Hackmatack Salad

How the Hackmatack Salad got its Name

Fair warning:  this blog post is rated R, or at least a hard PG-13.  If you’re offended by ribald humor, tune in again next week when we’ll be back to serving up the literary equivalent of tea cakes on lace doilies.

Disclaimer #2: This post also goes all the way around my elbow to get to my thumb, but bear with me.

Here goes.

In the early 90s, we lived in Charleston, West Virginia, and were very active in a small Episcopal church, St. Luke’s. We socialized frequently with our church friends, who were diverse in age and life experience. And, being Episcopalians, most of us enjoyed a cocktail or three.

One weekend, Rob and Bev Schissler invited a group of friends to their home to play “Balderdash” and have a pot-luck dinner.

If you haven’t played it, Balderdash is a game where one person – the “Dasher”—reads out an obscure vocabulary word and writes down the actual definition on a slip of paper.  This is kept secret from the other players, who invent their own, often humorous, definitions and turn them into the Dasher. The Dasher reads the slips of paper one by one, and folks take turns guessing which is the actual definition. 

When it was his turn to be Dasher, Rob read aloud the word, “hackmatack,” and secretly wrote the actual definition (a variety of larch tree found in Canada) on his slip of paper.

I racked my brain for something creative.

“An Arabic form of self-mutilation,” I wrote.

All answers collected, it was then time for Rob to read the definitions aloud.

When he came to mine, he squinted at my messy handwriting and misread aloud,

“Hackmatack: an aerobic form of self-manipulation.”

 As you can imagine, hilarity followed.

“Aerobic self-manipulation!?”  chortled Bev.

“Kinky!” cackled Jenny, the priest’s wife.

 “Don’t knock my hobbies,” offered Bob, head of the Vestry.

Who said Episcopalians were the frozen chosen?

So, gentle reader, what does any of this have to do with this week’s recipe?

Later, when everyone sat down to dinner – the holy spirits had been flowing for a couple hours at this point—I unveiled a salad of my own invention, and people dug in.

“Wow! This is really good,” enthused Rob.

“Mmmm! Apples, toasted almonds, is that curry I taste?” asked Bev.

“Oh my god, so good!” gushed Jenny.

“I think I just had a hackmatack,” said Rob.

And this, my friends, is how the Hackmatack Salad got its name.

Don’t say you weren’t warned. But it really is that good.

Enjoy!

Warning: If you experience a hackmatack lasting longer than 2 hours, consult a physician.

RECIPE FOR PRINT