Etiquette rules used to be the guiding light for hosting. Today they’re just outdated.

A knife should go to the right of your plate, and a fork should go the the left. You should set a table with wine and water glasses. That’s all well and good, but when it comes to etiquette rules, there are plenty of them that we could certainly live without.

Outdated etiquette rules are often sexist in nature – this was after all the time when the hostess did all the work, and the man of the house would simply gather his male counterparts into the lounge for a post-dinner cigar and coffee. We went to the experts to highlight a few that you can feel good about crossing off of your etiquette list.

1. If you’re single, don’t dine at a bachelor’s house, unless of course you’re a career-woman

This one is proof of how sexist etiquette rules can be. Oh the horror of having the “appearance of evil!”

“Social conventions can do very little to protect a girl really bent on getting into difficulties. In this case, a girl not out of her teens would do better to avoid [dinner at a bachelor’s] unless others, considerably more mature than she, are present. A career girl, from her twenties onward, can accept such an invitation but should not stay beyond ten or ten-thirty. An old rule and a good one is ‘Avoid the appearance of evil.'” – The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, 1952

2. You must, absolutely must, get some expert, hired staff

I mean, who would dream of hosting a dinner with just your regular staff?

“Just as it is better to hire a professional dinner-party cook than to run the risk of attempting a formal dinner with your own Nora or Selma unless you are very sure she is adequate, in the same way it is better to have a professional waitress as captain over your own, or a professional butler over your own inexperienced one, than to have your meal served in spasms and long pauses.” – Emily Post, 1922

3. Don’t pay any attention at all to what your guests are eating

These days, I think we’re all better off being aware of what everyone at the table is eating and what they are enjoying; how else are you going to know what to serve them next time?

“Having once taken your seat at table, you have nothing to do with the dinner but to partake of it. Not a word, or even a glance, will a well-bred hostess bestow upon the servants, nor will she speak to the guests of the dishes. Their choice rests between themselves and the waiters, and you must take no notice of what they eat, how much, or how little. Nay, should they partake of one dish only, you must ignore the fact.” – The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, Florence Hartley, 1860

4. Whatever you do, don’t talk about politics, or anything that will bore someone

Wait, isn’t a good political discussion the kind of thing that makes a great dinner party? Not according to Lady Constance Howard in the July 6th, 1895 issue of Home Chat. “Two topics of conversation are best avoided— religion and politics; and the hostess who possesses tact will not discuss music or painting with persons who have no taste for either.

5. Calling ahead to figure out what kind of flowers the hostess likes

I think we can all agree that a nice bottle of wine is way more useful than sending flowers.

“At a formal dinner, don’t show up with a bunch of cut flowers because the hostess and staff will be too preoccupied to arrange them. Instead it’s thoughtful to call your hostess several days before the dinner to say you’d like to send her flowers and to ask what ware a few of her favorites as well as her preference in color.” The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, 1952

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Image: Cardboard Antlers

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Six years and 194 dinner parties with meals from around the world to help relieve the global hunger crisis.

A dinner party is more than an excuse to eat a few exotic dishes: it’s a reason to be with other people, engage in a lively conversation, and maybe even learn something. Sometimes it’s even a chance to celebrate a cause, or solve a global issue like hunger.

That’s the idea behind United Noshes, a six-year project aimed to cook a feast from every United Nations member country (in alphabetical order). That makes for a total of 194 meals (there are 193 UN members, plus two non-observing members, Holy See (Vatican City) and Palestine, and Holy See will get wrapped in as appetizers before the Honduras meal). The two women behind the project, Laura Hadden and Jesse Friedman, are estimating that to make that many meals will take about 6 years, finishing towards the beginning of 2017.

What makes United Noshes special is two things: First, they put an emphasis on local community as much as they do global. For the United Noshes team, cooking from around the world is not just a way to explore new foods, but a way of bringing people together. They invite new friends and old, and you can sign up for their newsletter to learn about upcoming dinners. Second, they use the meals as a way to raise money for World Food Program USA – as of December 2012, they raised over $12,000.

The United Noshes blog is an exploration of not only different foods, but also a geography lesson, giving you a look into even the smallest of countries. As James Michener once said, “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” Food is an avenue for exploring cultures, and fortunately the United Noshes team is providing people with the opportunity to do that even when they are at home.

Kitchen tables are the place for us to connect, and what better way than learning about the culinary culture of new countries and taking part in something that benefits others that are not so lucky to have access to elaborate meals?

