It’s always felt reprehensible to involve one’s partner in any piece about food. I can’t bear sly mentions of “the blonde” or “my companion”. Still, there are certain subjects where it’s unavoidable. Some partnerships crumble over the loading of the dishwasher, but for us the question of dinner parties is more explosive. Whenever people are invited to eat at ours, there’s a brief, tense period of apparent harmony and then the inevitable appeal from my partner: “You’re not going to do anything complicated, are you?”
To be clear from the start, there’s no doubt about my ability to create something good, and have it on the table on schedule, while still maintaining high-quality pre-prandial chitchat. But there is an underlying disconnect. I always want to hit the recipe books, scour the web, find some arcane dish or magnificent feast menu and half kill myself shopping and cooking. She, on the other hand, doesn’t just prefer something simple. That would be too easy. Instead, it’s almost as if she believes it’s wrong to have made an effort. How did we get here?
We’ve always, as a species, eaten together. We invite others as an act of hospitality — to honour guests, to express our love and respect. But there is another factor, a darker purpose, because social dining can also be a testing ground for social status. You can see it today as you trawl National Trust properties.
The old ones where you study the drawbridges and arrow slits, then gaze in slightly less wonder at the great feasting hall. Then the later piles, where crenellations are vestigial embellishment, and the fortifications decorative. So we stare instead at long dining tables with their collections of silver and porcelain and wander through restored kitchens full of re-enactors doing things to whole pigs. Our entire heritage industry marks the declining importance of military strength and the weaponisation of dinner.
The domestic dinner party as we know it arrived at the turn of the 20th century when young aristocrats took smaller houses or flats in town, with more modest facilities and perhaps — whisper it low — no staff. I love how bohemian the Bloomsbury set felt about dining without a butler. For posh young things, rebellion seems to have outweighed the delight of the food. Reading their accounts, you can’t help feeling they got a more thrilling frisson from sharing a pot of home-made stew without a footman than they took in any of their convoluted couplings.
Already by this point in history there was a strange reversal. Performative simplicity had become the main purpose of the meal. When the dinner party trickled down to the middle classes, effort became important again. Writers in the 1950s seemed committed to status display, the necessity to impress and not let your family down. This is perhaps most aggressively expressed by Fanny Cradock, the celebrity chef who, viewed through modern eyes, seems mainly a ruthless social mountaineer who could only have sprung up in the peculiar social climate of England immediately postwar.
Her dishes were too often complicated structures, with dressing and arrangement that wouldn’t have been out of place in a grand hotel or on an ocean liner. This was the panoply of mid-century status seeking: paper hats on the lamb chops and piped potatoes. Flaming brandy and aspic as social capital.
The backlash against Cradock’s blatant social ambition was expressed by the impeccably patrician Elizabeth David. To David, it was very important that one didn’t invite one’s friends to “dinner”, with all its baggage. In fact, dinner parties should not take place in the formal dining room, which most of her readers would still have possessed. “Simple” or “kitchen suppers” were a word-by-word rebuttal of dinner parties: not dinner, not a party.
It was perhaps best expressed by the status of a Le Creuset cast-iron cooking pot. A vessel carried to the scrubbed pine table, in person, by the host, direct from the Aga in which she (probably) had cooked it. There’s a studied absence of visible fuss. More hospitable warmth. More performative insouciance. This wonderfully democratic style was still laden with privilege. You couldn’t fit a long pine table into a regular house. Le Creuset pots were expensive, including at David’s shop, and you had to strengthen the floor to install a bloody Aga. But her doctrine of faites simple landed beautifully with the British middle class. To this day, it runs through our cooking and restaurant culture.
It’s impossible to explain to food lovers from other cultures why our finest hosts and our best culinary minds want food that looks like it was created without perceivable effort. Why our best restaurants plate up with artful austerity on prison-style crockery against walls of whitewash or naked brick, on scrubbed wood tables. Why the very best thing you’ll be served if an English person invites you into their home will be something formless from another country’s peasant cuisine and “a few simply dressed leaves”. Throughout recent history we’ve ricocheted between a desire for emotional restraint around food (“It’s nothing really, just a simple casserole”) and a more continental desire to display.
Nigella Lawson rose to brilliance as a food writer pirouetting the fine line between aspiration and effortlessness. Her TV shows were a masterclass in simultaneous evocation of parallel realities. A constant, slightly defocused, dinner party with relaxed glamorous friends, carrying on just outside the kitchen door, under the fairy lights. Then, inter-cut, passages of Nigella cooking easily. Alone. Ever calmly reassuring that this was simple but it would impress. And then at the climax of the event we’d see her magically bring the two worlds together, passing between them with the unifying food in her hands. The show is a carefully curated manifesto of “social success without faff”. A perfect dinner party with — save the hanging of a few fairy lights — no perceivable effort expended by the Goddess.
I sometimes think that the most awful and accurate image of our relationship with dining is the one that existed entirely in counterpoint to Nigella’s world in the early 2000s; the reality-TV show Come Dine With Me, in which a group of strangers scored the experience of eating at each others’ houses. Look at the ghastly arrivistes, weeping into their soufflés
Hospitality means the generous acceptance of guests (sometimes strangers) and is philosophically a near-altruistic act. Come Dine With Me, which is still on air but less in the zeitgeist, is an evil subversion of hospitality in another parallel narrative structure. One contestant works themselves into collapse creating a dinner to impress their guests. Meanwhile, in another room, they (and we, the complicit audience) judge and sneer. It’s a hateful format, a demolition of what’s best in the human spirit. Yet there is something about immense effort leading to humiliating failure that clearly spoke, at the deepest level, to the great British public. Effort apparently deserves scorn. CDWM brings class into the picture because it tapped into the snobbery of viewers. Look at the ghastly arrivistes, aping their betters and weeping into their detumescent soufflés. Look at them, making an effort! How hysterically naff of them to let the effort show. How richly we enjoy watching their comeuppance.
Why am I so exercised about this? Because the alternative — those “simple suppers” so loved by many of my peers — are a massive, consensual delusion. There have only ever been three reasons, as far as I can tell, to invite people to break bread. One of them was to distract the Duke of Northumberland and his knights from burning down your castle. One of them was to impress the husband’s boss or your awful neighbours. But the third is pure hospitality. Because you love people and you love cooking for them. I do, Elizabeth David did and I bet Nigella does too. If we simply wanted to feed our guests effortlessly, there’s Deliveroo. Perhaps the class thing is the cause of my household conflict. My partner shows a justifiable concern that effort might make guests uncomfortable. When you come for dinner, though, I’ll make absolutely sure you won’t be troubled by any formality or exceptional fuss — that’s surely hospitable. But I need you to know that no effort was spared. That…
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