When I moved into my first flat, one of my earliest purchases was Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat. I was on the cusp of adulthood, and it encapsulated everything I imagined my new grown-up life would be: effortless weekend lunches, laughter and “Extravagant but still Elegant Dinner for 8” (ceviche with hot garlic potatoes, tenderest chicken, chocolate raspberry pudding cake) in the company of poets and celebrities. But 20 years later, How to Eat’s dinner party pages remain pristine, unsullied by any trace of hot garlic potato. Because dinner parties are terrifying and I am horrible at them.
I cannot be alone in this, because there is a word for the terror of dinner parties: deipnophobia. Whether I am a true deipnophobe, or simply a deipno-failure, this much I know: I am a rotten hostess. Something about that combination of performative cooking and social exposure brings out the very worst in me: I become a worrier, a hoverer and a taker of offence; the opposite of a good host, even though, as Nigella wisely says: “You’re making people feel welcome in your house; you’re not putting on a show.”
Awful memories of dinners past linger: an unholy blend of bad wine, worse food and lingering silences. A lurid green “spiced” chicken, universally rejected. My overblown sulk when my father-in-law flatly refused to eat my “spiced” monkfish (a theme may be emerging here). Drunkenly arguing about farming methods when I had no opinion on farming methods. Burnt blinis and burnt bridges. There is no excuse for this: friends decades younger than me host with grace and poise, and my mother-in-law, a self- confessed bad cook, entertains constantly and joyfully.
A wiser woman would accept her deficiency and adjust to life as a guest and not a host. I am not that woman and the food media conspires to compound my feelings of inadequacy. The gorgeous fiction of TV cookery show dinner parties (even if the “guests” are extras on their ninth take in a chilly Croydon studio) enchants me. I buy cookbooks that promise bright and beautiful feasts and linger over magazine spreads of tables, artfully dressed with bunches of wildflowers, vintage linen and mismatched china. I watch the grisliest episodes of Come Dine With Me, that testament to our national inability to Just Be Cool, with part glee and part shameful recognition. What kind of adult can’t manage to have people round for dinner?
My perennial shame has galvanised me to give hosting one last try and apparently my timing – vital, they say, for dinner parties – is spot on. The New York Times has just declared they are back; a sign, they say, of our thirst for authentic connection in a digital world. I set myself a task: three dinners, in three different hosting styles, to try to redeem myself. I send a mass invite to everyone I know (I still do not know any poets or celebrities, so it’s an assortment of friends, acquaintances and, daringly, one virtual stranger). Then I divide them into three groups for three evenings, one week apart. Finally I retrieve the dusty, extra leaf from the attic, evict its resident spider and ceremonially extend the table. Dinner party bootcamp starts here.
Nigella Night
For my first attempt, it must be Nigella, whose dinners, seductively bathed in soft light, gentle jazz and strong cocktails were my first hosting inspiration. Assembling a menu is easy, if arbitrary. I go for roast pepper crostini from How to Eat, “spiced” (that word again, I have apparently learned nothing) chicken from her new book, At My Table, and brownies. Nigella’s hosting advice is thinner on the ground, but I glean this: she is insistent things don’t get too cheffy (little danger of that) and preparation is essential, as is a timetable. Nigella uses her phone to schedule reminders, so I shop ahead, chop ahead and stuff my phone with timings and alerts.
On the day, I spend a fraught afternoon dismembering chicken (my own hens watch, impassive, from the back step) and fretting. Having people round makes me feel anxious and exposed. I am suddenly conscious that we have stockpiled 48 budget loo rolls in the lavatory like doomsday preppers and that we are using my son’s school project on the history of the toaster as an improvised stairgate to stop the dog going upstairs. In the unforgiving light of someone else’s (imagined) gaze, my life seems weird and grubby. Are those socks on the sofa? Will the dog get overexcited and have sex with a cushion when the guests arrive (yes)? Where did all these German motorbike magazines come from? I am reminded of a Swedish friend who told me that, back home, guests often wander round your home and peer into your cupboards, egged on in a spirit of Scandinavian openness by the host. I have not invited her, obviously. A friend I have invited texts to say she’ll be late. “Don’t worry, I’m Nigella relaxed!” I text-lie back. “I look forward to seeing you in your silky peignoir,” she replies. I add a new phone reminder to change out of my turmeric-splattered jumper.
