Gotham Diary:
Timing
16 May 2014
Tomorrow night, I’m giving a dinner party. I’m doing the cooking today. The menu is an exact repeat of the one that I used for another party, about a month ago. A soup (wild mushrooms in a broth), a stew (blanquette de veau), and a dessert (lemon soufflé with raspberry sauce). At the last party, I made a miscalculation about the soufflé that I want to correct this time. The soufflé came out perfectly, but I waited until we were done with the stew to put it together, and then it had to bake for forty-five minutes. Everybody seemed to be happy enough to talk at the table, but I saw right away that the soufflé ought to have gone into the oven just before we sat down to the soup. It had been a long time since the previous dinner party.
It has taken me years — all my life, really — to get beyond the idea that giving a dinner party is a big deal. There are really only three things to think about.
First and foremost, a well-composed table. There is no point to a dinner party if the guests are not congenial. Putting together a good table, especially when you have only four or six seats to fill, is probably the most difficult part of giving a good party. And then you have to hope that everyone will be able to come on the appointed day. You must genuinely believe that it will not be a catastrophe is one (or even two, in the case of a couple) of the guests has to cancel at the last minute.
The second consideration is the menu. What can you make that people like to eat? What don’t they get anywhere else? As you get older, it becomes important to weed out the laborious dishes. Nor should you be spending a lot of time in the kitchen, cooking, during the party. The meal ought to be easy to serve.
Ambition will always be a problem for young people. The desire to try something new, or something daring and a bit risky — is understandably strong. The sooner you get over this itch, however, the better your parties will be, and the more will you enjoy them yourself.
The third hurdle is timing. Once everyone is seated, dinner ought to move along at an easy but steady pace. There can’t be any long gaps between courses. The rice that I’ll serve with the stew tomorrow night will have been boiled and then set to steam before we sit down to the soup — which means in turn that I shall have started the boiling right after I have whipped the egg whites for the soufflé. This will give me ten minutes to compose the soufflé and pop it into the oven and to dish out the soup. The rice will steam for fifteen minutes, which is just about how long a first course ought to last. That leaves about twenty minutes for the stew — then the soufflé comes out of the oven, and must be served at once.
Timing is very personal, and it requires a lot of practice and experience — much more than actual cooking does. At first, it seems to be a matter of schedules and stopwatches. Gradually, it becomes a rhythm. There are wonderful moments when it actually seems that the timing is doing all the work.
Timing is the one aspect of giving a dinner party that is shared with restaurant practice. Nothing else is. You are not a restaurateur. You are not running a business. You want to make people happy and comfortable; you don’t want to impress them. And you don’t want to knock yourself out: when the dishes are all washed and put away, you want to be thinking of the next dinner party.
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Of course, I’d really much rather be reading. I’m very near the end of The Sleepwalkers, and it won’t be long before I’m done with For Love of the World. The latter, which is Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Hannah Arendt, has become a somewhat annoying read. Young-Bruehl clearly adores her subject, but the whiff of hagiography sets off an allergic reaction after a while. There is too much discussion of Arendt’s work, which Young-Bruehl doesn’t write about as interestingly as others do, and there is not nearly enough plain old biographical information.
Young-Bruehl is not alone in papering over the plumbing. In Hannah Arendt, Margarethe von Trotta’s movie about the writing of Eichmann in Jerusalem and the controversies that it excited, there is not a single scene in which Arendt and her husband sit down to dinner. (Indeed, the only dinner that he eats is prepared by a friend, while Hannah is off in the country.) At one point, Arendt lets herself into her apartment, sets down her keys on the hall table, walks into the kitchen, pours herself a mug of coffee, and sits down to read the paper. Who made the pot of coffee? How did these people live? Arendt herself wouldn’t have thought, I suppose, that this was an interesting question: how she lived was nobody’s business. But that privacy died with her. And the organization of the household of a woman who almost pointedly refused to think or to write about it (but who thought and wrote about everything else) is a tantalizing secret.
At Crawford Doyle the other day, I asked one of the staffers what fiction people were reading. He handed me a book that I’d never heard of, and might well have overlooked. It’s collection of short stories by an Italian writer who lives in Rome but who writes in English: The Other Language, by Francesca Marciano. I’ve read three of the stories so far, and they’re really very good. The narration is distinctive but not distracting; Marciano’s Roman sensibility is refracted in perfectly fluent English. Two of the stories, “Chanel” and “Big Island, Small Island,” contain stealthy packets of meaning that keep opening up long after the story has been finished — because, as to meaning, neither story comes to an end.
The Sleepwalkers, all too sadly, does come to an end, on 1 August 1914. More anon.