India Knight - My Favourite Writer - Here is a recent article by India Knight, my favourite writer, who writes for The London Times. She is Eurasian (Belgian/Indian) and Belgian by birth. I just love her. She has similar ethnicity to my husband and she is British like him too.
Friendship sticks a steak knife into smug soirees
India Knight
According to a piece of perhaps not entirely academic research from the University of Sussex — it was commissioned by Hardys, the Australian wine brand — the traditional dinner party is dying out. It has been replaced by “more socially inclusive rituals” with no dress code and people helping themselves to things rather than sitting anxiously waiting for the host to notice their wine glass is empty.
Dr Harry Witchel compared media depictions of dinner parties from the past 50 years, from cookery books to footage of TV chefs, and concluded that a mini-revolution had taken place in the way we eat at home or in other people’s houses. Obviously a larger revolution has taken place in terms of what we eat: when I was a teenager I remember my mother driving for miles to find a bunch of coriander.
Dinner parties — the dying kind — used to be the most hideous ordeal; no wonder that confusion over what piece of cutlery to use is still shorthand for social anxiety. They were never about fun but about impressing people with some carefully recreated, utterly inauthentic version of what people felt their lives should be like, courtesy of Gracious Living magazine (or equivalent). The guests weren’t chosen because they were nice, but because they were the boss or someone else you wanted to impress. They were basically about pulling the wool over people’s eyes: what ought to be an exercise in warmth and generosity often had the feel of chilly fraudulence.
Amazingly, this wildly outdated model lasted well into the 21st century; I remember in my youth and particularly at university going to any number of let’s-play-grown-ups dinner parties — boy-girl, boy-girl, turn to the right and chat, main course, turn to the left — that practically involved origami napkins.
When I got married in the early 1990s, nobody thought it was at all peculiar to give a young couple in their mid-twenties fish kettles, sauce boats and piles of “good” cutlery; since we weren’t expected to use them every day (and how nice it is that the concept of “for best” should since have become extinct), the suggestion was that we’d wheel all this stuff out when we had dinner parties. Except that, increasingly, dinner parties came to involve cauldrons of spaghetti, entire cartons of cigarettes and tumblers of red wine and the need for sauce boats never really arrived. I still have an attic full of this stuff.
My love of hosting dinner parties never waned, though. When I had young children and was a single parent and the idea of leaving the house was often too exhausting to bear, I used to hire giant tables and those little golden chairs with red velvet seat pads from catering companies. Thus equipped, I’d throw dinner parties for 30 randomly assorted bods — no sauce boats and no placement and lots of alcohol.
God knows what the guests thought — I often lost interest in cooking by the second martini — but those mad dinners were what kept me sane. On my occasional forays out of the house, I’d go to a dinner party that still worked on the boy-girl turn-to-the-right basis and usually find the experience quite demoralising. It’s like Come Dine with Me, which I could watch for days at a time: anthropologically fascinating and often thrillingly grim, but you wouldn’t want to be stuck in it.
Now, says Witchel, “we’re finally seeing a shift from passive to active guests, which could ultimately see the end of the traditional dinner party host as we know it and lead to a more modern role as dinner party facilitator”. I think what that really means is people have stopped pretending to be something they’re not and helping yourself to more without being asked is no longer an appalling social faux pas.
What has also changed, I think — and the study mentions this, too — is the idea that dinner parties are essentially vehicles in which to show off who you know; the look-at-my-guest-list syndrome that was prevalent in the late 1990s. You’d turn up somewhere and find yourself wedged between television presenter A and film star B, and eventually it would turn out that nobody really knew each other but the host had met A for 20 seconds at a party, B was a friend of a friend and here we all were, pretending to hang out.
Certainly the dinner parties I went to in my youth would strike my children as absolutely deranged, like something out of a 1940s movie, and I think that’s probably a very good thing: in retrospect they strike me the same way.
Old-school dinner parties may be dying out but their replacement — kitchen suppers, informal get-togethers, whatever you call them — are massively on the rise. It’s obviously partly to do with recessionary times and no one fancying divvying up the bill in restaurants, and partly to do with the inescapable truth that if you’re cooking for four, you might as well cook for eight and have some friends round.
But I also think there is a direct link between the rise in “come round to supper” and the fact that so many people now do much of their social interacting online: there comes a point when you realise that it might be a good idea to have a conversation with someone you can hear and see and even touch. When everything starts feeling slightly crazily technofied and new, there’s enormous comfort in the Luddite and old — and people sitting about chatting and eating is as old as cavemen.
A friend brought his boss round the other day; said boss is French and my friend thought I could chat to him in his (and my, a long time ago) native tongue. The boss is bossish, lives in Mayfair and eats in smart restaurants twice a day. Anyway, I gave him a drink and said bonjour and within five minutes he was rhapsodising about how nice it was to be in a home, not a glitzy restaurant or bar, on a battered sofa, not a designer chair, having a drink that wasn’t brought to him on a silver tray.
This cuts straight to the crux of the matter: dinner parties, whether you’re host or guest, are generous, intimate acts — come into my house, let me get you a drink, here’s some food I made for you and some people I thought you might like — that feel human and time-honoured.
Good riddance to the dinner party of old, but long live the new version.
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