On January 24, 1981, my mother had a dinner party. She served mushrooms Berkeley, Creole bouillabaisse, a green salad and pear and ginger pie. She used her white plates—Arzberg Athena, a wedding gift from my grandparents—and a yellow Marimekko cloth probably bought at Design Research. On April 19, 1987 she also had a dinner party. She served cantaloupe soup, poached rainbow trout and strawberries with sour cream. The plates were Della Robbia and the centerpiece was hand-dyed Easter eggs.
How do I know this? My mother has kept a notebook of every dinner party she has hosted since 1979: menu, guests, cloths and flowers, and typically notes on recipes and sources. Those mushrooms were from the Vegetarian Epicure, newly popular in Cambridge circles. Previous years she relied heavily on Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cooking, plus James Beard, the New York Times Cookbook, and Cooking for Crowds by local Merry White. Her notebook meant no one would be served Creole bouillabaisse twice at our house. That (once we moved to Durham) the political scientists from Duke might meet some political scientists from UNC, or some neighbors from down the block.
In the 1970s and 1980s dinner parties were how my parents socialized. Selected, mixed and remixed groups of six to eight. They came to our house at 7. My mother wore perfume and lipstick (not an everyday occurrence). My father offered drinks to start and did the dishes at the end. My brother and I were allowed to pass the hors d’oeuvres and eat a specific number of pita triangles dipped in hummus or babaganoush before being sent upstairs to bed. (Now my son eats Trader Joe’s edamame hummus out of the container with a spoon, but back then hummus was exotic and entirely homemade. Edamame: then called soy beans and grown locally in North Carolina.) We hosted a dinner every month or two, and my parents went out to one at someone else’s house almost every other Saturday night.
My mouth waters when I read my mother’s notebook. Saltimbocca. Lamb tagine with apricots. Pollo al Jerez. Italian cornmeal cake and my Omi’s plum tart for dessert, caponata or caviar toasts to start. I have white china in my cabinet, an orange Marimekko tablecloth in a drawer, the New York Times Cookbook and the Silver Palate and the Silver Spoon on the shelf. I could have a dinner party. And yet I don’t. And none of my friends do either.
I don’t think I have ever been invited to a meal at someone’s house where the table was laid with china, tablecloth and flowers, the hosts dressed up, the food prepared, the guest list a balance of new people and old friends. Lest I never receive another invitation again: I am not ungrateful. Yes, we gather around the coffee table and in the kitchen in groups of ten and up. We brunch with another couple and hope the children won’t fight. It is fun and you do have a few minutes to catch up. But I know I have served the same people the same quiche more than once. I’m always wearing the same thing as my three-year-old. Paper napkins from IKEA are fine, right?
The dream of the dinner party, in my mind, is the reciprocity of effort: care has been taken by the host to get the food and the people and the mood right, and care has been taken by the guest to be on time and accessorized and without children. We could talk in peace, drink as much wine as we want and, maybe, relax. Those that we invite would invite us back. We’d make new friends. The ambitiousness of cuisine in Julie & Julia used to be universal (among a certain set), and now it is worthy of blog, book, rom-com. But I’m equally intrigued in the ambitiousness of the social life—as distinct from social climbing.
So what happened to the dinner party? (And I’m told, in certain redoubts like Princeton, baby boomers are still having them.) Short answer: time, space, skills. We work more hours, and a Saturday spent cooking just seems like more work, particularly if there is (as there often was at my parents’ parties) a professional agenda to some or all of the invitations. I just went to a fun, tasty Christmas party for which the host had cooked nothing. Costco, IKEA and the local gourmet shop supplied all. No one had to spend all day cooking while their spouse took the kids out, though my mother speaks fondly of pounding, slicing, whisking and listening to opera on NPR. She can’t remember where we were.
