I like parties in stories.
During a class on English Literature, we read Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” (available online too) and our teacher, Mr Rivers relived the delight of the author’s depiction of Laura directing workers to install a marquee while holding a piece of bread and butter in her hand. The party was an extravagant affair. It had mounds of roses and canna lilies and 15 kinds of sandwiches. Cream puffs were sampled before guests arrived: “(…) Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.”
There are other parties in other stories… Mrs Dalloway offers that wonderful feeling of excitement for a party in June, the energizing thrust of the prospect of a fresh morning with errands to run: “What a lark! What a plunge!” But food is barely mentioned. In Search of Lost Time features a party, and again the food is secondary, the author perhaps having spent so much energy describing a madeleine dipped in tea that he preferred to focus on the socializing at Mme de Guermantes’.
But why talk about parties when their season is over? When they are over? (You hear it on the '“This is Taste” podcast interview with Yottam Ottolenghi about 28 minutes in).
For two reasons… Parties have two components - people and food - and I’ve discovered that the priority can diverge in real life as in stories. Advice can be like Auren Hoffman’s who has a paragraph header that reads “the least important thing is the food”. Similarly, more gently, from David Lebovitz’s newsletter “In France, we eat to be with our friends first, the food is secondary.”
Secondly, I read Hisham Matar’s book The Return, and enjoyed it so much, I wanted to note one scene among many others that stand out in my memory. It’s tangential to the book’s main subject, but listen to this description of the kind of dinner parties Matar’s mother would host in Cairo…
First there was the menu, which shifted several times before agreement was reached. And then the machinery would start. Every resource would be employed – servants, children and a handful of committed friends – until each desired ingredient was located and delivered. My mother managed this complicated operation with the authority of an artist in the service of a higher cause. She spent hours on the telephone, handing out precise instructions to the butcher, the farmer who brought us our milk, yogurt and cheese, and the florist. She made several trips to the fruit-seller. She would drive into the Nile Delta, down narrow dirt roads, to a small village near Shibin El Kom in the Monufia Governorate, to select, as she used to say, “with my own eye,” each pigeon. I would be sent to get nutmeg from one spice shop west of the city, then gum Arabic from another in the east. There was only one vegetable-seller in the whole of Cairo from whom to buy garlic at this time of the year. Several samples of pomegranate would be tasted before she placed the order. And because, she maintained, Egyptians have no appreciation for olive oil, she would order gallons from her brother’s farm in the Green Mountains or, if the Libyan-Egyptian border was closed, from Tuscany or Liguria. Ziad and I would then have to accompany the driver to the airport to explain to the customs officials why our household consumed so much olive oil, pay the necessary bribes and return home to Mother’s happy face. Orange blossom water was delivered from her hometown, Derna, or, if that wasn’t possible, from Tunisia. On the day of the party, a dash of it would be put onto the pomegranate fruit salad and into the jugs of cold water. The marble tiles would be mopped with it too. (p 54)
[…] [On the day…] The kitchen, which was off the main entrance, would have my mother at its center, helped by the cook and a couple of maids. The radio would be on very loud, playing the songs of Farid al-Atrash or Najat al-Sahhira or Oum Kalthum or Mohammad Abdel Wahab. (p. 56)
Ours was a political home, filled with dissidents and the predictable and often tiresome conversations of dissidents. These high dinners were my mother’s retaliation against that reality. Her obsessiveness with where and when to get each ingredient, combined with her extraordinary talent as a cook, produced astonishing results that literally silenced these men of action. (p. 57)
Hisham Matar’s book had the same effect on me: I felt silenced. All I could think, after having read it, was how beautiful literature could flood me with gratitude.
Enjoying: Christian and I are three episodes from the end of the miniseries “Say Nothing”. I love how the inside of the A in Say Nothing is shaped like a tear – so subtle! Also, our Apple remote takes it personally when we say “Say Nothing” using the Siri button. It answers “ok then” on the screen.
