How to get cancelled on for your dinner party
Do you have any questions about cooking or dinner parties — technical or emotional? Send them to me and let me turn this newsletter an advice column.
It’s okay, it’s fine. The food will get eaten. But, you know, you really thought about what they liked and you planned the menu around them, and you spent time gathering the beautiful things and turning them into more beautiful things in your kitchen, and so it’s just kinda shitty, right? Like, you know people have other things going on, but we can all agree that it’s still shitty behavior? Here you went to all the trouble of making them a gift and then they do this to you?
But, of course, if you throw dinner parties all the time, then you’re going to run into people canceling sometimes. With different lead-times and different reasons, and of course they have nothing to do with you, but you still might take it personally. And maybe you pretend that you don’t or maybe you sulk openly, but either way is not cool. Because a gift is offered, it’s not imposed. And if cooking for others is a gift, as I so often say, then its reception does not belong to you, like property that someone else can break or take away.
I am not going to make Miro a Totoro-shaped cake for his first birthday. I’ve been imagining all the things I was going to make for him since before he was born. I pictured elaborate cakes decorated like his favorite things or I’d look at those comically gorgeous lunchboxes by Kenji Lopez-Alt and Julia Sherman. And then I had an actual human around me all the time and at the same time I began working with actual small humans and I was face-to-face with what they wanted, not what I (or their parents) wanted them to want, and I began to see things differently. One of the best things I’ve read about parenting was while scrolling through some Smitten Kitchen recipe — I don’t remember which — and her saying, “Don’t cook for your kids. They are unpredictable tyrants. Cook for yourself.” I thought about this over Christmas, so much of which I spent in the exuberant labor of constructing and decorating a really kick-ass gingerbread house. “This is the last year I get to do this,” I explained, sending everyone else to bed while I melted Lifesavers into stained glass windows and constructed a pretzel stick fire escape. I was having the most fun and exhausting myself a little too much. I realized that, down the line, if I poured this kind of labor into every one of Miro’s birthday parties and special days, what he would see as love was this intrusive busyness that didn’t include him.
Labors of love and love of labor get all tangled up. Cooking is an essential labor traditionally performed by women, and thus undervalued. It’s also a source of pleasure and self-expression. It’s also a profound form of care. And a dinner party can be the most wholesome kind of communion as well as the perfect stage for the theatrics of connection. It’s when we forget why we’re cooking — misattributing our labor to other people or floating into fixation on how a party will look and be received — that a kind of intolerance arises. We place too heavy a burden on unsuspecting loved ones to carry out the vision we’ve dreamed up alone. (Case in point: Weddings.) When things don’t go as planned, we get upset. But what of the undivided joy of shaping the bread or sizzling the onions, just hours ago? It’s easy to forget.
Anyway, here’s how to get cancelled on for a dinner party: You tell whoever that it’s okay. Or you tell them that you’re disappointed that you won’t get to see them. Either way, you let it go. You eat the food yourself or you invite someone else to come over or you pack it up for your neighbor or you save it for the next day and throw another party, and this time you’re relaxed because you’ve got no expectations, and when your friends come over with their babies you’re not at the stove but on the living room floor where three babies feels like one thousand, and it’s easier to bring the platters into the living room and balance them on top of the speakers to let everyone serve themselves, eating in turns because that’s what parents do, and the babies are being fed lentils and rice and kuku sabzi on the floor like little dogs and they’re tumbling over each other to grab at spoons and food gets on the rug but someone vacuums it up and at the end of the night there are no pictures of the food but lots of the babies and it’s not what you’d planned but it’s more than okay.
What I’m Cooking
Rich Chocolate Oreos
Here’s a kid-recipe that you should make for yourself: Oreos made of deeply, richly, bitterly chocolate cookies with a tangy cream-cheese mascarpone filling. Not what you expect from an Oreo, but better.
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