In the city, people often don’t have space or furniture to set a table for 8 or ten. If we get married later, or not at all, we might not even have plates and forks for that many. Ironing a tablecloth is something I have to gear up for. A recent WSJ.com article, “No McMansions for Millennials,” recommends houses of the future skip the dining room, but “don’t forget space in front of the television for the Wii, and space to eat meals while glued to the tube, because dinner parties and families gathered around the table are so last-Gen.” This is an architectural change that’s already happened in most apartments, where the sofa is much more important than the table.
And then there’s the food. My mother can’t remember anyone who was such a bad cook that they would say, in the car on the way over, “Let’s drink and not eat.” Cooking was what women did, some were better than others, but no one burnt the roast. But one of the gifts of feminism has been letting women off the hook as cooks. If a strain of organic parenting wants to hang them back up, so be it. Among my acquaintance, it is as likely to be the husband as the wife who cooks, but both work full time so either might feel put upon about the division of labor come Saturday. Standards are also higher. I think my mother is an excellent cook, and we think alike in our preference for Italian over French. But now we eat Thai for lunch, buy hummus in tubs, can get a tagine from the fancy salad bar. The New Brooklyn Cookbook is filled with recipes I don’t want to try to impress my (nonexistent) colleagues with at home: I can buy them down the block.
And yet, it isn’t so fun to go to restaurants anymore, not when you can’t get a table on Sunday at 3 p.m., no restaurant designer understands that at least one of the room’s six surfaces should be sound absorbent, and salads are in the double digits. I want more connectivity. More good food. More time with friends. I want to talk. Dinner parties used to do that, and I wonder if they can again. It’s my entertainment resolution for the new year: I want to make an effort, and I doubt I am the only one.
Can the dinner party be saved? Yes! See how next week…
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I completely agree and have vowed to have a dinner party at least once a season. Changing friends and seasons for each so that my friends canaletto new ones. Besides it’s the only time I will really get to spend at home catching up on more than the latest facebook news. I am already planning the first one for ten.
I have to be honest, when I read the suggestion that future homes should be sans dining room, I died a little. My neighborhood is full of folks that love to give dinner parties and although I am a baby boomer, my neighbors are all much younger. I feel, as the grande dame of the neighborhood, I am instilling a bit of the past civility in them and I know they appreciate it. Paper plates for anything but a football game? For shame. Not only are your dishes eco friendly, they make your guests feel special. Wow, that came out as much more of a rant than I intended it to. lol. Great article.
Oh, and I lived in LA a few years ago and held dinner parties for 12 in my living room with two fold out tables pushed together or sometimes on the apt. complex pool deck. A little more lugging about, but much more room.
Totally with you on this. My dinner party blog (http://www.adinnerparty.net) evolved from a notebook like the one your mom kept. While it does require some effort to entertain a few times a month, I wouldn’t have it any other way. When I share a meal at home with my friends, I find that the conversations and time spent together is more leisurely and also more memorable than any night out at a restaurant. And I don’t even have a formal dining room or table! If you fill your home with people you genuinely enjoy, and make something simple from scratch, it doesn’t have to be fancy or all that time-consuming.
I think in some way they still exist….. granted most have been tugged and pulled and mangled into something not resembling its former self. But they do exist. On a personal front, my partner and I (sadly being the older of most of our friends) make regular use of the dining table planted staidly in the center of our house. If only to try out new dishes from the tomes of great chefs (Childs, Keller, Adria….) or if nothing more than to have some downtime where the wine flows and the conversation flows more. Once upon a time there was a running joke that you could take my entire table for a particular party and sell it on eBay because there was a good chance you wouldn’t see any of it’s components at a future dinner party. Times have changed of course, and I have certain pieces that I wouldn’t dare toss (the platter that survived being unwrapped twice by airport security in London for example….) though that hasn’t stopped our penchant for great food tableside.
Maybe it is us trying to breath a little something different into the lives of our younger friends, Keeping a social tradition alive that really shouldn’t have to face a painful death. I like to use the excuse that we have the table, we have the space, so let the party go on!
