“Guests, however inconvenient, must be honored” was my parents’ motto. Americans live by this excellent sentiment so much more than Europeans, who are rather cold-blooded in the matter, generally speaking. How many Europeans take the visitor into the home when a restaurant will do? On the other hand, American women work themselves needlessly into a frazzle over guests. What gets them is what to feed the guests—this issue precipitates most of them into monumental despair, as I gather from letters and questions at lectures.
When it comes to making guest menus, one must shed preoccupations such as keeping up with the Joneses, whoever they are. Even more objectionable is the notion that the home kitchen has to rival a good restaurant kitchen. Books, magazines, cooking schools all have done their best to make people believe that you too can be an instant gourmet cook, when cooking, apart from a natural talent for it, is largely a matter of practice combined with good will. The best home cook cannot rival most great restaurant dishes because she or he doesn’t have necessary items such as half a dozen basic sauces, shrimps, and oysters for the decoration of fish dishes, special machines to roll out sheets of chocolate, and so on and on. Mine is the European point of view that those who want to eat fine restaurant food should eat it in its natural habitat. At home, one should serve the dishes that are best made at home, such as unusual soups—peanut, sorrel, or homemade chicken soup, now a rarity—freshly cooked pasta or rice with vegetable sauces, boiled dinners with vegetables that have been cooked separately rather than in one pot, and all the lovely homey fruit desserts that go under the name of Apple Betty, Blueberry Grunt, or Summer Pudding. Naturally everything must be cooked with the utmost care and the best possible ingredients.
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