How picnics become better parties
Laid-back gatherings are fun and convenient for both guests and hosts
I don’t like dinner parties. Maybe this is an inconsequential admission for some, but the dinner party is high currency in the circles I run in as a food writer, academic and chef’s wife.
Capital D-Dinner Parties, the sort where a group of the host’s friends or colleagues sit around a prettily laid table and are expected to sustain interesting conversation across the span of several courses, always feel to me like an awkward first date that just won’t end; ease and enjoyment the exception rather than the rule.
It took upheaval for me to reconsider my approach. In 2015, we moved from Brooklyn to a small town in the Hudson Valley. I also gave birth to twins. One might argue that we were excused, by circumstance, from hosting for a while. But as newcomers, we needed to make friends. I decided to buck up and keep at the dinner party thing long enough to establish a new social circle. But a multicourse affair requiring vigilance at the stove just wasn’t feasible. (I know because we tried — repeatedly. I’ll spare you the details.)
So, last fall, planning the requisite first-birthday party for our kids, we tried something new: not a dinner party in the conventional sense, but more a grown-up picnic of sorts. We started out slow — with people who mostly knew one another.
We made a big pot of soupy beans and plenty of rice to match. I sliced some avocados. We laid out drinks. Everything was ready hours in advance. Our new friends arrived. Some brought kids of their own. People served themselves and ate — heartily. Some made plates upon arrival, then chased a child. Others mulled around and sipped rosé until their appetites piqued. I got to eat too, a small miracle while wrangling newly mobile babies.
The party ended, and the thanks poured in: “We were so relaxed,” “I talked to more than one person,” “You seemed like you were actually enjoying yourself!” My guests were thrilled, and so was I.
High on our success, we tried again a couple of weeks later, this time dipping our toes into those tenuous waters of introducing strangers to one another. Friends were up from the city. The other guests, another set of year-old twins and their parents, were brand new to town. We wanted to roll out the welcome mat.
I went to market in the morning, picking up a few vegetables, some cheese and a loaf of fresh bread. We already had the rest of what I planned to serve: tinned fish and some good chocolate, mustard, beer, wine and more chocolate. Back home, I put together a three-ingredient cauliflower soup. I washed greens for a salad. I shook up a simple dressing in a jar. Then I went about the rest of my day.
Our friends arrived. Without a local sitter yet, the other twins’ parents put their kids down in a bedroom upstairs while I opened a bottle of wine and tossed the salad. When they came back down, we all set upon the food. We helped ourselves to bits of things as we liked. Occasionally, the six of us landed on a common point of interest and found ourselves in one of those magic moments of true group conversation. But for the most part, our socializ- ing mimicked the shape of the meal, fragmentary, as we asked one another to pass the mustard or break off a shard of chocolate.
Toward the end of the meal, Justin, the father of the other twins who had spent the past year as addled as we were, asked how we still managed to cook at home. I told him I’d simply given up on composed dishes.
While my husband had turned to one-pot meals since the kids’ birth, I’d become focused on bites I wanted to eat, an unintended consequence of learning to get myself fed by snagging tidbits here and there while balancing a baby on a hip or breast.
Later that night, I got a text from Justin: “You’ve inspired me to host again.” That made two of us. It wasn’t long before my husband and I sent out another invite, this time for a brunch gathering in the same mode: biscuits, plenty of spreads, baked apples. I cracked two dozen eggs into a bowl, whisked them up and set a pan on the stove. As people became hungry, volunteers scrambled batches. The adults milled about the kitchen with coffee in hand, children ran, I was happy. We’d hit gold. As host, I can relax. Everyone eats and drinks what they want, as they want it, avoiding the ever-anxious interplay between host, guest and food. When someone asks what they can bring, I give an honest answer: whichever element I didn’t have time to pick up.
Most of the prep for these sorts of gatherings is shopping, really, and because we serve the kinds of things we like to eat, much of what we need is already stocked. As for cooking, I stick to the kind of food that requires no measuring and takes just a few minutes to throw together, then takes care of itself on the stove. (OK, those biscuits were an exception; I remind you — my husband is a chef.) Soup is ideal, like my Back Pocket Cauliflower Soup, or what we call “love soup” in my house: a perfect chicken and vegetable soup heavily accented with dill. For variation, sub out the soup for a pot each of beans and rice, the bread for tortillas, and put out avocados and limes in lieu of tinned fish.
Because I don’t have to worry about much in the kitchen, I get a chance to eat, too. And because everyone has to get up from time to time to fill a soup bowl or open another bottle, the conversation moves freely, clustering along the natural lines of human proclivity and preference. While I love my friends, I know that they don’t all necessarily — and shouldn’t be expected to — care as much for one another.
Here’s my basic formula: soup, a green salad, good bread, cheeses (I play by the rule of three: one hard and mild, one sweet and runny, and a blue), tinned fish (Portuguese sardines, if you’re asking for my two cents), mustard, plenty of wine and beer, and chocolate. Scale the amounts up or down depending on the number of guests. Leave the soup or beans in their cooking pots on the stove, lay plates and bowls, utensils and glasses on the kitchen counter, and that’s it. No place settings, no courses, no assigned seats.
One frigid night, Justin and his wife, Amy returned the invitation: a group of 10 for Raclette, a participatory meal if ever there was one. They cut up cheese, laid out cured meat, and roasted a few vegetables. The rest, they knew, was up to us.
We tried something new: not a dinner party in the conventional sense, but more a grown-up picnic