Last week I ordered a whole salmon but did not specify the size I required, because to have done so in a small family-run fishmonger would have been a jerk move. When it thwacked down on the counter, I’d say it was about the weight of a fully grown human thigh. They had to give it to me in a bin bag and I carried it down the road looking like I’d killed someone. But I had no anxieties about whether I had a big enough pan for it, or how long it would take to cook, or whether there would be enough for everyone I was cooking for, or what it would taste like, because I have been making magnificent large-scale catering errors since the 1980s.
The worst thing that can happen when you cook for others is that you don’t make enough: trust me, this is more important than anything related to what it looks or tastes like. With raw animal instinct, everyone can assess instantly that there will not be enough; they start polite, taking miniature servings that shame you to the core and trigger a catastrophic psychological reaction in all of them. Now they have had a tiny amount, they are ravenous, and nothing will satiate them. Plus they are quickly drunk, and so are you.
Portion size aside, how best can you approach mass catering? The novice entertainer should look no further than Australian Women’s Weekly Cooking for Crowds. I first heard about it in the early 90s, on the radio, where I misheard it as “Cooking for Krauts” and thought “That’s a bit racist, but I’ll give it a whirl.” It teaches you a whole heap of 20th-century presentation faux pas, such as situating an olive slightly too centrally on top of everything, but it offers important lessons on quantity. Because there is also such a thing as too much.
I was poaching this gigantic fish, per rule two: nobody comes to your house to watch you running about. There is no good way to do last-minute cooking in front of people. If you get very stressed, that is contagious, and if you don’t get stressed at all, they lose confidence in eating anything. In summer, poach fish, make vitello tonnato for meat eaters and bake savoury tarts for vegetarians. Rick Stein’s is the only hand you need to hold for the poaching of a whole fish, although he tends to mandate a huge amount of wine in the broth, which I always think is a bit Versailles. Vitello tonnato, an Italian dish of cold veal with tuna mayonnaise, sounds mad but is exquisite. I make it with pork and call it porkato tonnato. The best savoury tart book in the world is Tamasin Day-Lewis’s The Art of the Tart, though Yotam Ottolenghi has a roast garlic tart with the superpower of being able to deliver 17 different taste experiences in one go. It is a bit psychedelic, actually. In winter, go full stew, but always do one of those Gordon Ramsay scone or dumpling topping numbers, otherwise it will feel a bit like a school dinner.
Opinion is divided about how fancy you need to be. My Mr believes that dinner-party food has to be as good as restaurant fare, otherwise why aren’t you in a restaurant? I believe that it has to be edible and look cute, and beyond that, nobody really cares. He will make a terrine so complicated (Simon Hopkinson) that you have to dismember a chicken and put it back together again in a completely different formation, a mixture of culinary and butchery skills roughly on a par with Hannibal Lecter. It will take four days and that will seem, to him, totally normal. I will make a chicken with 40 cloves of garlic (Richard Olney), which takes seven minutes to prepare, and still be quietly applauding myself the entire night.
Back to the fish: my plan was to garland it with cucumber to look like scales, in an ironic nod to the ancient suburban housewife art form. It turns out this is incredibly hard, and you probably have to do an evening class to get it right. In fact, never assume you can do something just because you’ve seen it on TV a few times. Yet this brings me neatly to rule three, which is the critical audience: it doesn’t exist. There is a gratitude that is almost primal when you feed any person who isn’t one of your children: if it collapses, they laugh; if it’s a ham en croute that looks like an unexploded parcel bomb, they rejoice. Only once in my life – when I made a potted shrimp (Sainsbury’s magazine, circa 2004) that was too stiff and incredibly packed with butter, and I asked my late uncle whether he’d like some bread, and he replied mournfully: “I suppose that might help” – did I have the trace of a feeling that it wasn’t quite right.
If your friends are boring, serve a red wine sorbet at 11pm; something about the sugar and the unexpected Dolby-surround-sound effect of red wine from two sources makes everyone perk up. Of course if you’ve got Tories round, you could just give them cocaine for the same effect, but I have no idea about cooking for Conservatives.
