Now I’m more relaxed about dinner parties, I don’t freak out if I can’t find purple basil
Dinner parties are in the news again thanks to the release of a film, The Trouble with Jessica, set during a London dinner party where everything goes badly wrong. With dinner parties on screen you know pretty much what you’re in for: posing, flirting, tension (arising from a crisis in the kitchen and/or a clash of opinions) loosened inhibitions, accusations, an accident (wine spill or worse) and in real life it’s much the same, only without the kaftans and moody lighting.
Or it was, because dinner parties are very different now that we’re old enough not to care so much. The rules have relaxed, of course, since our early hosting days (three courses, one featuring sundried tomatoes, and a flaming sambuca) but we’ve relaxed too.
We no longer feel the pressure to compete on the cooking front (they gave us fish stew, we can’t get away with a tray bake); or to ask interesting people we barely know in order to make it more interesting for the ones we do; or to rush around the day before making the house look OK (such as hanging the pictures and hiding the bad ugly stuff).
Even back in the Noughties you would freak out if you couldn’t find the purple basil, you never had less than eight for supper (to make the effort worthwhile) and you tidied up your bedroom in advance in case someone put their head around the door and discovered the front of house set up was basically a sham. These days we’re comfortable in our own skin, we can wing it with a recipe, and we haven’t been entertaining for almost four decades without learning a few tricks.
Only the truth is more complicated, if we’re honest. The older you get, the weirder it is that you can’t make gravy and the more people expect you to be proficient in the kitchen, and at the very least, organised. Nowadays they mind if you reel back when you open the front door and gasp “Christ I forgot I’d asked you”; they prefer you not to admit you’ve only just put the lamb in, so you’ll be eating at midnight; they care if it slipped your mind they’re vegetarian, or AA and there’s not so much as a bottle of fizzy water in the house.
Back in the boomtime dinner party years, everyone was drinking like pirates and would happily have eaten insoles if you served insoles and often what you did serve was not far off (I once saw a guest at one of my dinner parties gagging when she sampled an experimental meatloaf dish, but on the whole people just chewed their way through it with the aid of Jacob’s Creek). Now everyone is extremely concerned about what they eat, and if they don’t have a medically justified preference they have an opinion. (“Oh you’re doing those with butter are you…Hmm…you don’t think a bit of olive oil…”).
Apart from anything the kitchen, back in the old days, was separate from the room where your guests gathered: now everything is open plan, access all areas, and the deal is people feel free to join in, if not take over. They’ll be in your fridge and cupboards before you can say, “Look I just don’t want to make that much effort if it’s all the same to you?” It’s like a human rights issue: my body, my choices.
And because we’re older we don’t have the three-nights-on-the-trot energy we used to, so frankly they do expect you to make your dinner party worth the squandering of their limited resources. On the one hand they’re grateful (we don’t see enough of our friends), but on the other, is this it? And no cheese? And your neighbours? Giving dinner parties does get a lot easier in the sense that you’re not learning and you’re unlikely to poison them (that happened once; tiramisu) but they’re still not easy. They’re still on the list of things that can go badly wrong.
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