Cooking for company

I loved this mouth-watering post by Mark Bittman about a going-away potluck for Frank Bruni. Not only because the food sounded great (what do you expect when Florence Fabricant, Melissa Clark, Mark Bittman, and their friends get together?), and not only because Bittman is entirely right that there should more meals like this in the world. I liked that Bittman confessed that he was "was nervous about cooking for [his] peers . . . was rushed, and (not surprisingly) . . . probably put in less effort than all or most of them."

I love to cook, but this is the story of my life. Cooking for two already requires a great deal more attention than cooking for oneself (attention to whether it's legitimate to have clafoutis for dinner, to put peanut butter on a hamburger, and so on). Cooking for guests is yet another level. Like Bittman, I'm often making these dishes at the last minute, while rushed or rushing out the door. But the bigger problem is that I like things spicier, saltier, sourer, and stronger than the average bear (as, thankfully, does my wife), and those preferences creep into many of my workaday recipes. Vinaigrette: three parts vinegar, one part oil, more salt than you want to know about. Most Indian recipes: double all spices, then proceed. Sorbet recipes: cut sugar in half, then proceed. And so on.

Sometimes these preferences win converts at dinner parties. (Nobody has ever complained that our desserts were not sweet enough, or that I oversalted the salad.) But some of these preferences are just idiosyncratic. People whose brains have not been properly trained just shouldn't eat chipotle or cayenne pepper in the same quantities I do. I'm so used to cooking without recipes, without worrying about what normal people eat, that I don't even know how to taste-test my own cooking for mixed company. Normally I cook dinner by asking "what do I want?" and then "how can I best make that happen in my kitchen with the ingredients I have on hand?" I hardly know how to cook in any other way.