How to Host a Dinner Party (6 page)

If a friend invited me over, rubbed a chicken with salt and pepper, stuck it in the oven for forty-five minutes, and in that time boiled some potatoes and tossed a salad with olive oil and lemon juice, I would be a happy guest. But many of us want to be Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay or that cartoon rat who has his own restaurant. Well, we’re not all trained chefs, and that’s okay because the projected image of the domestic diva or the bad-boy chef is about as authentic as that of the magical talking animal. As we gather ideas for our menu, let’s start by being realistic.

Menus come to me in many ways. Sometimes I want to cook something because it has already proven popular, its ingredients are in season, it’s easy to prepare or cost-efficient, I know my guests like it, it uses a new technique that I’d like to try, it’s a combination of flavours I think might work, I already have it in my freezer, or it caught my eye in a book or magazine.

For some of us, menu planning is choosing to make the one thing we make well (which I thoroughly endorse). For some, it is poring over cookbooks. Others make spontaneous choices while walking through the market. There are many ways of choosing what goes on our menu. Some factors that determine our choices will be money, the theme, the style of meal, and incorporating food restrictions. Let’s tackle these individually.

Money

Any time money is a factor, it should probably be discussed first, so let’s talk about money. Rather than pretend that we can or should all become a television chef, some Botox-infused icon who cooks every luxury on a nebulous budget with the aid of invisible food stylists and celebrity guests, let’s admit that money is a driving force in our lives and that we don’t all have access to the same resources.

But the good news is that most of us, despite the paranoia that leads us to suspect otherwise, are surrounded by others in similar circumstances. If you are a twenty-two-year-old student, you probably live in a tiny apartment. Well, so do your friends. It is unlikely that any of your guests are Prussian nobility who will pop their monocle at the sight of a Triscuit. If you are a forty-four-year-old creative director at a marketing agency, guess what? You’re middle-class, buddy. There’s a reason why your friends are talking about vacations and their guilt over wanting private school for the kids. They are middle-class as well. If you are the CEO of a large corporation, then your life is probably populated by other wealthy people and by servants, like the person currently reading this for you.

So if we accept that we are surrounded mostly by peers of a similar economic bracket, it’s time to stop projecting our need to climb beyond that. Having the boss over? Well, the boss knows that you make less money than her. That’s how that power structure works.

Never spend money you can’t afford to spend, and certainly don’t do it for the sake of appearances. Anyone you need to ply with champagne isn’t really your friend. Or it’s a necessary business expense, in which case you can probably afford it.

The biggest monetary obstacle people complain about is buying wine. Pish posh. Expect guests to cover this. In the past year I’ve hosted fifty dinner parties. I’ve bought maybe a dozen bottles of wine. Guests bring wine. And the better your reputation as a host, the greater surplus you will accumulate. If you don’t like the wine your guests bring, you’re probably a wine aficionado, in which case you have a collection and can afford to share it.

One friend complained to me about the food cost of dinner parties. She said she’d spent $80 on fish for eight people. It turned out she was serving 8-ounce (227 g) portions of black cod, bought at $20 per pound. Personally, I don’t want to eat a half-pound of anything. Are we at some 1950s steakhouse? She said the reasons for her portion sizes were fear of not having enough food and fear of looking cheap.

Also, she’d chosen to serve a large amount of the most expensive ingredient/course. Black cod is a pricey fish — why not skate or lake trout? And third, properly cooking a piece of fish demands too much of a host’s time. It’s not magic. It needs only a smoking hot pan and the patience to wait and flip the fish carefully once it’s browned on one side. Anyone can do it once they are taught, but it requires too much attention at dinnertime. We can negate many of these obstacles by learning to cook foods that are both a good deal monetarily and a good deal less work to serve.

By this I mean we must learn to braise. Braising is slowly cooking something, submerged in liquid, at a low temperature, for a long time. Once the food is done, it is easy to reheat in a pan or in a pot of its original cooking liquid. What braising means to me is turning an inexpensive piece of meat (shoulder, leg, belly) into not just something delicious, but something that can be served with about five minutes’ effort at mealtime. It is about freeing yourself from a steak that not only will cost four times as much, but will also require you to spend twenty minutes over the stove, poking, flipping, and checking, rather than hanging out with your guests. Mastering this technique can be the cornerstone of any successful dinner party. The menu stage is the time to make the choices that will ease, not complicate, the experience of hosting.

Themes

The theme of Jesse’s meal was not really Moroccan, but rather the blind leading the blind. A themed meal is nice if there is a purpose behind it, not just a theme chosen at random. Please, unless there is an occasion, leave the themes to bachelorette parties and sixth seasons of sitcoms that have run out of ideas. Don’t pick a theme just to do something different. This is like deciding to build a Lord of the Rings–themed bookshelf before learning to make a bookshelf. Doing things well should always take priority over fanciful ideas. Good food is always a good theme.

