Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [8]
GIVING A DINNER PARTY (V)
The clean-up, as well as the cooking, is more interesting if you’re not doing it alone. Anyone can load a dishwasher and put the leftovers away, but it takes someone involved to be part of the post-party analysis, the late-night debriefing during which you hash over the food, the guests, and the most outrageous or revealing things that were said. It’s inevitable that now and then one of you was in the kitchen, so it’s also a chance to hear what you may have missed.
GIVING A DINNER PARTY (VI)
Keep in mind: attitude is everything. As Horace says, “a host is like a general; adversity reveals his genius.”
FOOD
Sometimes a guest has special dietary rules: they’re allergic to shellfish, cannot digest tomato seeds, or they’re vegetarians. If you know ahead of time, it should influence, though not completely dictate, the menu, unless they’re the guest of honor. But you’re not running a restaurant, and the cocktail hour is no time to try to prepare something special.
EXTRAS
This happens so often it hardly qualifies as unexpected. A guest calls with the news that a friend or relative has appeared and asks if they can be included. Yes, if at all possible, and especially if it’s only one. One of our best extras appeared on a night that John Irving called to say he thought he was in love, but he hadn’t introduced her to anyone yet and could he bring her along? You bet. They married the next year.
SCHEDULE
It is rare but not unheard of for guests to show up on the wrong night. There are four choices: send out for pizza; give them a drink while you change and then go out to eat; urge them to stay and serve whatever you were going to have anyway or make a simple pasta; or, if the night is impossible, as a last resort, send them home.
ACTS OF GOD AND MAN-MADE DISASTERS
This requires a similar approach. People show up in a downpour or a blizzard when the storm has taken out the stove and refrigerator. One night, in the middle of an elaborate meal, there was a pounding on the door by two men who announced that their car, at the end of the driveway, was on fire, and could we call 911? It must have been a slow night at the firehouse, because five engines and trucks showed up. The two men, who had rescued their pizza from the backseat, joined us for the meal. But then, we’re in favor of memorable dinner parties, aren’t we?
JORIE GRAHAM ON LOVE
“Things taste better in small houses,” Queen Victoria once said. At our house in Aspen, the kitchen and dining room are together and there’s also a fireplace. The table sits six, eight at most. Jorie Graham, the poet, and several others came to dinner one January. We began talking about love and the period of the 1960s and ’70s, when new and improved contraception and the nonexistence of AIDS made for openness and great sexual freedom.
Overwhelming passion, Jorie observed, when one is literally unable to breathe, had been central to and written about in Western literature for more than fifteen hundred years. “It is the signature element,” she said.
There began a recalling of passionate firsts: seeing someone on a neighboring boat and in an instant falling in love, later marrying; sexual awakening on a trip through the country with a boy of twenty.
“Twenty … how old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
Stilton and pears and the almond toffee (Enstrom’s) made down in Grand Junction, as good as any in the world, we all agree. Snow all around. Starry night. Everyone reluctant to leave.
NEVER TOGETHER
Part of the pleasure of giving a dinner party is inviting people who do not know but might like each other. Like Babe Ruth, who did it some thirteen hundred times, it’s inevitable that you sometimes strike out. As a reminder of what definitely didn’t work, we have at the back of our dinner book a page called “Never Together.”
There are obvious mismatches to be avoided: guests with intensely different views who tend to speak their minds on politics, abortion, or gun