Dinner and drinks parties: treasured pastimes of the British middle classes
and a seemingly inexhaustible source of entertainment, most notably in Mike
Leigh’s unforgettable 1977 Play for Today, Abigail’s Party.
It is 30 years since that soirée, when Alison Steadman brought us Beverly with
her peach chiffon, blue eyeshadow and, we couldn’t all help agreeing in the
end, mercifully dead husband.
Now the BBC is planning a new 90-minute drama along the same lines, The
Dinner Party. Scheduled for transmission in the autumn, it is rumoured
to star Timothy Spall.
For several years now, dinner parties have been resolutely unfashionable. In
the Nineties they were all but replaced by “destination” dining in
fantastically overhyped restaurants, each one more splendidly outlandish
than the last.
Then “supper” became the thing, a self-consciously effortless and informal
affair that was supposedly thrown together with gay abandon but actually
required vast amounts of planning behind the scenes.
Recently, however, there are signs that the middle classes are once again
officially communing over the stroga-noff. The dinner party, dare we say it,
is back.
Why should this be? Well, thanks to a Herculean property boom, people are
investing heavily in their homes. They want to show them off.
In particular, we are all obsessed with our kitchens. And where there is a new
powder-blue Aga or a kitchen “island”, then dinner for eight will surely
follow.
On the surface, the new dinner party appears considerably more relaxed than it
was in Beverly’s day. The ubiquitousness of the open-plan kitchen means that
guests can witness, if not partake in, the cooking process. Some would argue
that this takes the pressure off the hostess.
Personally I find that it makes the whole débacle even more stressful, since
before, at least my culinary incompetence was concealed. Now, tragically, it
is on show for all to see. Because underneath that veneer of postJamie
Oliver informality, the dinner party remains rife with disastrous potential.
It is, as ever, the great middle-class battleground.
FOOD
Presentation-wise, we’re all domestic goddesses now. No more blue eyeshadow
and hostess trolley for us. This is partly because so many women now have
jobs and are therefore unable to spend entire days planning menus and
preparing food; but also because many of us now have open-plan
kitchen/dining rooms.
Most modern dinner-party cooking takes place, as it were, in real time. It’s
part of the evening’s entertainment to have olive oil on your blouse and
sugar in your hair; the food is served in large dishes, with everyone
helping themselves at the table.
Being a greedy person, I always look forward to eating when I’m going out for
supper; but there are those for whom the food, for a variety of reasons, is
almost the least important part of a dinner party.
There are the women, for example, who refuse to eat your special potatoes
because “they don’t agree with me” (it’s a potato: what’s not to agree
with?). People who peel the pastry off everything, guests who will eat only
the sauce but not the pasta. To these people I say, you’re very welcome to
your silly eating fads but why can’t you have a night off now and then?
Still, I’m not entirely blameless. I cannot, for example, abide anything
cooked in red peppers. Ratatouille makes me shudder. As does being served
raw beef, another British middle-class affectation.
If someone could please explain that one to me, I’d be overjoyed.
Here are my tips for a simple dinner-party menu:
Starter: hummous with pitta bread slices and carrot fingers. Main: Jamie
Oliver’s simple supper chicken, and for pudding you can’t beat a proper
macedonia. It’s very easy to make and excellent for using up old or slightly
hard fruit. The key thing is to chop everything small.
WHEN TO LEAVE
Knowing when to leave is a vital dinner-party skill. Departing before coffee
is incredibly rude, even if you do have to get up at 5am the next day. There
are exceptions: a new baby, a sick child, a very long drive home. But
otherwise you should stay for at least a couple of Bendick’s Bittermints –
say 20 minutes or so.
At the other end of the scale, overstaying your welcome is just as bad.
Generally, a hostess knows she’s in trouble when a guest refuses coffee or
tea and asks instead if you can’t “crack open another bottle of wine”. Do
not comply with the good stuff. If the guest is still sober enough to notice
a sharp decline in standards, there’s a decent chance that he or she will be
off soon; otherwise at least you won’t have wasted a good bottle on a drunk.
A move to “sit soft” (one of the more irritating expressions in the
dinner-party vernacular) will often jettison hangers-on. If that doesn’t
work, inquiries about transportation can be effective. I find that simply
tidying up, turning off the music and making obvious signs of wanting to
retire usually does the trick. In extremis I have been known simply to go to
bed. I did this once to find the offending guest, a friend of a friend I’d
never met before, sound asleep in my fireplace the next morning.
Often the person who won’t leave also turns out to be The Bore. If someone is
being loud or bullish at your dinner party, I’m of the firm opinion that you
should simply draw his or her fire. After all, it’s your house, you’re in
charge. If they don’t like it they can always leave. Please.
DECOR
It is a mathematical fact (oh, all right, it’s not. But it ought to be) that
when the middle classes move house/do up their kitchen, their dinner-party
quotient rises exponentially. This is because they want to show off their
impeccable taste/ new dining table/reclaimed floor tiles/ vast wealth.
Conversations will be had about the marvellousness of their builder, the
fashionableness of their architect and the all-round cleverness of the
hostess for getting the chandelier that was featured in last month’s Interiors
magazine at cost price from the Italian manufacturer.
