I have no idea if the below is helpful, but since the age of 16, I have earned money from cooking, hosting, catering, and curating dinners for others. Also, as someone who has had periods of challenging ‘cash flow’ as an adult, it has often been cheaper and less awkward to have people over for a meal as opposed to meeting and eating in restaurants. As such, hosting and feeding people is something I feel very comfortable doing. I suspect this is not the case for everyone.
Sometimes a small gust can change the course of something forever, and since the early 2000s, that gust has been provided by Jamie Oliver. His bish-bash-boshery was seminal in popularising cooking for a much larger slice of the market, but it also heralded the end of rules-based hosting and entertaining. Which, in most cases, has been a good thing. What we have lost, however, is the knowledge of the structure that might keep us on the straight and narrow.
‘You have to know the rules to break the rules,’ some smart alec once quipped, no doubt in a baritone bray; but within are myriad truths. The filigree thread that separates faux par or rudeness from eccentricity or a cavalier approach is contained in the phrase above. To know something has been decreed a rule creates an opportunity to sneer at the rule and do things your own way. If rules are intended as a framework, even in ignoring the rules you’ve been gifted a structure to climb up and out of the prison of the rules making.
Another view, espoused this week by David Coggins in his newsletter ‘The Contender’, is that rules are useful 90% of the time. 90% Rules, as he calls them, are ‘guidelines that work for 90% of people 90% of the time. These truisms are handed down and generally constitute good advice.’ That’s what I hope we are dealing with below. Advice that is useful for 90% of you, 90% of the time, and which hopefully constitutes sage advice.
Ignoring the advice below is likely as sensible as following it, yet even in doing so, you’ll be considering what you do more than you would if the advice had not been proffered in the first place. So even in that, I feel some sense of pride.
Have people over and offer them some food and drink, that’s the crux of the thing. It’s lovely to host friends, it’s lovely to offer hospitality and share what you have, even if it’s sometimes not much. Cultures less affluent yet more sophisticated than ours have long known that it is essential to offer the best you can to people coming into your home. It’s a stereotype, and it's a truism as much as any other.
Around about 45 ‘Rules’ for hosting:
Understand above all else that the food is not the be-all and end-all. People remember being shown a good time, people do not remember the specifics of the pot au feu that you bore on about all night.
Being present, attentive, and good company makes you a better host than if you’re smashing and clanging pots and pans around, tea towels flung over each shoulder, sweat pooling around your neck and armpits, a slick of grease pungent in your hair from wiping it out of your scarlet face.
Have a theme. For the food, you understand, nothing more. Be it a type of cuisine, a group of ingredients (i.e. local to you - you might be in the French countryside, a Spanish fishing port, up a mountain; or perhaps you’ve grown everything or, god forbid, foraged it,) or perhaps even a technique such as cooking over fire.
Do not have a theme. Never ask your guests to dress up, the last thing anyone needs is a reason to have to go out of their way to buy a new outfit just to satisfy some strange peccadillo you might have.
Sometimes have a theme. I mean, sometimes it’s OK. Be specific though, and tie the food and drink into it if you do have to force people into a theme.
Buy more drinks than you think you’ll need, and fewer crisps.
If you’re serving wine, serve the same wine all night. If you’re offering beer, offer the same beer all night. If you’ve made a special soft drink or a cocktail, be prepared with enough of it to serve everyone the same thing.
Never ever serve shop-bought hummus. In fact, unless your ‘theme’ is food appropriate, never serve hummus.
Offer your guests a drink within two minutes of them arriving. Do not simply wave in the direction of the fridge and tell them to help themselves. Always pour the first drink for them and hand it to them. You can encourage them to help themselves thereafter if you really want.
Do not bore anyone about the wine. If someone asks, be prepared to indulge them with an interesting snippet about it. If no one asks, you say nothing.
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