Around 6pm, my husband comes home and I assail him, bug-eyed, with demands: he has to find wine, retrieve the Christmas lights and drape them around (there can be no Nigella dinner without fairy lights), then assemble a Rolling Stones playlist. “Sometimes, at my dinners, I’ll have what I call ‘old-people dancing’. I put on music – Blondie or the Rolling Stones – and everyone dances while sitting still,” Nigella says, alarmingly.
“I only have one Rolling Stones track,” says my husband, fiddling with the stereo. I start to protest, but he convinces me that Nigella would like us to have a drink before the guests arrive and I bow to his indisputable logic. The drink is definitely a good idea, since it has started snowing heavily and several people cancel. However, by the time the three guests who brave the storm arrive, my Nigella-mandated pitcher of cocktail has taken a battering. I manage to serve the crostini, but then realise I have tipsily misplaced my phone, with its battery of alerts and reminders and have no idea what to do next.
The remainder of the meal is, consequently, a little fuzzy. The food is edible though and, thanks to the cocktail pitcher, the atmosphere is upbeat if lacking in seated dancing. My guests, who don’t know each other, are relaxed and chatty, which lets me off the hostessing hook. Encouraged, I quiz them on their own dinner party habits. One regales me with tales of his exquisite St John-inspired menus, which makes me glad I waited until coffee to ask. A few days later he tweets about a dinner he is attending with “a Picasso, Matisse and Delacroix, and a 10th-century mosaic on the stairs”, which I imagine compares poorly with our toaster poster.
Verdict: Broadly, Nigella night is a success. I forget to change out of my cooking jumper which one guest declares “disturbing” and the potatoes are semi-raw, but there are no real disasters. The hangover, however, is something to behold. I should test Nigella’s Eggs in Purgatory cure, but I can’t bear to go into the kitchen.
The Great American Dinner
My second great culinary crush and hosting guide is the US cookery writer Laurie Colwin, whose warm, funny stories in Home Cooking and More Home Cooking have a devoted cult following. Her inspired scratch meals between friends and culinary failures turned triumphs make everything seem possible. You dearly wish to be at her table, being plied with potato salad and brisket (I do not know what brisket is, but Laurie Colwin makes me want it). “Hosting,” says Colwin, who died cruelly early in 1992, “is often a heroic endeavour, requiring daring, ingenuity, a desire to take chances and a concern for others. These traits are also called for in saints and Nobel Prize winners.”
I share none of these traits and apparently I cannot cook either, as everything I attempt – baked chicken (my hens again gather to watch me chop their cousins), creamed spinach and “biscuits” – turns out peculiar. I spend the afternoon panicking at tablespoons of butter, Fahrenheit temperatures and spooky American ingredients. Colwin’s green sauce, for which she claims miraculous properties, is horribly bitter and the “biscuits” are just cheese scones, which I am apparently supposed to serve with the main course.
Home Cooking gives no instructions on the social side of things, so I turn to an earnest recent New York Times dossier for US advice on entertaining. It recommends that I “find some recent news items or weird science stories” to stimulate small talk. I text my stepfather for his best New Scientist tidbits; he does not reply. I read on. “Just ask two questions over and over: what and why,” the New York Times urges, which sounds like a recipe for getting punched before pudding.
Vague recipes, an over-ambitious menu and the inexplicable disappearance of my blender leave me frazzled by the time the guests arrive, to no music or candles and an aperitif of crisps. I stare blankly at these poor people I am supposed to be welcoming into my home, failing to take their coats or offer drinks. Thankfully, my stepfather calls back with weird science facts to get the party started.
“Newly discovered fungus turns luckless ants into kamikaze zombies!” I announce to the assembled guests, to universal bemusement. “The Darwin barnacle has a penis eight times its body length!” Silence. “Are you sure they said it was a conversation starter, not a conversation killer?” says someone.