Image: Daniel E. Lee

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ColumnFood, friends and manual labor.

“We need to make another picnic table.”

When you live in an apartment building, it’s not really the bucolic setting of a country house with a beautiful backyard, but even a communal outdoor space that has a few garbage bins in the corner can be turned into an outdoor oasis for entertaining. Two summers ago my fellow apartment dweller Dave made a picnic table. It held up for about a season before sitting on it turned into an extreme sport, taking considerable grace when standing up and sitting down so as not to suddenly tip the entire thing over. Despite our best efforts to simply have it as the “serving table,” we quickly learned that if a picnic table graces your backyard, people will try to sit on it.

It needed a replacement.

Dave was good enough to get $20 worth of reclaimed lumber from the Rebuilding Center and construct a frame, so come Sunday all I had to do was hold a couple of boards in place and drill in all of the screws. I made a pair of jean shorts for the occasion. If you’re going to be making your own picnic table just a few hours before hosting your dinner party, it’s only appropriate.

This is no fancy picnic table. The thing isn’t even sanded, which makes the potential of splinters just part of the meal. But much like simple food can often taste better than its more complex version, a handmade picnic table becomes part of the experience, a reminder that using our hands to build something is a worthwhile activity that most don’t save time for.

We finished it with 45 minutes to spare and I went to invent an almond and fig tart concoction for dessert.

This summer we have in fact mastered our guide to entertaining:

1. Email friends that they should bring over a side dish and/or drink on a certain day and time.

2. Put a salmon/lobster/marinated meat/asparagus/corn on the grill.

3. Make a couple of side dishes and a moderately fancy dessert with seasonal berries.

4. Drink a glass of sparkling water and walk around the backyard of the apartment building barefoot while waiting for guests to show up.

This is no frills dining, where mason jars abound and good food somehow just appears. How else does one explain a spread that includes Marcona almonds, kale salad, corn on the cob with chili lime garlic butter and cotija, watermelon with lime and walnut salad, heirloom tomatoes with basil and a few slices of pecorina and spicy mango salsa?

I overheard someone say, “When Brones sends an email inviting you to a barbecue, you know you should say yes.” Although I’d like to take credit for throwing the kind of affairs that people want to attend, the central component is bringing together people that want to take time to celebrate good food, whether they make it themselves or not.

Sometimes we focus so much on what the food is – Is it organic? Is it local? Did you know the butcher? I am off dairy, is there milk in that? – that we get distracted from enjoying the full process. Making something with our hands, bringing it to share with a group of friends. These are basic things, and all things that no matter where you are on the foodie scale, you need. We need sustenance and we need community, which is why the two things seamlessly go hand in hand.

Backyard dinner parties are reminders of what is important in life: good food and friends. They don’t have to be complicated to be successful. They don’t have to require long shopping lists and days of preparation. You can simply be barefoot, bring a dish, and trust in the fact that sometimes serendipity is the best recipe for enjoying a late summer evening.

Watermelon Basil Salad with Lime and Walnuts

Ingredients:

• 1/2 of a large seedless watermelon cut into small cubes
• juice of 1 lime
• 1/4 cup chopped basil
• 1 cup toasted walnuts, chopped

Directions:

Mix all ingredients in a salad bowl and serve,

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

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10 dinner parties to make you rethink eating as a group.

You may think dinner parties are things that only happened in eighties movies but you would be wrong. Last week, I overheard a woman with a three week old baby planning a dinner party for the following weekend. That’s some serious dedication to the form and we’ve all got some catching up to do.

Plus, of course, there are few things quite as glorious as sitting around a table with good friends, eating good food and drinking good wine and having those wonderful “Never Want This To End” moments. There should be more of those, so try to squeeze a couple of these dinner parties in before the end of your summer.

The Forager Dinner Party

There’s food growing all over that mystical environment place ready for the taking and completely free of charge. So use it. If you know there is a ready stash of forageable food nearby, pick three or four things, such as sorrel, nettles, berries and mushrooms, and base your dishes around them. If you’re feeling brave, ask your guests to bring something they found on the way over to yours and cook on the fly.

Locavore
 Dinner Party

Make your house the epicenter of your foodie world by only buying produce from within a 100 mile radius to whip up delicious dinner treats for your buddies. You know the drill: farmers markets, veg boxes, co-ops, home grown and so on. Really this is just your standard cooking with slightly altered shopping habits, except we’re all very right on round here so probably the shopping habits aren’t even changed that much. So, uh, file under Totally Normal Dinner Party.