On an architectural front…. we recently laid plans for a client who’s first request was that a large kitchen was in order. But in place of the dining room, she wanted a kitchen twice its normal size so that she could entertain the way she knew best – casually, friends strewn around a substantial island with wine in hand, enjoying conversation over boiling pots and searing pans. As a result, she made up for not having a dining room…. that kitchen became a centerpoint in the design, with a large fireplace and great french doors that opened onto the hidden patio beyond the kitchen’s exterior wall.
So with all that rambling…. I don’t personally think it has died off. I think the dinner party today has changed. It embodies all that was important during dinner parties of yore – socializing with friends, enjoying great food, wine, and company – but in a new form. So maybe there isn’t the formal dining table covered in special china…..
As a frequent diner at Ms. Patti’s I can attest that the dinner party is alive and well in our little pocket of Atlanta. She is the diva and the rest of us remain well fed apprentices.
I love dinner parties. I actually had two of them last year. No dining room table! Where are the kids going to do their school projects?
I enjoy dinner parties — and am making an effort to host more frequently. Hosted one last month and will be a guest at one next weekend. And, am now organizing dinner groups in our condo complex. Was pleasantly surprised at the positive response to the idea. I am a baby boomer, but most of the condo dwellers are a good 20 years younger — and they are enthusiastic. Always looking for an excuse to cook a multi-course meal.
I’m going to guess that the author’s mother either did not work, or worked at a job that allowed her to leave at 5pm.
Furthermore, in addition to the changes in Mom’s worklife are the changes to the challenges that Mom often feels required to meet in order to be veiwed (by herself, among others) as a Good Mom and Good Wife. I’m about ten years older than the author, and when I was a kid, throwing dinner parties — complete with elaborate dishes from “Mastering” the “The New York Times Cookbook,” ironed tablecloths and cloth napkins, beautiful or amusing china, centerpieces, arranged flowers for vases in the living room, coffee sets to be taken into the living room after dinner along with ashtrays for the smokers, ironed “guest towels” for the powder room along with beautiful or amusing “guest soaps,” and, of course, an appropriate “hostess gown — was (along with staying thin and never getting really bombed in public) the primary obligation of the upper-middle-class wife. She didn’t really have any obligations with reference to the children: They were largely assumed to take care of themselves, once they had passed the hors d’oeuvres and been settled in front of the tv set.
These days, her obligations begin, as before, with staying thin and publicly sober. But, while she is still expected to stay thin and publicly sober, her obligations have shifted from entertaining to parenting. She no longer has to produce an authentic Moroccan feast for 12 every other Saturday, but she is expected instead to “help with” the homework of all three children, arrange schedules for them that rival a full-tilt tagine in complexity (soccer, ballet, Mandarin, flute, therapy), volunteer at their schools, and cater to their (respective) veganism, tree-nut allergies, gluten sensitivity, and refusal to eat anything with a face. Oh, and she most likely works a 60-hour week.
I throw a lot of dinner parties, but I’ve found the biggest problem is getting the guests to understand what’s going on. Some people can’t handle a multi-course meal spread out over three hours; they’re used to everything dumped on the table at once a la Thanksgiving. Others want to bring kids and throw a bunch of McDonalds crap on the table while the kids knock over wine glasses. Some assume that “cocktails at 6:30, dinner starts promptly at 7:00″ means “drop in any time between 8 and 11, and bring extra, uninvited guests with lots of food allergies. I’ve also found that last minute cancellations happen a lot, which is difficult when you’re focusing on controlling food costs and making sure you have enough people to make it worth the work.
I know this sounds like bitterness, but it’s not. I’ve completed dozens of successful dinner parties, and many were smashing events, but for some managing all the above annoyances made me swear off them for months at a time. As with a lot of older etiquette stuff, it only works if everyone knows what’s going on. These days, if you stand up when a lady leaves the table or attempt to push in her chair, it just confuses and bothers her. And while I’m firm on certain rules, I’m not a tyrant–I’ll have people begging for an invite to the next one, only to cancel at the last minute and ask, “Can you move it to tomorrow night?”
