Get some wine in, iron a few napkins and cook something simple but delicious. It’s easy – and what could be nicer?
Who is to blame for the media’s continuing obsession with the demise of the dinner party? At this point, I’m not precisely sure – though as I write, doubtless some poor PhD student is hard at it, tracing the dots between our postwar literary culture, Katherine Whitehorn’s 1963 appropriation of the word “slut”, the early work of Mike Leigh and M&S’s new prosecco-flavoured crisps. All I can tell you is that I have been reading articles on the subject at least twice a year for the past two decades. Long ago, I was even asked to write one myself. As I recall, I got out of it on the grounds that I (and everyone I knew) was then living in a flat so miniature, I could no more have pictured myself throwing a dinner party than I could have imagined life without bottled pesto.
These pieces used to focus on the idea that “entertaining” was a chore – naturally, our diligent PhD student will at this point cross reference to “Conran, S”, who in 1975 decreed that life was “too short to stuff a mushroom” – and that “formality” had long since gone the same way as the (bricked-up) serving hatch between kitchen and dining room. The writer would throw in a few moss-encrusted jokes about voluminous peach dresses, Blue Nun and hostess trolleys and – presto! – job done, give or take the odd reassuring line about the relative easiness of lasagne or roast chicken, and the fact that “everyone eats in the kitchen now”.
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