How to Host a Dinner Party (15 page)

For an intimate dinner party, there should not be assigned seating. Even if you don’t have formal seating assignments, guests will wait to be told. If you see them hovering, let them know, “Please sit wherever you would like.”

In some strange vestige of our patriarchal past (I hope it’s the past), guests are hesitant to take a seat at the head of the table. Unless you are royalty or a CEO, there is nothing special about the ends of the table. If anything, they are the worst seats because they are the dead ends of conversation, where you have the fewest options of whom to talk to.

As a host, I usually take the end of the table to let others converse more freely. Sit in the middle only if you feel you’re needed to help facilitate conversation. If there is a guest who will assist you between courses — if he or she has specifically volunteered — have the person seated in a position where he or she can see you in the kitchen, or at least the entrance to the kitchen. If the guest’s back is turned to you, he or she will quickly lose interest in being of assistance.

TOMATOES

When tomatoes are in season, they should be served with a minimum of manipulation. Cold gazpacho soup and a well-made tomato sandwich are two great ways to present the flavour of a tomato.

Gazpacho

Chopping tomatoes will make lumpy gazpacho. Puréeing them in a food processor or blender will make it frothy. After much experimentation and many bad directions, I discovered the secret of gazpacho in Paul Bertolli’s book
Cooking by Hand
. It is easy, but depends on tools. You will need a Kitchen Aid–style mixer and a food mill (aka a ricer). The slow paddle of a mixer will thoroughly separate the liquid from solid without whipping air into it.

Place the freshest, most flavourful tomatoes you can find (sniff them at the core, and if they smell more like fridge than tomato, pass on them) in the bowl of a kitchen mixer. Use the paddle attachment on a low speed until the tomatoes are pulped. Be patient. This may take ten minutes. Pour the mixture into the ricer with a bowl placed underneath. The liquid is what we’ll use for gazpacho, but reserve the skins. You can always toss those into a sauce.

Add the remaining ingredients to the tomato liquid. Season to taste. Store at room temperature and serve the same day.

Serves four.

Tomato Sandwiches

You may think a tomato sandwich too lowly to serve to guests. But so long as it’s not the main course, it will be welcome. Serve it with the soup as a representation of an ingredient in its prime.

Here are some tips for making it great.

Making your own mayonnaise will elevate the dish in both taste and stature. When I was a kid, we didn’t really keep mayo in our house, so I didn’t discover the glory of a tomato sandwich until I was older. Still, I grew up with challah and prefer it for most of my sandwiches. A sourdough also will be good, as long as it’s a bread with more body and less crust.

Toast the bread. Spread a little mustard on the top slice and lots of tarragon mayonnaise on the bottom. Instead of thin layers of tomatoes (which will result in the tomato squeezing out of the sandwich), slice them as thick as the bread and lay them out without overlapping. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Serve.

For the tarragon mayonnaise

Place the egg yolk, Dijon mustard, and lemon juice in a mixing bowl with a splash of water. Whisk and slowly drizzle 1 cup (250 mL) of olive oil in as thin a stream as possible. When it emulsifies into a glossy, thick mayo, transfer it to a bowl and season to taste with salt.

In a blender, purée the tarragon with the remaining oil and lime juice. Season with salt and fold into the mayo.

It’ll keep in the fridge for a week. Use cling wrap inside the container to prevent discolouration.

If the mayo breaks (separates and stays thin), start with another yolk, slowly adding the first broken batch back into the mix.

Y
ou have successfully passed those critical first fifteen minutes. Your guests have been lulled into a state of relaxation, your gentle coaxing with wine and conversation allowing them to believe that this is all just happening without some greater power steering its course. But when the time comes to serve food, you must assert your authority as the warden of this food prison. In addition to expressing confidence — for who will follow a leader who does not believe in himself or herself? — it is important to not be over-prepared or under-prepared. Also, do not use the term “food prison” at the dinner table. (Or in a book about dinner parties).

GETTING STARTED

 
 Once I was at a dinner where all the salads were plated in advance — shriveled by the time the guests were seated. That’s over-prepared. For a cold appetizer, you should have all your ingredients prepped, but not assembled. At another dinner, the guests were seated and then told that the soup would take just a while to warm up. Soup, as opposed to a slice of seared foie gras or a poached egg, is a pretty forgiving hot appetizer. If your first course is soup, bring it to a boil, cover it and turn off the heat, and then tell people dinner’s ready. These are details to have considered in the planning stage.

Both of these seem like basic “shoes go over socks, not the other way around” common sense. But some people get flustered around food and lose their sense of how long things take. If you need a hand in cooking or plating, or just want to accept the offer, ask the Helping Hand before they sit down again and get wrapped up in another conversation.

“In about five minutes, I’m going to need you to help me plate,” you say. Or, “Can I put you in charge of making sure everyone’s water glass is full?” Then, at the moment you need their assistance, tap them lightly on the elbow. They’ll know what to do.

Bring the Helping Hand into the kitchen and give them clear instructions. If you are running around like a headless chicken, it is unlikely that the Helping Hand will understand your directions to “put a bit of lentils on each plate.” Be precise. How much lentils, one spoonful or two? In the centre of the plate or on the side? If they are helping you plate a row of six dishes, do one first to demonstrate exactly how you want it to look.

If you are changing cutlery in between courses, make sure each guest has what he or she needs before being served. You don’t want your well-timed dish to get cold as you fumble for forks.

If you are serving family style, you may expect guests to start digging in as soon as food hits the table. But as you return from the kitchen with each new dish, you’ll see that guests are still waiting patiently, the food untouched. As children, we may have grabbed for sustenance as soon as the food arrived, without waiting for our mothers or fathers to sit down. But our guests will not start eating until the host is seated.

Pay special attention to this, you hosts who are too full of performance anxiety to be seated. I was taught that hot food is meant to be eaten hot. So if your guests appear too socially inhibited to start before you sit down, even after your insistence, you may need to be seated, just to get the ball rolling. In this situation, sometimes I’ll sit down and begin to put food on my plate or eat, just long enough to get others started. It’s like when you have to suck a bit of gas from a car tank before siphoning it into a bottle.

You will likely need to introduce the food, but the table may have an impenetrable dialogue you don’t want to interrupt. Too bad for them. You made this soup. They should hear what it is and eat it before it gets cold. Sometimes people will stop their conversation when they see food, but don’t depend on that.

Here’s a trick. While serving a dish, get in between two people who are talking. I mean physically in between. In the second when they pause, say, “I don’t want to interrupt, so I’ll just tell you that you’re having a smoked eggplant soup.” This probably will interrupt things, but conversations branch in so many directions. It is everyone’s right, but primarily the host’s, to make those digressions.

If you do not introduce a dish but simply start eating, others will eat. When there is a pause, someone will comment on it, hopefully with a flattering sincerity, and ask, “What are we eating?” Some hosts like to make a big event about this, but that can backfire if your dish doesn’t live up to the hype you’ve just given it. Talking too much about a dish before it’s eaten can build undue expectations. Guests will hunker down with nachos as if they were taking an exam, feeling the need to form some clever summation, wasting time on pith when they should be enjoying melted cheese.