Bon appetit!

You know it’s going to be a good night when one of your guests turns up with a bottle of Moet and another comes dressed in a can-can costume.

Yes, dear readers, it was French night at the Montmartre end of Croydon Hills, the second Dinner Party Project event. It was a time to celebrate all things Parisienne, paying homage to the Eiffel Tower with the obligatory statue as our table centerpiece and subjecting our eardrums to many repeat plays of the Manhattan Transfer mumbling ‘Chanson d’Amour’.

Our guests—longtime and valued colleagues and their spouses—arrived in varying degrees of French fashion. Berets were the order of the day for Bernie, Ian and myself, while Raelene and Jen opted for leetle black dresses (tres chic).

Marg looked ooh-la-la in her satin and feathered can-can concoction, dressed as if she’d come straight from stage of the Moulin Rouge (well, maybe not exactly; her outfit thankfully included a bodice).

  Dapper Dante came attired a la Inspector Poirot, poised to investigate potential crimes against French cuisine. While strictly speaking his character was not French (as Poirot himself would no doubt remind us), it was close enough. Wayne rounded off our little group in his suit and tie, looking all the world like a waiter—which turned out to be handy, because that’s what he became.

Escargot and frogs legs were off the menu, but onion soup was on. Speaking of which, I have a gripe or two with the Francais regarding this dish.



Gripe one: the recipe said to cook the onions till they were dark brown and sweet, noting that this could take a while. The recipe was right about that. It took three hours. Gripe two: after three hours of reducing, there wasn’t too much liquid left in the saucepan and I had to serve eight bowls out of it. H’mmm. The solution? Drink some more champagne, and frankly that’s the only liquid you need.

There’s something about French food that reminds you that life is good and that food is as much about fellowship as it is about filling your stomach. There’s a delight in following a recipe that has been cooked by generations of people who have also shared stories, laughter and a good wine over dinner.

Indeed, how can you go wrong with the rich flavours of slow-cooked beef bourguignon, its garlic and onion-infused gravy soaking into the silky mash? Or the warm, smooth chocolate sauce poured over the light, cream-filled profiteroles? Actually, we could have gone wrong there, because choux pastry can be tricky to make. At least, it might have been tricky had we tried to make it. Luckily we didn’t.  M’sieur Coles came to the rescue there. 

And so the second Dinner Party Project came to end, but not before we enjoyed a sip or two of port and a selection of cheese. Bon nuit, mes amis.

The Paris End of Croydon Hills: The second Dinner Party Project

Eating French food in a house in Croydon Hills, Melbourne is just as good as eating it in a little restaurant in Paris, said no-one ever in the entire world.

But here’s the thing—we either eat it in Croydon Hills, or we don’t eat it all. So, with this in mind, the second Dinner Party Project (DPP) will recreate—to the best of our ability—three of the fabulous dishes we ate in the City of Lights last year.

Our entrée will be French onion soup, that deliciously sweet, rich broth topped with crusty bread and melted cheese. I haven’t eaten that since last April when we stopped for lunch at an outdoor cafe in Jardins Tuilieries, between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde.

We were on our way to see Monet’s water lilies at Musee de l’Orangerie at the other end of the gardens, but couldn’t go past the aroma of coffee and the promise of a cheap, warm meal to combat the brisk spring breeze.

For the DPP main course, I decided on boeuf bourguignon for two reasons. One, because it didn’t look too hard to cook (am I kidding myself?) and two, because we are it in a gorgeous little restaurant, the Crémerie-Restaurant Polidor near the Jardin du Luxembourg.

This quaint restaurant has remained basically unchanged for a century. A bustling, cheerful place with an unpretentious décor and menu, you sit at long wooden tables where you sharing your space, salt and pepper shakers and conversation with strangers.

The hearty boeuf bourguignon was simple, tasty fare, but it gained a certain romance when eaten in a century-old eatery that had seen people such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac sitting at those same tables.

One thing about the Polidor we won’t try to recreate, though, is its legendary bathroom. The toilet, like the restaurant, must be over a century old. OK, let’s state the facts—it’s basically a hole in the floor and the best advice one can give is just forget about it and ‘hang on’.

Our DPP dessert takes its inspiration from our meal at Brasserie Julien in the heart of Paris. What’s not to like about profiteroles with a rich warm chocolate sauce poured all over them?  This dessert was the sublime end to a lovely evening at Julien’s which, with its Art Nouveau style, huge mirrors, mosaic floor, and delicate ‘Flower Ladies’ painted on glass paste panels, was as refined as Polidor was earthy.

So, with these great eateries to inspire us, we Dinner Party Project hosts will put on some French cafe music, practise our ‘bonjours’ and ‘mercis’ and prepare to create some Gallic ambiance at the Paris end of Croydon Hills. Bon apetit!

 

 

We dined seventies-style and survived

Theme: the ’70s
8 guests plus two cooks
Three courses plus appetizer
Drinks: champagne cocktail, party punch and beer
$11 per head

Guest and longtime friend, Gill, and I dressed authentically for the first dinner party project event—if that’s what you call compressing yourself into clothes you should have thrown out 30 years ago.

