How to Host a Dinner Party (7 page)

Let’s break this down by looking at a sample menu for a recent dinner I hosted:

• • Tunisian lamb thingee + couscous
  
• • Kale salad + Yuzu dressing
  
• • Beef cheek burgers
  
• • Ask Jesse to bring dessert
  

For this dinner, my lists looked like this:

BUY

This is how I make my list. It’s very sparse, but I try to write down everything, even if I know I have it. Then I’ll go over it and cross things out before getting started. For example, I had couscous, almonds, apricots, and garlic. But if I didn’t take the time to list them, I may have discovered later that I was mistaken, that I was out of almonds.

Never cook something because you think it will impress your guests. Instead, cook something you think tastes good. Never serve guests something that you haven’t cooked before. Your friends will be too polite to tell you what you’ve done wrong when you serve them overcooked, over-salted food, but you will know. If you are thinking of serving a dish at a dinner two weeks from now, test it out tonight. The heads of two can be felled with but one stroke of the sword, or is “two birds with one stone” the more related expression? You get a weeknight meal out of it and you’ll learn how to properly execute a dish. In the kitchen, we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.

Personally, I break this rule regularly, but I host a dinner every week. My usual formula is: one dish that I know is a crowd-pleaser; one dish that may be a tweak, but still reliable; and something new and experimental. It’s only because I do this all the time that I feel comfortable failing in front of an audience. When I’m hosting friends, I don’t take chances — nothing from the new album. No improv. Only hits.

High-end restaurants serve an
amuse-bouche
, a one- or two-bite dish. Using either bold flavour or the simplicity of fresh ingredients, the
amuse
says to the diner, “You are in for a good meal. Trust your host.” Take that into consideration if you’re organizing a multi-course meal. Not the pretension of an
amuse
, and certainly not the uptight theatricality of calling it that, but the idea behind it. Make sure the first thing that hits the table leaves a strong impression. If it’s a lentil soup, it should be a killer lentil soup, balanced with lots of acidity and spice.

To an Italian cook, the order is predetermined: soup, antipasti, pasta, fish, meat, cheese, and dessert. But serve people food in the order that will make them happiest. If you want to start with pancakes, so be it. This country was founded on that principle.

That “lamb thingee” on this menu was a Moroccan lamb stew I got from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s cookbook
The River Cottage Meat Book
. It definitely tastes better the day after it’s cooked, once all the flavours have mingled. So not only did I prep it before Saturday (my list says Thursday just because that’s an evening I had free), but I did a double batch, froze half, and saved it for another dinner. Same goes for the beef cheeks. I braised a whole batch on Thursday, about four pounds, set aside what I needed for Saturday, and froze the rest.

For this menu, I’ve chosen dishes that are all prep-heavy. On Thursday, I spend several hours cooking, sure. That’s my Thursday night. But on the day of the dinner, I just need to chop some greens and make a dressing. Each course will require me to be in the kitchen for only a maximum of fifteen minutes, and I don’t need more than an hour, tops, to prep.

All of this may sound counterintuitive. If we are hosting dinner on Saturday, why aren’t we spending Saturday in the kitchen? But set aside a weekday evening to accomplish most of the work for a prep-heavy menu and it will not just alleviate your time pressures on the day of the party, but eliminate any doubts about how much time you’ll need. Having a schedule for each task will reduce your worrying. You can wake up Saturday and relax with the paper, eat brunch, and watch cartoons, knowing that you don’t need the whole day in the kitchen to get ready for dinner.

Planning and advance work will also free up space so that you’re not using every pot, bowl, and inch of counter at once. If a soup can be made ahead of time, get it done so that space is freed up in the kitchen on the day that you need it.

When I’m cooking from a recipe I haven’t made before, I start by reading it out loud and (yes, I know this sounds silly) miming the motions. It’s goofy, sure. We all have different styles of learning. For me, it helps to rehearse it. When I pretend to scoop down the sides of my mixer, I get a better sense of what’s involved in the recipe. It helps pinpoint the elements that I’m less certain of, while familiarizing me with the recipe.

Quantities

When we’re fixing ourselves a snack, we know just how much we want. But when we’re planning dinner for six, it’s difficult to know how much to make. We’re afraid of making too little.

You can estimate by weight, volume, or fistful. You can imagine how much you would like to eat of every item. You can plan it out based on governmentally approved nutrition charts, calculating how many grams or ounces of meat, vegetable, grains, dairy, or candy each person needs. You might try visualizing a single plate, piled high with everything you’re serving. That might snap you out of the phobia that there won’t be enough food.

