to a cocktail supper spread.

As devoted as I am to Spinach Madeline, it also plays a role in one of my most disastrous entertaining experiences. Every time I cook it, I'm carried back (somewhat traumatically) to an evening in 1999 when I was hosting my first big party as a young newlywed in New York.

At the time, Jon and I had barely been married for a year, and I still hadn't had much use for my china or the stacks of silver-plate serving dishes my parents' friends had given us as wedding gifts. Eager to try my hand at real entertaining in our fairly small apartment, I suggested we host our first holiday party and invite everyone we knew. We'd put out a big spread like the ones we'd grown up enjoying on Christmas Eve as children. We'd mix the generations. We'd replicate the menu that nearly every Southern hostess I know serves around the holiday season — beef tenderloin, homemade rolls, crabmeat mornay, homemade fudge and lemon squares, and ... you got it ... Spinach Madeline. It would be a feast.

At the time we hadn’t given many big parties. Dinners with friends, yes, and boozy late nights with takeout. But not a proper party. We couldn't afford a caterer in those years, so for days, my Southern expat friends and I got together to cook all the dishes we so loved from years of attending Christmas parties at home in Mississippi. Julia Reed, who was my unofficial advisor on all things entertaining in those days — and really ever after — hooked me up with a very talented (and now award-winning) majolica artist she knew, who had a side gig organizing servers for parties where the hostess would do the cooking. She and her team would plate and serve the food and provide the bartender.

When the day of the party arrived, I was excited and proud. The apartment was decked for the holidays with fresh greens and flowers from the West 28th Street flower market. We'd put up our first Christmas tree and decorated it with the few ornaments we’d collected together. We splurged on champagne and rented glasses so they'd all match. I bought a new dress.

Right on time, the majolica artist arrived to get things going in the kitchen. We didn’t own a dining room table at the time, so the servers and the bartender popped up a round catering table, we covered it with a pretty damask tablecloth my grandmother had given me for my wedding, and I got out all the china I owned — Herend Chinese Blue Bouquet was my wedding pattern, and I'd been given a hodgepodge of other plates over the years. Mixing, I thought, would be chic.

The guests arrived just as I'd imagined: our young friends who were just starting out in New York as we were. Jon's older colleagues from Newsweek, where he was a junior editor — some of whom I'd never met and only knew by their bylines. My faculty friends from the private girls' school where I was a teacher. Our ancient neighbor from across the hall, and the middle-aged Italian furniture repairman on whom I'd developed a secret crush when he fixed an old chair I'd found on the curb and had recovered.

The champagne flowed. Laughter rose. People were still talking about the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal. Friends of ours who'd never met flirted in the corners. It was all going just as I'd planned. A success!

Then suddenly, just as I was raising a silent little toast to myself, a loud crash sounded from the dining room. In slow motion I turned around to see that the catering table had collapsed on one side. Its legs had not been properly locked. All my china was sliding to the floor in bits, beef tenderloin and homemade rolls following. The chafing dish of Spinach Madeline somersaulted across the dining room and splattered all over the wall in a thick muck. My beautiful buffet was a wreck.

As tears welled and I looked out at my guests in bewilderment, the wife of one of Jon's older (and much-revered) colleagues — herself widely known as a great entertainer — put her arm around me, took me to the kitchen, and summoned the majolica artist and her crew to reset the table and clean up the mess. I can't quite remember from this distance exactly what she said. But it was something to this effect: “Darling, don't fret. No one will remember the food, but they'll remember that table falling. They'll talk about it as one of the most fun parties they've ever attended. Every party needs a little unexpected excitement.”

I wasn’t so sure. But the next week, I arrived home from work, and waiting for me in the lobby was the most charming (and quirky) vase with a ribbon around it, made out of the shards of my broken wedding china artfully arranged in to form a new pattern. Without my knowing it, the majolica artist had swept up the pieces and turned my entertaining disaster into something magical. I still use that vase to this day. And I still serve Spinach Madeline.

RECIPE

Ingredients

• 2 10 oz packages of frozen spinach
• 2 T finely chopped onion
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 2 T all-purpose flour
• 1/3 c evaporated milk
• 6 oz of Pepper Jack cheese OR Velveeta cheese, cubed
• (If you use Velveeta, add a 4 oz can of jalapenos, chopped)
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1/8 tsp garlic powder
• 3/4 tsp celery salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• cayenne pepper to taste

Directions

• Cook spinach according to directions. Drain well reserving 1/2 cup of liquid. Set aside
• Saute onion in butter in a heavy saucepan over low heat
• Add flour, stirring until smooth
• Cook 1 minute, stirring constantly
• Gradually add reserved spinach liquid and milk and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until thickened and bubbling. 
• Add cheese, Worcestershire sauce, celery salt, pepper, garlic powder and cayenne, if you choose to add heat. 
• Stir in spinach and transfer to a chafing or baking dish
• Keep in oven on low heat until ready to serve.