I too remember my parents dinner parties, but resolved to do the same last year. We’ve thrown several parties together – some better than others but great fun with good home cooked meals and dressed tables. What we rarely get is a reciprocated invitation. But when we do we know we’ve made that connection and the friendship and interest grows. So we continue keeping the dinner party alive watching it grow a bit each year.
I have arguably the tiniest apartment in the West Village, however the table is set for eight, and my roommate and I host a dinner party almost every Sunday! The day starts going through both of our cook book collections. There is no room for wine nor all of the groceries in our tiny under counter fridge, so they are kept on the fire escape. There is no prep area to speak of in the kitchen, so we use my desk. We are both in the restaurant business and can’t stand the thought not using all of the inherited Riedel glassware, the imperfect Bernadaud plates, the Robbe and Berking silver, etc that we have inherited from the restaurants that we have worked in. Vive la dinner party!
Here in the UK dinner parties have seen a resurgence fuelled by very popular dining shows on TV.
[...] Gourmet Live Blog asks whatever happened to the dinner party. Good question! Do you or anyone you know ever host any these [...]
Hooray for the dinner party!!! Like you I grew in a household where my parents entertained at least two weekends a month and I love to have people over for dinner – sometimes it’s more formal and sometimes it’s more casual. The important thing is the “doing” as they say! As a personal chef who caters small dinner parties the number one thing I hear from clients is that they are intimidated by trying to get multiple dishes together and figuring out the timing. I discuss this quite a bit on my blog and have put together a party food planning chart and have posts on how to get the timing right.
Sign me up in favor of bringing back the dinner party!!!!
[...] the Gourmet article on the dinner parties of the past ricocheted me back to my past when we were a group of friends; some married, some single and none [...]
Belinda, I want to be friends with you! I am lucky enough to be occupying a nice, furnished condo in Brooklyn which has a real dining table, my first in many years of small NYC apartments. It has inspired me to have occasional small dinner parties, and I have had a couple of BBQs, less formal but still focused on good friends and good food. My Boomer parents, retired in NC, have a pretty regular dinner party schedule, and I still always call my mother to help me organize before hosting one of my own.
I, too, grew up with parents who hosted dinner parties regularly. And it’s a tradition I continue, including the notebook of everything served, who attended, etc – only mine is in a spreadsheet on my laptop.
But as the years go by, I’m finding that I’m entertaining less and less. It’s not that I no longer have the interest – it’s just frustrating when it’s so rarely reciprocated. I’m not even just talking about formal dinner parties with a tablecloth and the fine china – I’d gladly go to a friend’s house if the menu was as simple as take-out pizza – but even that seems to be too much work for many people.
I get that people are working more, etc, etc. But they all seem to find the time to come to our house – just not to issue the invitations themselves.
[...] formerly known as Adventures in Cooking is now I Cook, Therefore I Am. A Gourmet blogger wonders: “Whatever happened to the dinner party?” Mark Bittman asks if eating real food is unthinkable, Benihana sued a blogger and the oyster had a [...]
[...] heb ik een paar maand geleden al gedaan voor De Standaard Magazine (archief alleen voor abonnees). Dit stukje in Gourmet Live is bovendien ook leuk. Laat het ons dus concreet houden vandaag: wat serveer je [...]