When I’m planning proper meals, I strategically place the heaviest dishes toward the end. I also try to make it something with a negotiable amount. Guests may be more full than you’d expected, and no one wants to see good food go to waste, certainly not expensive pieces of fish. It can be hard to estimate how much people will eat (see Chapter Two: The Plan and Chapter Eight: The Portioning). This is something you will learn with experience. To begin, it’s better to have too much than not enough.

For budgetary reasons, we can’t simply have too much of everything. So whatever you’re going to have an excess of, make it something you wouldn’t mind eating as leftovers, not something you’ll resent having spent too much on.

One time I hosted a meal in a movie theatre. How much caramel corn does a dozen people eat during a matinee? How much bucatini with tomato sauce? Who knows? I chose these things because I could prepare them in advance, and because they were so inexpensive that I could afford to make far too much. For dinner, I might make my last course a lamb ragù with polenta. If we are full, I can serve only half of the ragù and freeze the rest. The polenta is dirt-cheap. Consider this while planning your meal, rather than leaving expensive pieces of fresh meat or fish for a final course that guests may be too full to eat, though even a big piece of rib-eye can be trimmed down at the last minute. Individual quiches cannot.

Or you can accept that, as samurai philosopher Musashi Miyamoto liked to say, “you must practise this.” Just start by making too much. Eventually, you’ll develop a sixth sense for how much guests need.

Just remember that people will eat more of food served family style than the same dish served as a plated course. A dish with three asparagus spears, three maple syrup–roasted sunchokes, and three slices of rare rib-eye is a perfectly good plate of food. But if you put out a platter of that, multiplied by the number of guests, those amounts seem skimpy. With shared plates, people always start off by taking too large a portion. Perhaps that’s a vestige of the family element of family style. When we were kids, in competition with our brothers and sisters, we helped ourselves to big portions and ate fast, so that we could have more of the good stuff.

Presentation

How will you serve the food you’ve chosen? What will it look like on the plate? When you’re at a restaurant and you see a chef spooning out sauce, mounting a deep-fried puck of something, coaxing a piece of fish out of a pan, then topping it all with a slaw he freshly tossed with dressing, you know that he didn’t just decide how to plate it at the last minute. That’s a dish he has served many times every night, and he has done so for many weeks or even months.

Once you know what you’re going to serve, decide how you’ll serve it. Sketch it out on paper. No, you don’t need a blueprint or 3D animatics to storyboard how a steak will look with a potato next to it. But if you’re composing a real dish, take a few minutes to conceive how it will look. It’s better than figuring it out while hungry guests wait at the table.

Also, if your dishes have multiple elements on them, it’s helpful to have an illustrated guide as a checklist. It can help you avoid forgetting to include key ingredients. I’ve made that mistake, serving a tuna ceviche with horseradish, only to find I had forgotten the horseradish. Attach your drawing to the fridge with magnets.

ON WINE

I once hosted a dinner (at which I was not cooking) for a group of chefs. About half of them were very into wine and the other half were not, several saying that they’d just as soon have beer with this meal. The chefs who weren’t interested in or didn’t know about wine were proud of this, professing a belief common among young chefs that they need not understand anything outside of a kitchen.

During the main course, a slow-roasted saddle of lamb, one of the chefs, a Frenchman, poured us a wine he’d brought. We all agreed that the wine was good and that the lamb tasted even better with the pairing. Then he poured us a drink from another bottle of the same wine, one that he’d opened an hour earlier. The effect dumbfounded many of the chefs at the table, all of whom agreed that what had been a very good dish was now a great dish.

There are two lessons in this story:

1. 1.
   Chefs, even good ones, can be ignorant about wine, and that’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
   
2. 2.
   The most basic understanding of wine pairing can dramatically elevate a meal.
   

If you are a wine person, wine snob, wine collector, sommelier, wine steward, wine captain, or wine lieutenant, skip this sidebar. You already have separate glasses for Pinot Noir. You have a wine collection that you store at 54°F (12°C), possibly in your basement cellar, a temperature-controlled cabinet in the kitchen, or a storage locker you rent because you’re very wealthy. You know which wines to serve with which foods and how to pour them.

For the rest of us, let’s simplify things.

When choosing a wine to drink with dinner, most of us have no idea what we’re doing. We take refuge in that old refrain, “I may not know art, but I know what I like.” Pleased with a particular wine we’ve enjoyed, we remain loyal.