Cooking to impress 

An edited version of this article appeared in Gourmet Traveller magazine, 2004

One recent humid morning, as I stood in our dining room nursing a hangover and brandishing a pair of eyebrow tweezers over the skin of a raw, inflated duck, I began to wonder about the impulse that drives the show-off dinner party. 

The dinner was to be for my brother-in-law and his wife to thank them for a favour. We’d planned a couple of appetizers, a simple but flash-looking starter, and pondered on something a bit more special for main course. 

Then my husband found the restaurant cookbook and flourished it at me, eyes blazing with excitement. 

Salad of roast duck, sea scallops and Sichuan pickled cucumber, I read, above three closely typed pages of recipe. When I got to the bit about the bicycle pump I put the book down.
 
‘But I’ve never cooked duck,’ I pleaded. ‘You have to dry it in front of a fan!’
‘The book says it’s really quite simple,’ he breezed. 
‘They always do,’ I muttered darkly. 

Quite aside from the hardware required, our cooking planets didn’t look good. First, we were spending the evening before the dinner with some notoriously bacchanalian friends, and our resistance in the face of good champagne isn’t high. Then the calendar caught my eye: dinner was planned for Friday the thirteenth.

But the picture looked sooo good – the silken duck flesh, the dark caramel skin, the succulent scallops with a perfect gold crust. I fell for it.

Restaurant cookbooks have a lot to answer for. In fact my brother-in-law had recently had his own show-off disaster when, after a sublime meal at Michel Roux’s Waterside Inn, he decided to impress his parents-in-law by replicating the menu. Suffice to say that poaching a quail’s egg, popping it into the centre of an uncooked haddock soufflé and then slipping another perfectly poached egg on the final product as a garnish is easier read than done.

But back to our “salad”. The recipe included a delicate operation to separate the bird's skin from flesh by judicious insertion of a sharpening steel between the skin and breast. The warning: ‘this is the most dangerous way to loosen the skin .. so be careful’ didn’t inspire confidence, but eventually I managed it. The knife steel moving sinisterly beneath the duck’s pimply white skin evoked an elderly person about to experience one of those body-invading alien moments.
Next came the really weird part. ‘Tie a piece of string past the cut. Place a bicycle pump with a football inflator’ – astonishingly Sean discovered that we owned both of these things -  ‘into the cut in the neck and inflate the duck. Then draw the string tight’. 

I captained the pump and Sean was string master. Watching the lifeless body slowly fill with air was even more unnerving than the previous bit; this was a return-of-the-living-dead moment. Once inflated, the bird was dunked into a sugary, soy broth to tighten the skin. Next step was easy: dry it before a fan ‘until the skin feels like parchment’ and at dinner time, bung it in the oven. 

It was not until the drying, and the rather pleasantly meditative process of gently tweezing little white feathers from our now tanned, still-aerated bird (my hair and its feathers wafting in the breeze) that I began to wonder why we were doing this. What does lie beneath the desire to cook something so elaborate, something so frankly ridiculous, for guests? When does a cooking adventure become pure pretension? And what do you and your guests gain from all these acrobatics, apart from something to eat? 

The artist Rosalie Gascoigne once recalled a series of tortuous ladies’ luncheons she attended as a public servant wife during the 1970s. The day she went to a lunch where the elaborate table setting included place cards held by little silver peacocks, she wrote, ‘a little part of me died’. 

And I once gave a party where I spent almost the entire night deep-frying single anchovies, each on a sage leaf, in tempura batter. Apparently they were delicious; I heard so days later when I finally got to talk to someone. Ever since, our party food has been cold antipasto and much champagne.

Which brings me back to spotting the difference between culinary ponce or poet. As another tiny white feather wafted away, I suspected that as with so many things, it came down to motive. If our duck turned into some kind of exploding disaster we would have a brilliant story, a big laugh and order a pizza. I hoped the meal would be seen as a hedonistic gesture, a treat for the senses, even a sign of our love for our family, as well as an exotic culinary exploration. But if, like my party trick, it were an attempt to get someone to like or respect me – or even to admire my cooking – disappointment must surely follow.

So perhaps being a dinner party wanker means, simply, paying more attention to the food than the company. In which case, if you really want to impress, take a tip from Elizabeth David and give your guest an omelette, a glass of wine and your brightest, warmest self.

(PS: The roast duck recipe was from Rockpool, by Neil Perry, and it is fantastic.)

© Charlotte Wood 2004