Confessions Of A Lapsed Enter Tainer

When the pleasure of feeding others turns to panic, KENDALL HILL heads back into the kitchen to face his fears.

If there is such a thing as late-onset entertaining paralysis, I’ve got it. I can’t remember the last time I made dinner for friends. And yet I used to be quite the cook. I don’t know what’s come over me.

In a previous life, I constructed towering, glorious croquembouches from scratch, wrestled turduckens at Christmas, planned elaborate Indian feasts and once spent an entire day reducing a kilo of tomatoes to an intense, clear essence that I cut with gin and called a Martini. Garnished with a tiny skewer of grilled saganaki cheese, it made a killer opening salvo to a multi-course debauch.

Now my catering barely goes beyond making (rather good) pasta for one, my dinner of choice at home. I will happily commandeer a barbecue at social events, but that’s been the limit of my social cooking for a decade.

The Booker Prize-winning author and avid cook Julian Barnes says the motivation to feed others should stem from pleasure: “That of anticipation, as you plan and shop and cook; that of the act itself, as you eat among friends; afterwards, that of contented, not too self-congratulatory remembering.

“But how rarely it turns out to be like this,” he writes in The Pedant in the Kitchen. “All too often, high anxiety destroys the pleasures of anticipation… ”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. At some point the pleasure I got from feeding others was overcome by panic. The prospect of entertaining now petrifies me.