I know. The dinner party is always over, or about to be so. In my long(ish) life, the announcement of its passing has been made several times, and on each occasion it has somehow risen from its bed like Lazarus, and tottered once more into the kitchen, wooden spoon in hand.
Still, I’m minded now to regard the situation as extremely serious: the patient, it would seem, really is in intensive care, and may not live to see another lasagne, nor even a small bowl of olives. Nigella Lawson, who is effectively the Mother of the Nation these days, says she’s out of the habit of throwing them – and if she is, so must we be. For where Nigella treads, we follow, breathing deeply the better to pick up the heady scent of cardamom.
What does she suggest we all do instead? No, not Deliveroo. She favours “picky bits” and a variation on the buffet comprising big bowls of this and that (or just this, if you’re hard-pressed).
What happened? Why did we stop having friends over to eat? (Surely no one says “dinner party” any more). I think the rot began to set in when people began using the word binge in connection with TV rather than food; Breaking Bad versus all that washing up was no contest. But then Covid-19 came along, and we got used to cooking either only for ourselves or for the person/people we were marooned with. For some, this has led, in the longer term, to the death of a certain kind of sociability. For others, the door is still just about open, but guests should not expect much more than a few slices of posh ham and a glass of wine. Nigella’s right.
We’re all moving in the direction of “picky bits” now, though I favour the term “salty snacks”, for which I seem always to be rushing to the corner shop just lately. (In my younger days, the Walk of Shame was the stroll to the Tube from a man’s house, dressed in the clothes of the night before; now it’s the dash along our street, my arms around a family-size bag of fluorescent orange, cheese-flavoured things.)
If the dinner party does become extinct, I will mourn its passing. I like having them, and I love being invited to them. Where, moreover, would our culture be without these glorious set pieces? Plays, films, books will be the poorer minus awkwardness over the hors d’oeuvres, and what will our future diarists write about, if not the undercooked pork they had round at this or that famous person’s gaff?
“Last night, at Tilton,” Virginia Woolf recounted to Lytton Strachey in 1927, “we picked the bones of Maynard’s [John Maynard Keynes, the economist] grouse … This stinginess is a constant source of delight to Nessa [Vanessa Bell, the artist and Woolf’s sister] - her eyes gleamed as the bones went round.” Even bad dinners are fun, unless you’re in a restaurant. As Laurie Colwin writes in her book, Home Cooking, there’s something almost triumphant about a really disgusting meal: “It lingers in the memory with a lurid glow, just as something exalted is remembered with a kind of mellow brilliance.”
Colwin, an American, was once invited to dinner at the London home of a “glum, genius-looking person”, who served a “casserole” comprising a layer of half-cooked rice, a layer of pineapple rings and a layer of sausages. Another time, she dined in Hampstead, where she was fed a version of stargazy pie with a whole squid where the eel should have been. It was flavoured, for the full medieval effect, with galangal, which her hostess described as “kind of like frankincense”. Colwin found both these occasions “enriching” – and so would I have done. My eyes would have been gleaming more brightly even than Vanessa Bell’s.
But this isn’t helping, is it? Part of the reason why people are giving up on entertaining has to do with fear – if it lurked before Covid-19, it has only grown since – and if I go on with these horror stories, you’ll only feel the more nervous. So let me encourage you instead with a few guidelines for a brave new world beyond picky bits:
Start small. Invite one or two close friends, and give them something (not beans) on toast. Grilled bread is very à la mode.
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Never, ever try out a new recipe if you’re expecting people. Long ago I invited a friend and his new girlfriend for dinner, and for some inexplicable reason – over-confidence? impending insanity? – I chose to experiment and served a chicken dish scented with rosewater. It was ghastly. Think meat Turkish delight. Years later, those two people married. I was not invited to the enormous wedding at which a very famous poet did a reading.
Ditch the starter, and buy in the pudding. Go to some fancy baker, serve ice cream, or dig out that fancy box of macarons someone gave you. Someone else gave it to them first: it’s your duty to break the cycle. It may even bring you good luck.
Main courses. I refer you again to Colwin. As she notes, everyone can make a salad. Add some potatoes and some protein – (non-rosewater scented) chicken, salmon, tuna – and presto! You’re halfway to a Nigella-style buffet situation.