Everyone is kind and encouraging, but this dinner does not feel like my finest hour. The weird food, which I put on the table hedged with endless undeserved calumnies about Laurie Colwin is declared good, but none of us can cope with the biscuits. “So I put the spinach on this scone?” asks one guest plaintively. Anxiety makes me monosyllabic and I am reduced to taking our hibernating tortoise out of the fridge as a talking point. We also run out of everything: two people are eating off plastic monster plates and we have to use mugs for water. I have tried to smarten the place up (I even grudgingly get out the fancy soap I hide from my family), but when everyone leaves, my husband wordlessly points to the dining room lamp: a spectacularly long and thick cobweb is gently swaying in full view at face height. Next day I find the green sauce, which I had entirely forgotten to serve and dispose of it with some relief.
Verdict: Laurie Colwin is for the bedside table and not the kitchen.
The DIY Dinner
For this last attempt, there is no hiding behind a single guru: I need to own my dinner. That does not stop me asking for help. First, I turn to my friend, cookery writer Trish Deseine, hostess of some of the most relaxed yet impressive evenings I have ever attended. She doesn’t minimise the work and thought involved, which I find reassuring.
“You need to think like an interior designer and then like a choreographer,” she tells me. “People need to feel comfortable, but not abandoned, or worse, trapped.” Trish also recommends applying Nora Ephron’s Rule of Four (inspired by US lifestyle guru Lee Bailey): “Meat, starch, vegetable, plus one intriguing thing (another vegetable, a sauce). I’d add another element to be on the safe side.”
While I am pondering this, I talk to cookery writer Diana Henry, whose new book How to Eat a Peach is a compilation of beautiful menus to inspire and delight non- deipnophobes. Henry started composing menus and hosting dinners at 16, but even she urges me to keep it simple. “I think it’s a really British thing to go over the top. An overdone meal is really naff.”
But how can you strike the elusive balance between nice enough and showing off? How on earth do people just know, I complain. “You just have to find your own level,” says Henry. “There’s a kind of inverted snobbery in Britain. You mustn’t be seen to be making too much effort. I don’t like that. People are here, give them something nice and relax them.” Then she asks what I am planning to cook; I demur.
“Emma, come on. You’ve got people coming tomorrow and you don’t know what you’re cooking yet?”
“I might defrost a curry,” I mumble.
“That’s fine!” she says, encouragingly, but I can’t help feeling I am making her inner 16-year-old menu planner sad.
In the end, I do stick with what I know: “spiced” stuff. More chickens are sacrificed for my curry (the hen vigil reconvenes), which I make fresh in deference to teenage Diana Henry. I make a vegetable dish, too, but rein in my urge to overdo things: my Fourth Thing for the rule of four is just raita, and the spare Fifth is shop-bought poppadoms.
By 7.30, I’m dressed like an adult human, enjoying a bracing drink, ready to welcome my guests with comprehensible sentences, not science soundbites. Is this success, or am I just too tired to be anxious? “It’s like kids,” says my husband. “Once you get to the third, you don’t care any more.” This suggests we were wise to stop at two, but he’s also right: practice definitely makes this dinner party business less fraught. This is the largest group yet – there are nine of us altogether – but in some ways, it is also the most relaxed. It’s no TV-worthy aesthetic and social triumph, but everyone chats (that virtual stranger turns out to be brilliant at filling conversational lulls), the food is basic but fine and I find I actually enjoy my guests. Drunk with relief and well, alcohol, it delights me how funny, kind and interesting people are when I relax and engage, rather than staring covertly at them and their plates to check whether they approve of my food, my house, my choices.
Verdict: less is more, unless it’s less. Find your level.
What have I learned?
I now know that “effortless entertaining” is a lie even for the best hosts and a cruelty to those of us inexperienced and insecure enough to believe in it. Dinner parties use up endless kitchen roll, endless lemons and endless energy. After three tries, I’m exhausted, fat, broke and a pariah to poultry. But there is something disarmingly lovely about allowing people to see you in all your insecure imperfection, trying to welcome and feed them. Will I be doing it again? God, no. But lunch? Maybe.