Style of Meal

There are many styles of service that we may or may not consider a dinner party: potluck, buffet, barbecue, picnic, hotpot, clambake, smorgasbord (okay, now we’re just naming Elvis songs), but these are usually dining situations driven by external social forces, such as family celebrations or cottage weekends. A definition so broad might include going out to a restaurant. To call it a dinner party, invited guests need to be sitting together at a single table.

There are only two distinct styles of service that I would define as a dinner party: multi-course plated and family style. I like to switch between the two, often at the same dinner, serving one course as consciously composed plates for each guest, the next as a big bowl in the centre of the table from which they can all serve themselves. The Japanese say of their
nabemono
hotpot dish that the family who eats from the same pot grows closer. I see this happen all the time when dinner switches to family style. As people start reaching and passing, you can see their body language relaxing.

These are choices you can adjust through the planning and plating stages (see Chapter Seven). But now is the time to look at the bigger picture. If you want to serve courses, do you have enough plates to serve four dishes to six people? Are you prepared to wash dishes between courses if you don’t have twenty-four plates? A dishwasher may be too slow and too loud. I wash cutlery between courses. It may seem fussy, but it’s always appreciated. Sometimes I think we serve things family style to justify owning the large vessels at the top of our cabinets, the platter and bowl too gargantuan to fit on a proper shelf.

Food Restrictions

Despite what I said about vegetarians and vegans in the previous chapter, this is the perfect opportunity to show that you care. Make something special for people who have food restrictions. Consider balancing the needs of the few against the enjoyment of the many. If you’ve got one vegetarian or someone with a gluten allergy, plan a special dish for him or her, or even just a modification, but make sure to replace items rather than just serve them something with the good stuff missing. Making chili? It’s not much more work to make a small veggie version on the side. Serving a braised short rib over a celeriac purée? Poach an egg for the vegetarian. If the majority are vegetarians, just make the whole meal meat-free.

If you know that someone has a severe nut or shellfish allergy, don’t take any chances. Avoid any of those elements in the meal. Wash your preparation surfaces and tools thoroughly before starting to cook.

ON COOKBOOKS

When shopping for cookbooks, don’t be swayed by flashy photography. Those photos are to your cooking what fashion spreads are to your gym routine. The stylized, micro-focus, glistening tomatoes, golden-crusted seared slices of foie gras, pea foam piped into an open pea pod, and symmetrically even zips of pistachio sauce create an unrealistic goal.

There’s a reason why people call it food porn. Food photographers earn good money to give you a food boner for this stuff. But the idea that we, as amateurs, should attain the level of skill that professionals achieve is foolish and sure to lead to our disappointment.

Too many celebrity-driven cookbooks have not been properly recipe tested. If your town has a dedicated cookbook shop, ask the staff for suggestions. Don’t trust cookbooks implicitly. Treat new cookbooks like a first date and don’t take their word for anything, not the amount of salt or the baking time. But once you have cooked more than one dish out of a book and have been happy with it, trust the hell out of that book.

Here are suggestions for beginners from Mika Baraket, owner of the Good Egg cookbook store in Toronto, Ontario:

• •
  How to Cook Everything
  by Mark Bittman. No photos, just a few instructional drawings. Chock full of info, facts, and figures as well as recipes. This is almost a textbook. Only men buy this book. Fact.
  
• •
  The Art of Simple Food
  by Alice Waters. No photos or instructional illustrations, just a few spot drawings for flair. The recipes speak for themselves — very minimal on facts and figures, nothing fancy. Only women buy this one.
  
• •
  Cook with Jamie
  by Jamie Oliver. Lots of photos. His dishes are not plated, but rather thrown on a plate simply and unpretentiously. We recommend this to students and young families.
  
• •
  The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook
  by America’s Test Kitchen. Instructional drawings, very didactic. This is for the older, studious cook.
  
• •
  Appetite
  by Nigel Slater. Yes, there are photos, but more so of the ingredients than of the final dishes. This is the best cookbook ever written. If everyone read this, the world would be a better place.
  

THE PLAN

 
 Let me impress upon you the critical nature of this stage. If we take care to plan our shopping and cooking properly, we will ease our job as host, which should in turn relax our guests. Foolish are the hosts who bookmark a few recipes, thinking that they’ll rise on Saturday, go out for brunch, take a leisurely stroll through the market, latte in hand, shop for ingredients, then spend the afternoon cooking.

The reason we plan ahead is to avoid a typical stressful dinner party scenario: Thirty minutes before guests arrive, the house is a mess, but you’re on your way to the store because you don’t have enough eggs to make the cornbread that needs forty minutes to bake.

Making Lists

I like to schedule my work with two lists,
Buy
and
Make
. My Buy list contains every item I need to make dinner, short of salt, pepper, and olive oil. It’s obvious that we need buttermilk to make the cornbread because most of us don’t keep buttermilk lying around. But do you think you have six cups of flour? Are you positive? Make sure before you start baking, so that you don’t need to make an extra trip to the supermarket. On my Make list, I include every last kitchen detail, from soaking beans to making soup to slicing herbs. (You might make a third list, called
Clean
, if there are any major tasks here beyond a simple tidying.)