The Family-Style Eating Dinner Party

You can do this one of two ways. Either make everyone eat food cooked for slightly too long in a pressure cooker while a middle aged Jewish woman shouts at you for not doing your homework. Or dish up huge bowls of hearty salads and platters of meats and cheeses, or serve a heavy, heady stew in a huge enamel pot, and let everyone dig in. Slabs of crusty bread are crucial, regardless of the main dish you serve. Tear it apart with your hands and share the chunks all around.

The Austerity Dinner Party

It’s tough times all round, so who can afford to throw a full-on swanky dinner party? More to the point, who can be bothered cooking when there’s gin to be drinking? Cheap c’est chic! Go all out with lentils, pulses, rices and root veg. You can do incredible things with red lentils, butternut squash, kale and garam masala, and a French onion soup with homemade bread is basically the best thing humans have ever invented. Ever. Except for maybe gin.

The State of the Nation Dinner Party

See above, except 1% of your guests eat foie gras while wearing top hats and tails and laughing a very tight laugh.

The Craparet Dinner Party

You know that thing where you watch an amazing show, like the circus where unfeasibly sexy and bendy people make you feel inadequate, or a friend gives you tickets to something and it turns out to be these guys, or this, and that inadequacy conspires with inspiration and you vow to become the best goddam drum-playing trapeze artist the world has ever seen. EVER! Except you don’t, of course, you remain slightly adept at a marginal skill. Accept that you will never perform in the cabaret of your dreams and instead join the craparet.

Ask each dinner party guest to perform a short act in the spirit of crap entertainment; a shoddy magic trick perhaps, or a half-baked burlesque routine. A song sung out of key. Feed your guests backstreet cabaret fare: little triangle sandwiches or burgers, fish cakes, spring rolls, cocktail sausages, bowls of nuts, olives or pretzels, and considerably sized buckets of red wine.

The Independence Day Party

Over here in Brit-land we don’t do Independence Day because we basically invented the whole world. But on any given month, there is a country somewhere in the world having their own Independence Day celebration. Do it like they do in Finland, Jamaica or Mexico, and if things get really bad with the economy, use your new found cultural know-how to declare your house an independent state.

The Food Crawl Dinner Party

Why lumber one person with all the hard work? Allot starter, main and dessert to a different guest and travel from house to house in between courses, exploring each households take on a theme: vegan, vegetarian, conscious meaties, local, or just delicious food and booze.

The Republican Party

Come as yourself, but take on a particular belief, policy or idiosyncrasy from the never ending pool of bizzaro-juice that is the Republican Party. Confuse consent and non-consent. Confuse North and South Korea. Insist the person sitting on your right spends the evening carrying a fetus to term.

After dinner (Republican dinner? It doesn’t matter, as long as the women cook), guess what everyone else was acting out. The winner gets to act/not act on a matter that is none of their business/desperately urgent.

The What Curiosity Found Dinner Party

Or What Curiosity found. Either/or. Present your findings once you’ve eaten. Powerpoint and pointy lasers welcome. After-dinner speakers are the absolute bee’s knees. Yes they are!

Image: Angry JulieMonday, Carly & Art, NatalieMaynor, kevin dooley, Gabriella Corrado, garryknight, emmadiscovery

The post The 10 Dinner Parties You Should Throw Before Summer is Over appeared first on EcoSalon.

An exclusive EcoSalon playlist for your next night of hosting. 

Throwing a dinner party? Or need inspiration for getting some friends together for an evening of good food and drink? This playlist should do the trick.

Check out the music videos for some of the songs below, or instead of clicking play every time one music video ends and you need to start the next, go even further ahead and listen to all of them nonstop on our 10 Songs for a Dinner Party playlist on 8tracks.

1. Beyond the Sea – Bobby Darin

2. On an evening in Roma – Dean Martin

3. Oh Marie – Louis Prima

4. Man Smart (Women Smarter) – Harry Belafonte

5. Witchcraft – Frank Sinatra

6. Lady Luck – Richard Swift

7. Postcards From Italy – Beirut

8. A History of Lovers – Calexico & Iron & Wine

9. Let Me Come On Home – Otis Redding

10. Polk Salad Annie – Elvis Presley

Like this playlist? There’s more where that came from. Check out our full 10 Songs series.

Images: Jenny Downing

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