Spaghetti and Dead Politicians

the joys of the dinner party

Ah, the California barbecue season. Time of long, lazy afternoons gathered around the grill, an ice-cold beer to hand, the scent of hickory charcoal drifting in the breeze. Who doesn’t love a barbecue?

Photo by Dan DeAlmeida on Unsplash

Well, me, for one. I don’t like hamburgers, which, once consumed, sink instantly to the pit of my stomach, there to squat like a leaden toad and ruminate, darkly, on unforgiven slights and unforgotten wrongs. If I’m going to eat chicken, I’d rather have had it roasted in the oven, please, with a squeeze of lemon and a great deal of garlic. I don’t like chasing half a red pepper clear across my compostable bamboo plate in an ever more frenzied attempt to spear its shinily impregnable skin with the virtuously inoffensive tines of my compostable wood fork. And I particularly don’t like perching that same compostable bamboo plate precariously on top of my knee and attempting to digest my food while around me some other people are eating and some other people aren’t, and some are walking this way past and some are walking that way past, and my befuddled lower intestine is wondering confusedly if it really is still in our friend Mike’s back yard or has somehow transported itself instead to Grand Central Station during rush hour. If I’m going to eat with my friends – which, to be clear, is something I very much like to do as I’m very fond of eating and pretty fond of my friends, too – I like a dinner party.

For some reason, Angelenos don’t give dinner parties. They like any other sort of party just fine. Show them a birthday and they’ll have whipped out the grill faster than you can say many happy returns. Mention a televised event – the Oscars, a baseball playoff, a back-to-back Monkees marathon – and the table will be groaning with wittily themed canapés before Micky has slid down the spiral staircase. But the idea of gathering just a few people to sit around a table together in order to eat the same meal together, is one that seems to have been wafted from their collective DNAs at birth and blown with the dust in the Santa Ana winds to the ocean and beyond.

Which is a source of disappointment to me, because I’ve always liked a dinner party. In London when I was young, all young women and many young men learned to give them almost as a rite of passage, and looking back now on the time and effort we used to put into them then, I can only conclude that we either had a couple of extra hours in the day to kill, or were all stark raving bonkers.

Everything was made from scratch, and nothing was simple to make. Impossibly fiddly little items called stuffed mushrooms were a favorite starter – you spent an eternity and a day chopping mushroom stems into teeny-tiny little pieces with onions and garlic and various herbs which you then sauteed in butter and mixed with cheese which you had also grated, then laboriously stuffed the mixture into the mushrooms’ caps and put them into the oven to bake, they took all afternoon to prepare and were wolfed down in seconds, but it never occurred to us not to make them because that was what we all made. Home-made chicken liver pâté took less time to cook but was hell on a plate, so to speak, to clean up after; and my friend Patti would serve globe artichokes, bursting with plump leaves, a whole one for each guest, which would arrive all at the same time, hot and steaming from the tiny kitchen of her tiny flat, and even she can’t remember what on earth she would have cooked them in.

The nature of the main course would depend on your budget. Chicken was a staple, browned in olive oil, braised in red wine, adorned with sliced mushrooms, chopped bacon, peeled pearl onions, crushed garlic, squeezed-in tomato paste, melted butter and flour, and a hey nonny no as the cook slid silently to the floor in exhaustion; “spag bog,” as we used alluringly to call spaghetti Bolognese, was popular too, it being the height of sophistication to check the pasta for doneness by throwing a strand at the wall to see if it stuck – it was years before it occurred to any of us to fish a piece out to taste it instead, and when I now picture my former haunts, I sometimes wonder, a little sentimentally, whether the kitchens have residual pasta pieces clinging starchily to their walls to this day. Once, I was once entertained by an impossibly hip husband and wife couple, anthropologists, no less, and in their thrillingly cosmopolitan thirties, who gave me a dish of bananas wrapped in bacon and baked in cheese sauce, which tasted very much nicer than it sounds. Sometimes I would even make a cassoulet.

Desserts were an alcoholic’s Paradise. Kirsch rained like summer showers on everything from chocolate mousse to ever more elaborate concoctions of fruit salads; there were prunes in Armagnac, cherries in brandy, bananas au rhum (the extra “h” was non-negotiable), and a Scottish flatmate had a recipe that seemed to consist simply of whisky, whipped cream and more whisky, with maybe a solitary raspberry on top if she were feeling elaborate. How we managed to wash the dishes afterwards is a matter I now find in equal parts impressive and inexplicable.

All these years later, I’m still giving dinner parties, and my Los Angeles friends, although still slightly bemused by the eccentricity of this activity, do seem to enjoy them; the menu, however, is as very different animal from those of youthful yore. A starter will be a big bowl of chips and a selection of the delicious dips you can buy at the Farmers Market, the spread usually rounded out by the sour cream and dried onion soup mix without which Mr. Los Angeles insists, firmly if a trifle mysteriously, that a party is not worthy of its name. The main course will be a lazily simmered casserole, with a lentil option for the non-meat eaters and copious use of the various vegetables and salads that are on permanent offer in the Eden that is Southern California. Dessert will be more of same – fresh fruit and/or a pie purchased at that same Farmers Market, or, if I’m feeling inspired, I might pick a couple of lemons from our tree and stir the juice into a bowl of heavy cream and sugar to make a posset that sits in the refrigerator for a few hours and emerges tasting like what angels eat on Sundays. People seem to like it as much as they did in the labor-intensive days, and I’m not too tired to enjoy it either.

The soul of a dinner party is never just about the food anyway. There is an alchemy that arises when six or eight people are sitting around a dinner table eating and talking together. Themes will announce themselves, epigrams be invented, and running jokes take fire that will flame with brilliant hilarity for just that one evening and one evening alone; secrets will be confessed, life stories disclosed, personalities will blossom, sometimes even romances will bloom. It is the communality of it all that provides the magic, the shared food, the shared table, the shared room, the shared humanity.

Even when dinner parties are bad – and, oh, trust me, some of them are – they have each their own unique personality. One of the most memorable I ever attended was given by an unremittingly earnest acquaintance who wore a cravat and was obsessed with European politics of the mid twentieth century, a fascination he was unshakably convinced I shared, because one of my brothers was for a time a Member of the European Parliament. (I don’t). Over the veal goulash, the talk led to a discussion of the policies of Imre Nagy (1896-1958), onetime leader of the Hungarian People’s Republic; and, because most of the people my host hung out with were the sort of people who – and God bless them for it – were interested in this sort of thing, grew quite animated. My host, who was a kind-hearted man, at last noticed my own lost expression, and gallantly leaned over to include me in the fun.

“I always find it interesting,” he murmured to me waggishly, “how people will forget that Nagy was a Titoist.”

He nodded, and sat back, the better to savor his own bon mot.

It is not a comment I have ever forgotten or ever will forget. And I submit that it is not one you would ever have heard at a barbecue.