She wore the Osti creation she’d worn at her engagement party in 1977, I frocked up in my Form 6 (Year 12) formal dress. Why did we still have these dresses in our wardrobes after three decades, you ask? Because everyone knows that clothes come back into fashion, a theory proven in our dining room last Saturday night.
(Mind you, it was lucky Gill’s long elegant Osti frock was polyester, so it had a bit of give to accommodate the effects of four children. As for me, I didn’t fill the bodice of my dress any more than I did at 17 AND I could only zip it half way up my back. Thank goodness for the all-concealing little cardigan.)
Our six trendy younger guests arrived in varying degrees of  ’70s style. Jocelyn, Chelsea and Michelle had intended to wear bridesmaids dresses from the era borrowed from a friend’s mum, but the 35 degree day and the multi-layers of chiffon were too much when combined. (Why was everything polyester in the ’70s? Were natural fibres banned or something?) Instead, the ladies looked delightful in short dresses in seventies-inspired patterns. So did the cutest granddaughter in the world, complete with a sweet headband around her almost-bald head.
Their partners showed great creativity in capturing the essence of the ’70s, although I hadn’t expected to host Darth Vader. Still, you can’t dispute old hoarse throat was around then; nice look with the black cape and plastic mask, Paul, almost as nice as Martin’s blonde mullet wig.
As for Jordan, he was resplendent in one of his Dad’s  ’70s tops, a dressy mustard-hued polo-shirt affair with embroidered detail. So, men keep clothes for 30 years, too! I’m not sure, though, that the ‘clothes-come-back-into-fashion’ rule applies to baby-poo-coloured polos.
The evening kicked off with champagne cocktails, punch and beer on the pool deck, with French onion dip served in a pottery ramekin (for those who remember: it was from Potters Cottage, Warrandyte). While the guests shovelled in their dip with slices of celery and carrots, to a sound track of ‘70s music (Cat Stevens, Creedence Clearwater Revival among others) I put together the prawn cocktails—shredded lettuce and prawns arranged in wine glasses, topped with a thousand island dressing. I must say that the combination of Worcestershire, tomato and tabasco sauces mixed with cream tasted better than it deserved.
Each glass was garnished with a whole prawn and lemon slice to look exactly like the photograph in the Women’s Weekly cookbook—and entrée was served.
Mains involved another Worcestershire sauce extravaganza, but no tomato sauce this time. No, no, this called for serious tomato input: I added an 810ml tin of condensed tomato soup to the mixture of chopped onion, celery, garlic, brown sugar, sherry and mustard to pour over the lamb chops. They were baked, along with the potatoes topped with plenty of butter and parmesan cheese and served with beans almondine (beans topped with almonds) and carrots vichy (thanks to sous chef Ian).
‘These carrots are yum,’ said Jocelyn, spooning more on her plate. Of course they were, sweetie. Couldn’t you see the butter and sugar dripping off them?
But the piece de resistance was the bombe Alaska. This was a last-minute change to the original menu, thanks to the weather. The idea of a steam pudding bubbling away on the stove for hours was unappealing, so I decided to serve an ice-cream based dessert I’d never cooked and hadn’t eaten since the early ’80s.
In the end, my nerve almost failed me. I’d prepared the ice-cream and raspberry-topped sponge, no worries. But when it came to making the meringue to cover it, I put on a sooky face and enlisted the skills of my domestic-goddess daughter, who whips up that kind of stuff all the time with one hand while with the other she simultaneously vacuums, feeds the baby and posts about her latest business venture on Facebook.

But even she looked concerned when we put the meringue-topped concoction into a 250 degree oven. As soon as that meringue turned golden, we whipped it out and ran to the table, threw brandy over it and lit it for the fabulous flambé effect. Nothing: the match fizzled. But the ever-patient Jordan struck another match and struck gold, or rather blue, as the brandy flamed spectacularly over the meringue. I tell you, I was impressed myself.
But, all good things must come to an end—the ‘70s did, disco music did, Thousand Island dressing did, and so, indeed, did the first dinner party project.
So the quest is on to find the next theme—and group of culinary guinea pigs.

Canning the first DPP menu...

The first Dinner Party Project (DPP) menu comes from the pages of the 1977 edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook. We received this excellent publication as an engagement present in 1979 and it was really the go-to book in the early years of our marriage.

 It certainly looks well-used, as you can see by its food-stained pages, its broken spine broken and battered cover (pictured left). The photo is a bit deceiving, though—the cover didn’t come off as a result of overuse. That happened while we were moving house;we put the book on the car roof while piling stuff into the boot, then drove off.

We found it on our way back to collect more belongings from the flat, lying there like roadkill in the middle of Maroondah Highway. The back cover and the index from ‘S’ onwards was gone, which was a pain, but luckily by then I knew the trifle recipe was on page 219. That was my staple offering for family get-togethers. At least my father liked it.

It’s been some years since I’ve flicked through the cookbook and I admit I was surprised by the number of recipes that used canned or processed food. Cans of tomato, mushroom and chicken soup, cans of champignons, creamed corn, shrimps and pineapple (not to mention packets of French onion soup) were well represented in recipes.

