The Servantless Cook

In which the author explains how you can be a better host

So you’d like to throw a dinner party and are wondering how the devil best to play it. Good, you’ve come to the right place.

I’m afraid though that my first piece of advice will not be advice at all, but a liberal dose of existential doubt. It is the exact same resolve-testing nugget of doubt that was offered to me by a wedding band singer when I prepared to take the stage and propose to my girlfriend;

Are you sure you want to do this mate?

Because some people simply aren’t meant to host. This was a sentiment put to me by a friend’s father at supper last weekend, and one I couldn’t have shared more. He noted that these days you can be invited to houses that are dirty, with too many guests, and where the only thing more offensive than the lentil and raw onion soup is the choice of bore your host has decided you’d make good chums with.

This may seem snobbish, and admittedly these were the words of a man born into a staffed country manor, however the tirade was no reactionary assault on our measly, modern servantless existences. It was instead the recognition of fact; once there were professionals for this sort of a thing, and with the rise of the DIY dinner party, inevitably there have been casualties.

And we are not alone in our hesitations. AA Gill famously wrote in the 90s that we should start to regulate this whole hosting charade; that whenever the meal is not good enough, we must ask to ‘take it back and to bring something else.’ He’d done the math and figured the average guest spends £40 (in 1990s money, mind you) on taxis, wine & babysitters, and that this cost is not to even mention the immaterial; there’s then the hour in transit, the anecdote assembling to sing for one’s supper, with both rendered all the more dire by the inevitable enroute argument with your partner. If conversely the host it to spend 45 minutes preparing a mozzarella salad at a fiver a head, well then who is exactly doing whom a favour?

Gill can be misinterpreted for one who condemns dinner parties, but the astute reader sees only an appeal for improvement. This is a man who believes we must accept the mantle of responsibility, that ‘it is no excuse for a host to be too busy to shop wisely and cook well… If you’re too damn successful to look after you’re friends, then don’t give dinner parties. Take them to restaurants or hire a chef.’

Rule one of hosting is therefore the smallest ask and the biggest ask I have of you - to care.

Yet equipped with whole hearts, the odds are still stacked against us and we don’t even know it. One of the definitive modern cookbooks and first to sell over a million copies was Julia Child’s Mastering the art of French Cooking, a tome that starts with the line ‘this is a book for the servantless cook.’ Did you even identify as a servantless cook? Well that’s what you are. Only you are so divorced from history that you had no idea, and I hope finally now are catching on to the source of your tribulations.

Julia’s remedy is to go French because ‘the excellence of French cooking, and of good cooking in general, is due more to cooking techniques than anything else.’ I would however posit that the postures of the prosperous have since changed. We inhabit the age of the curator, not the creator. In the 1950s of Julia Child, unrivalled mastery in the kitchen separated the domestic goddess from the tin can proletariat. However cut to the predilections of modern professionals and submission to the kitchen is viewed as inefficient, indulgent, and ill-judged in its acquired social capital to input effort ratio. An example; one of the greatest starters I’ve served is some high grade tomatoes, chopped roughly in the moment, and tossed with a bunch of basil leaves and doused in olive oil. Served with grilled bread and anchovies, now that’s social capital.

It took another Yankee - what with their gumption, democratic instinct and innate aversion to class systems - to really first show us what servantless cooking could look like with style. In MFK Fisher’s memoirs of life in Switzerland during the 30s, she described hiding a simple but soulful stew from her hoity-toity guests, who growing ever more hungry and nervous without any obvious sight of dinner, intrepidly questioned if it was true that she had no servants living with her.

When all was revealed in its full informality, the guests flocked like children into the kitchen for their suppers where ‘they ate and ate, and talked as they had not dared talk for too many years, and laughed a great deal.’ And this is the benchmark of a successful supper. It’s not the accolades over your wellington, but the emotional vigour roused in your guests. A Swiss Judge at Fisher’s dinner gives the finest seal of approval to any soirée imaginable when he raises an impromptu toast to his wife of many years; ‘Anneli, my dear, I had forgotten I could have such an agreeable evening with you in the room.’

This may seem a lot of pressure. You’ve got a lot to live up to, you’ve appetites to appease and relationships to reconcile. I’m like Dirty Harry pointing the revolver at you, I’m the wedding band singer, I’m asking you if you understand the gravity of your decision? Rather than make you run away, I’m hoping you are made to run toward. Choose life.

But how? Here we move on from supper’s poet laureate and into the practicalities. The sensuously sensible Nigella Lawson was one of the first Britishers to fight back against the age of Entertaining with a capital E. In How To Eat, she resists the atmosphere in which it is incumbent on us not so much to cook as to slave, strive, to sweat, to perform. Home food, she says, should be home food; relaxed, expansive, authentic and should reflect your personality not your aspirations (though I might add there is often a fuzzy line between those two things). After this rousing introduction and a very good suggestion of crostini as aperitif, I’m afraid - and please spare the lowly food writer who criticizes one of the industry deities - her proceeding recipes don’t quite fully realise the philosophy. They’re too much work and some break the cardinal sin of hosting decreed by the greatest Italian cook I know; una volta a tavola, mai più in cucina.

Instead it is Adler Tamar of An Everlasting Meal fame who provides the singular anecdote to act as exemplum for an evening bien fait. One of the most pleasant dinners she remembers was at a friend’s who’d plated the entire meal: braised short ribs, haricot verts, and potato puree, and left them sitting on the dining room table for an hour while they drank wine and ate prosciutto. Drank wine and ate prosciutto, yes now that is a good starting point - why have not more of my evenings begun like that?

However… and most regrettably… I must now undermine all that has been said so far, and admit that I rarely have anything done by the time people come for dinner. It’s always a total shambles. And like any man worth his manhood - as Adam did with Eve - I will blame my wife for this desperate situation. She stuffs too many activities into a single day, and I play the workhorse allowing the morning playdate across town to merge into hosting a silly number of people for lunch at home.

Yet I’m experienced enough to know how to weather the storm. Get people drinks quickly (make sure there is wine & proscuitto) and take whoever is most socially reticent away with you into the kitchen to help you prepare a few bits (with an especially stiff drink for them).

There will always be aspiration and reality, and with time one learns, supper is most often the place where they end up meeting.

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Gazpacho

Here’s a suggestion on how to host your summer barbeque; have cold beers lined up ready for guests alongside a jug of gazpacho with ice and glasses to serve it into.

As MFK Fisher knows best; gazpacho makes ‘a legitimate and not too alcoholic way to keep your guests busy… you will find the appetites sharp and wits fairly clear, and a satisfying patina of conversation glittering in the air.’

This creates the background hum while you merrily grill whatever you are grilling. Don’t barbeque lots of things - maybe just some lamb chops, or steaks, or kebabs and serve them with something simple and pre-prepared like an olive oil potato salad or a rice pilaf and a side of dressed green beans.

Ingredients:

• 6 ripe tomatoes

• 1 cucumber (peeled)

• 1 small red pepper

• 1 small garlic clove

• 1 cup stale bread

• 6 tbsp olive oil

• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar

• Salt to taste

• Cold water (if needed)

Method:

Peel all the vegetables (this can be done with a potato peeler and a bit of wristy zigzagging, believe me), add salt, vinegar and oil, and blend until smooth. Add the bread and let it set for 30 minutes until it has softened and inflated. Blend again. Taste and correct for sharpness (more vinegar?), unctuousness (more oil?), salt (more salt?) and pepper (etc.).

Note: Exact ratios of all the ingredients are not very important, this is very much a blueprint.