As a guest, it is advisable to select one very obvious item of recent
acquisition, such as a new-range cooker or stylish wallpaper, and remark
upon it in lavishly appreciative tones.
NB: By decor we now also mean the garden, which these days is no longer simply
a place to potter on sunny days, but in itself an opportunity for showing
off. The size, the landscaping, the quality of the garden furniture – all
have to be considered.
Of course, couples who proudly show off their revamped homes, with their
pristine sofas and blissfully empty storage solutions, find that the second
their first child comes along the entire place is instantly overrun by tons
of brightly coloured plastic tat. Thus the hostess with children must, as
well as everything else, find a way of concealing all evidence of civilised
existence having been ruined by children. Trikes, bikes, prams or other
infant rolling-stock must be collapsed and put away, and all toys stuffed
into cupboards.
The illusion need last only a few hours – just long enough to convince your
guests that you are Superwoman and not an exhausted, demoralised wreck.
CONVERSATION
Choose the right set of guests and the conversation should flow like the
Aloxe-Corton, right? Wrong. The most carefully engineered gatherings can
descend into icy conflict or, worse still, abject boredom if the
conversation takes a bad turn. Often, the wine is actually to blame. The
less lucid people become, the more they lose their inhibitions and their
inner bore takes over. Generally speaking, the deterioration can be charted
thus:
Two glasses of wine: Property prices, swiftly segueing into the
impossibility of finding a good school for little Johnny and/or why little
Johnny is being short-changed because even though he can already conjugate
Latin verbs and beat his mother at bridge, his teacher simply refuses to put
him up a form, which is just typical of the state system but, hey, what can
you do? The local private primary is almost four grand a term and anyway,
it’s against our principles, we pay our taxes so why should we have to pay
twice, etc, etc.
Three glasses of wine: The conflict in the Middle East, Iraq, why
America is evil. Enough said.
Four glasses of wine: Sex, lack of, all marital strife, gruesome birth
experiences (“I was in labour for 36 hours with no pain relief”; “Well,
that’s nothing. I was pushing for three days before the surgeons decided to
operate, then I lost 27 pints of blood and nearly got septicaemia and Chloë
had such terrible birth trauma that she still has to see the cranial
osteopath once a month.” It’s even worse if it’s the man doing the boasting,
since the temptation is to say “Er, and what on earth do you know about
it?”).
Five glasses of wine/brandy: The state of the nation, viz, the
middle-class tax burden, these immigrants (“although do you know, we have
this wonderful Polish girl, she’s so good with the children and really
doesn’t mind working extra at the weekends”); thuggish European legislation;
hoodies; David Cameron.
CHILDREN
One word: no. Children are fine to have around at lunch, or to hand round the
crisps sweetly (provided they are then packed off to bed before the fun
starts); but any attempt to integrate them should be resisted. In
particular: children performing any sort of “artistic” activity, especially
the playing of musical instruments; reciting poetry or trying to join in the
conversation. They will either embarrass you (eg, “My daddy has a big willy
but I’ve only got a little one”) or your guests, especially if they are in
any way beholden to you.
The offspring of an old boss once informed me, and the entire table, in loud,
privately educated tones: “My daddy says you are lazy, useless and not very
clever.”
She added: “You’re lucky you don’t work for me. If it was me I’d have you
sacked and put into prison.” What a charming evening that turned out to be.
WHAT TO BRING
Now that everyone is a wine snob, the ubiquitous bottle of plonk is a risky
option. Take something too cheap and you may offend; something overlavish
and your host will feel embarrassed. Champagne, however, is always welcome
(especially if you deliver it chilled so it can be cracked open
immediately). Flowers are a good option, too, though personally I find
receiving them a touch stressful since I have only one, rather small, vase.
If I am given more than one bunch, I have to use the water jug or a decanter.
Scented candles are always nice – although a little passé now, and some people
don’t like them because they can be a fire hazard. Probably the best thing
to take is nice chocolates. By which I don’t mean anything that is
supermarket-branded. And I don’t mean Milk Tray either.
CHOOSING GUESTS
The key to a successful dinner party is not the food, the wine or the decor;
it’s the social mix. That’s why it is so vital to stop and think about the
people you are inviting. Someone you may find terribly amusing, if a little
risqué, maybe, to your woolly liberal girlfriend from university, nothing
more than a thuggish boor. So unless you are entertaining well-worn
acquaintances, it’s best to engineer a mix that, as far as you can tell,
will not develop into anything too toxic.
If you do decide, just for the hell of it, to pit ideological opposites
against one another, make sure that both are robust characters who can
defend themselves with enough charm and eloquence to bring the other guests
along with them.
Where you know that common ground exists, subtly encourage it. Guests
discovering that they have a shared love of opera, or America’s Next
Top Model, or stamp collecting, is always conducive to harmony. If the
common ground is less that enticing, however, don’t draw attention to it –
eg, “Ah, Hilda, have you met my friend Alice? She’s also just spent six
months in rehab.”
As for numbers, six is comfortable (everyone can have the same conversation,
so no one feels excluded), eight is ideal (you can invite four people who
know each other and two who don’t, thus ensuring a degree of freshness but
nothing too risky) and ten is just a pain, since you need either an enormous
house with correspondingly large oven, or staff.
