I didn’t grow up in a family that “entertained”.

I’m very pleased for Colette Rossant and Diana Abu-Jaber, whose picturesque childhoods were filled with fat, nurturing women and fragrant hearths, where food was at once emotional sustenance, cultural identity and the mortar that cemented family life. But I, for one, had a mother who had a job, a grandmother who was neither blobby nor wise (more on that later), and was not raised during a time of cultural upheaval, and so my after-school snacks were not, sadly, expressions of a dying way of life.

(My grandmother is, in fact, a very talented cook, but her repertoire is a strictly traditional one, requiring full days of preparation and, in some cases, a strong stomach. She is a straightforward, literal-minded person, to whom the Cantonese proverb “the other side of a pig’s stomach is shit” is not an earthier warning that all that glitters is not gold, but her preferred description of the prep involved in braising a pig’s stomach. Though she hasn’t cooked in some years, she had an incredible way with offal, stewing pig’s ears and serving them in an irresistibly chewy julienne. I don’t bother to order turnip cake at dimsum restaurants, because nothing comes close to hers, studded with dried shrimp, scallops and sausage in proportions that make commercial versions look stingy. The difference beween her and a grandmother who might figure in an emo food memoir is that she couldn’t have cared less about passing on any of her methods–and as a young child I probably would have had a limited tolerance for scrubbing the other side of a pig’s stomach anyway. Understandably, after raising four children, she lost the inclination to work eight-hour miracles with pig hearts and ox tongues and only returned to the kitchen for special holiday meals.)

Pity the publisher who decides that recipes from my Hong Kong upbringing call for their very own book; pity even more the reader who dares to try one. Most of what I ate as a child, prepared by a succession of live-in servants from the Philippines, varied between waterlogged, undersalted and simply mystifying. On a typical night, there might have been spinach, served in a pool of its own faintly gritty bilge; a tureen of the grey, medicinal broth requisite to the Chinese table, and a whole steamed fish, its jellied skin plastered with wilted scallion stems, host to any number of vicious pinbones waiting to lodge themselves in my throat. (My grandparents could swiftly process any mouthful of fish, the bones falling from their mouths into a neat pile on the table, as efficiently as if they had been equipped with miniature baleens. I could not.)

Under these circumstances, we could scarcely have thrown a dinner party, an event that attained the status of myth in my childish imagination. I caught glimpses of these arcane happenings at my friend’s houses: laughter and good smells and not even a flicker of television. I saw crockery that matched and silverware that didn’t bear the name of the airline they’d been filched from. (Once I mortified my grandfather by mentioning in public the provenance of some of our spoons; he took me aside and whispered that I was never to say anything like that again. My defiant response: “If it’s so shameful, why do it?” I was too young to observe that, if you can afford to fly business class, taking these souvenir utensils is not only shameful but possibly indicative of kleptomania.) Throughout my adolescence, I yearned for matching bowls and plates (and, though I didn’t know it yet, the ritual of hospitality that went along with them) almost as deeply as I yearned for clear skin.

The night before I moved into my first apartment of my very own (and the last night I spent in Edinburgh University’s halls of residence), I barely slept at all. The week before, I had bought a copy of Mary Berry’s French cookbook for £3 at a charity shop, and had done almost nothing since but pore over recipes for onion soup and Burgundy beef. I was nineteen years old and about to throw my very first dinner party.

I still remember what I served. Avocado halves with a mixture of tinned crabmeat and Caesar dressing where the pit would have been; stringy pork cutlets Marengo; a fruit salad for dessert and bottles of Oyster Bay Semillon Chardonnay throughout. The menu seems respectable enough, if oddly reminiscent of the 1970s, a decade I had no first-hand knowledge of, but the idea of my voluntarily drinking anything white from New Zealand now seems absurd–call me pretentious, but anything that perfumey is for dabbing on pulse points. I didn’t like most of my six guests all that much (during my first year at university I had excelled at forming awkward bonds with people with whom I had nothing in common), but it wasn’t about them, it was about the ritual. The dinner was as uncomfortable as the mangy, rented sofas that served as seating–yet, somehow, for me, the night was a triumph.

Over the years, I’ve managed to tweak my dinner party methodology so that everybody’s a little more comfortable. One of the most important changes I implemented was to stop inviting people I didn’t like–so simple, yet so effective! Making it through culinary school, of course, did wonders for the food. The pièce de resistance, for me, though, is not the ridiculously plated dessert I sometimes like to send out because I know my friends will ooh and ahh at the silly, overblown garnish, but to be able to look down a table set with matching white plates (I’m still working on matching glasses) and know that–insofar as I am a naturally warm and nurturing person, which I’m really not–I am taking care of my friends, at least for an evening.

• BROWSE
• « My Kind of Comfort Food
• » So I Finally Went to Grimaldi’s

Related Posts

• It’s All Under Control
• Twee Overload
• A Last Supper, And My Dessert “Philosophy”