Bookseller’s comment hits it on the head. When having the dinner party is a critical part of your full time job as wife/hostess, it’s much simpler to iron the napkins, polish the silver, prepare elaborate menus, plan tablescaping and then clean up afterwards, not to mention keeping the meticulously detailed log book. But if you hold down a job and/or have children, the scenario changes drastically. Like so many other women I work fulltime with demanding hours; I take on additional freelance assignments; I have 2 kids; but I still want to entertain my friends at home. I love to cook and wish it was practical to serve a four course meal complete with beautiful tablescaping, but realistically it isn’t going to happen. I can only manage about 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night as it is. Costco and Ikea become necessary accomplices, though I did bake some brownies for a recent get together. (OK they were from a mix.) The expectation for the lavishness of the experience has to be adjusted downwards but I hope the pleasure of the social gathering doesn’t diminish despite the paper napkins and mismatched champagne flutes.
Hi Alex,
Liked your piece! We must think alike, as we’ve been throwing real dinner parties to keep us warm this winter…
Matthew
I was struck this week when I read this article on the demise of the dinner party. While I appreciate Alexandra Lange’s nostalgia for a time of hors d’oeuvres, mom in the kitchen all day, and exotic local vegetables, this is not a memory most Americans in our modern melting pot share. This kind of gathering did not just die out because of a lack of time or space, it is simply part of a fading (and many times very exclusive) tradition.
Late last year a few of my friends and I decided that we would reinvent the supper club for our generation. We started in January and we are now an amazing group of ten women. We range from 24 to 34. We are married, single, engaged, and everything else in between. We come from California, Oregon, Ireland, Japan, Germany, and all over the East Coast. We are comedians, students, and hard working career women. There is not one of us who could fit a party like Lange talks about in our tiny apartments but we make it work. We make it work because at this point, we all need the release, the laughs, and the company of supper club.
We are not, however, anything like the women at Lange’s mother’s dinner parties. We use paper napkins, we sit on the floor, and we drink cheap wine. But frankly, no one seems to miss chairs, linen, or even a sense of organization because what we do have is everything that made dinner clubs once so popular: laughter, good and sometimes great homemade food, and a place where we can forget everything else beside food and friendship. And at our parties black/white, Jewish/Christian, hipster/preppy, and not-so-poor/dirt poor all feel like they are part of the tradition we are creating.
We have just started our blog: http://suppersanityclub.blogspot.com/ where we hope we can encourage other people to find sanity in their own modern version of the dinner party.
Counting the hours until Tuesday,
Rachel Bennett
[...] Whatever happened to the dinner party? from Gourmet Live Blog via Food News Journal. // [...]
Alexandra, great article! I wanted to share this conversation, spurned by your piece. (Fodder for the next one?Perhaps!) http://eat.at/swap/forum1/167466_Gourmet_What_ever_happened_to_the_dinner_party?
I made the same resolution this year, and two months in, have had 2 dinner parties. Okay, the first one was pretty spontaneous and one couple cancelled at the last minute, but the second, just last Saturday night was a revelation. The food was plentiful and tasty (filet of boeuf bourguignon), wine flowed, fire warmed us. We had invited two couple we knew slightly, and who knew each other slightly, and we had a good time getting to know one another better. I can’t wait for the next one, for the planning, the cooking, the relaxed atmosphere, the conversation, the aftermath – phone calls and followups. I believe that dinner parties are a wonderful way to get to know people better, to celebrate the friendships we already have and to respect and honor community.
Oh, and I do work full time, but my kids are grown and gone, so I am happy to devote the time to planning and making a multi-course meal, setting a pretty table, arranging some flowers in a few vases, and picking out music for a playlist.
Thanks for all these great comments. I am glad to hear the dinner party is not dead in other parts of the country, and other demographics, and I agree there are lots of different ways to define it. It is fascinating that the blog may have replaced the notebook as a way of recording the food, flowers and friends.
One point I wanted to clarify: my mother worked. Part time when my brother and I were young, but full time as a professor starting in the early 1980s. Her schedule was flexible, but she was certainly not always home by 5, worked at home on the weekends, etc., much like the creative professionals I know. She would be horrified by bookseller’s description of her hypothetical life, which sounds to me more like Mad Men era entertaining.