Imperative cooking: cheap-jack dinner parties ;! •.1
THE GREAT thing, apparently, is to discover the interests of one's neighbour at the table, and the way to do this is to ask, `What is the nicest thing that happened to you today?' If she, understandably tells you to mind you own business or not to be so silly, you must try again with 'What a cold December we are having. If you weren't in England, where would you like to be at this time of the year?' or 'I hear you are off to Greece for three weeks what books are you packing in your suit- case?' or 'If you were the Queen, what opera/ballet/play would you choose to have performed at your gala?' These will make the conversation flow and your neighbour feel at ease which is The Object of man- ners.
Just as well, because I don't think she will be having much fun with the food, since her hostess has been warned, 'Nowa- days on even the most formal occasions, three courses are considered adequate. . , . Do not attempt too much. (Plan) a menu that can be served easily and needs little last-minute preparation.'
There's something decidedly dodgy ab- out the advice on 'dinner parties' offered in Debrett's Etiquette and Modern Manners; dodgy but also rather revealing. That something is most obvious when the au- thors, having announced that 'nothing can beat a dinner that is served by profession- als', hasten to reassure readers that `few people can or wish to undertake this expense' and it is quite all right for them to do it themselves. That is what leads to the importance of planning easily served menus — and,- lots of advice on how to serve. 'Method one. The hostess or host can take the food round. . . . Two. The main course can be put on the sideboard and guests help themselves. . . . Three. A further method is to serve and pass the meat along on plates. . . . and let the guests pass the rest among themselves.' There is also advice on how to set plates, carve meat, clear away and make 'many excellent soups' in a blender.
This is not, in fact, the etiquette and modern manners of a dinner party but of a dinner party adapted for people who can't afford servants, which is rather like the etiquette of a large pheasant shoot adapted for clay pigeons.
The idea becomes even more dodgy when more adaptations are made. The very people who can't afford servants also have dining rooms too small to accommo- date more than six or eight people, and these people are often well-known to them if not to each other. Thus emerges the fashionable hybrid in which 'dinner party' motions are gone through by six or eight very squashed persons, two of whom dou- ble as hosts and waiters.
The alternative is to scale up the usual family dinner and its proper menu and manners to accommodate three or four friends. This is much better provided only that the usual family dinner is properly conducted. Sound daily cooking and eating is the basis of entertaining, not class envy.
The rule book for this sort of dinner would be very different from that for the bastard dinner party. The obligation of manners remains the same: to give guests the best possible and to put them at their ease, but the circumstances make the obligation far easier to meet. It is quite possible for those giving the dinner to come and go into kitchens doing 'last minute preparations' right up to and during dinner.
That term sounds so innocent but avoiding last-minute preparation' denying your guests freshly-cooked spinach, pep- pers, cauliflower, indeed almost all veget- ables, all correctly grilled and fried meat and fish, all pasta dishes except those in the oven — in fact the decimation of the menu. Is it good manners to condemn guests to endless daubes or roasts with accompany- ing vegetables kept hot in ovens, or by plastic devices with candles or imitations of canteen steamers?
Nor is there any reason why the dinner with friends should have to limit itself to a mean three courses. Imperative cooks have five daily for themselves: they're not going to reduce the number because of guests.
As for serving, with the single exception of boiled pasta which is served in soup plates, dishes are put on the table for everyone to help himself. The dinner with friends is not more `informal'. It is a different form which takes its discipline from a serious interest in food and indeed conversation. Both it and the true dinner party serve the interest of manners. I am not sure for whose benefit the hybrid is staged.
Digby Anderson
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