There was also a cute section labelled ‘international cookery’. This featured dishes from a selection of countries including China (chicken and corn soup and prawn omelettes); Italy (cannelloni) and India (chicken tandoori), terribly exotic for our 1970s meat-and-three-veg society. We were just starting to embrace new cuisines and, flicking through some of these recipes, I'm sure glad we did.

Our dinner party menu, however, will not come from the ‘international’ section. It will be the sort of food we served up to our guests on brown and yellow stoneware dinner sets, which at the time we thought was pretty sophisticated.

 And yes, a packet of French onion soup and at least one can of condensed tomato soup will be involved. Yummmmmmm!

We're living in the 70s, for a night anyway

One of our friends, who was little older and a fabulous cook, gave me and my husband a wise piece of advice after she attended one of our dinner parties in the late ‘70s. Don’t serve guests a dish you’ve never cooked before.

 Are you kidding? Where’s the fun in that?  It was advice we never took on board; nearly all our early dinner parties debuted a dish we’d never cooked before. In fact, come to think of it, they still do.

OK, so there were a few failures. But picking through oil-sodden breadcrumbs mixed with melted ice-cream (it took a few false starts before we perfected our deep-fried ice-cream balls) or spooning down unset strawberry mousse were not the worst things our friends have ever had to do.

On the other hand, eating a three-course pancake meal might have been. Yep, seafood mornay pancakes for entree, savoury mince pancakes for main and crushed pineapple crepes for dessert. For days after, my stomach felt like I’d poured concrete into it, and ditto for my bowel movements.  

Nevertheless, in honour of our early dinner party days, I’m channelling the ‘70s for the first Dinner Party Project event. It’s time to dust off the Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook we got as an engagement present and relive the glory of those days.

The guest list will comprise some friends who sat through those early years of learning to cook with us and survived.  It will also include three young couples who weren’t even born in the 70s. It’s my mission to introduce them to some of the dishes popular in those days (did we really eat prunes wrapped in bacon?), play some good old disco music and maybe even break out our ABBA karaoke disc.

So, dig out your flares from the back of the wardrobe—‘70s, here we come.

Next blog: 11 February —the menu revealed

 

 

The Dinner Party Project begins

The aim: To hold one dinner party a month

Reason: To see if it’s worth resuscitating a dying social tradition

Let’s face it—there’s a lot of good reasons to get together with your friends at a restaurant rather than around your dining room table.

You don’t have to cook, you don’t have to clean your house, you can go home when you want and you don’t have to put up with lingering guests having one more drink when you just want to go to bed. Not to mention the cost.

A recent UK survey found 40% of people have cut the number of dinner parties they host because of the increasing food prices. With the average cost of a dinner party at $95, many households can’t stretch the budget to entertain regularly. But it’s not only the cost that puts people off; 25% of those surveyed said it was too stressful to serve up a three-course meal to six or more people.

Certainly, being the ‘hostess with mostest’ was a fraught experience in the past when the dinner party was an indicator of your social standing.

Throwing elaborate dinner parties was a way to show off your wealth in Victorian times, particularly for the emerging middle classes. If you think it’s stressful cooking a three-course meal, spare a thought for the 1870s lady of the house (or, rather, her cook), whose guests expected to dine on 12 courses.

Not only that, etiquette was as important as the meal itself. There were strict rules on what crockery, napery and silver to use, how many people of each gender to invite, who should sit next to whom, the conversation subjects allowed, even who should walk into the dining room first. Talk about hard work.

Being invited to a dinner party could be way more stressful than holding one, though, if you happened to be on the guest list of some of the corrupt and powerful families of centuries past.

    

Taking your place at the Borgias’ table in the 1500s could mean taking your life in your hands. Legend has given them a reputation for poisoning guests who threatened their power, hence the saying, ‘tasting the cup of the Borgias’ came to mean sudden, mysterious death.

There’s no such agenda with The Dinner Party Project. It’s just an idea to bring people together for a meal to enjoy good company, good conversation and possibly good food (although of the three aims, that is the least likely to be met if I do all the cooking.)

Who am I? I'm an average Aussie mum with below average culinary skills who has nevertheless managed to feel three daughters to adulthood. (Did I mention their father is pretty handy in the kitchen? Thank goodness for that.) 

There will be a few rules attached to the project, but they will not be onerous and any poisoning will be purely accidental.

The Dinner Party Project will post one blog a week covering the monthly dinner party: the first will discuss the theme, the second will cover the menu and costing of each dish, the third will report on the actual dinner party, the fourth will be the debrief.

As our much-loved Australian cook, food author, restaurateur and food manufacturer Maggie Beer has said: ‘Food to me is the ultimate nurturer and the best way I know of giving one’s time, effort and care to others. It brings people together in the most wonderful way.’

So, with a bit of time, effort and care, let’s bring people together for a good night out—at our house.

The Dinner Party Project ‘rules’:

Don’t spend too much money on food (each dinner party will be costed)

Don’t spend too little on beverage

Minimise preparation, decoration and presentation

Maximise the number of people who come to dinner over the year

Mix up the menus, themes and guests.

Next blog: 2 February

First dinner party: 16 February