Home cooking by Colwin Laurie

Author:Colwin, Laurie [Colwin, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Cooking
Publisher: New York : Bantam Books
Published: 1990-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and

you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.

Of course, one person's dinner party is another's potluck supper. Glossy photos in magazines of women wearing eight-thousand-dollar dresses lighting huge numbers of candles in huge numbers of Georgian silver candlesticks on a table that seats forty can be pretty depressing when all you have is a ratty sweater and an old dishwasher. In the photos liveried footmen hover in the background hiding a battalion of cooks and cleaners. To the average person, the dishwasher stands in for any number of servants. Of course, some people actually have a servant who takes away the plates after each course and then brings new, clean ones. In other households, this person is often called a husband.

In the old days, women planned dinner parties by sitting

down with the cook and discussing what might be nice to serve. The cook or the cook's servant did the shopping. The table was set by the scullery maid. The hostess's job was to dress well and smile, and the husband poured the wine. Then, while the men smoked cigars in one room, and the women gossiped in another, the table was magically cleared and everything was washed and put away.

Nowadays, almost everyone works and the hostess usually spends a few days on and off consulting with the cook, a replica of the hostess, at about two o'clock in the morning when she can't sleep. The cook's servant, another twin to the hostess, does the shopping on the way to or on the way home from work, and the butler, a double of the husband, buys the wine and some flowers. The cook and butler rush home, set the table, start the meal, and just as they collapse exhausted in their chairs with a glass of wine, the guests arrive.

Some people like to feed lots of people at a time. Often this pays back several invitations at once. Others like to mix and match their friends. I know a couple who keep a kind of dinner party log: who came, who was matched with whom and what was served. 1 myself feel that eight for dinner without help makes the host and hostess jumpy. Six creates fewer dishes and less din.

But what to feed them? The idea of a dinner party is rather like the idea of a novel. People who have never written novels say: "Oh, but they're so long and have so many chapters!" Many people feel just that way about dinner parties: 'They're so long and have so many courses!" Just as novels are written chapter by chapter, so are dinner parties put together course by course. And just as novels are not necessarily written from beginning to middle to

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