Let me entertain you
How to have people over without causing an international incident, cheese or pudding first, plus a recipe for an easy canapé to take you into the holiday season.
I’m in London for a few days for a friend’s memorial, so I hope you don’t mind that this week I’m sharing with you a piece I wrote when we first moved to France about the challenge of making new friends and of having people over for dinner.
It’s Thanksgiving this week, and we’re about to launch into the season of entertaining, so I’m sharing a recipe for an easy canapé of endive leaves filled with chicken and walnut salad. I hope you enjoy it.
When I lived in London, with just a few calls and texts I could have a tableful of people for lunch or dinner within a couple of hours, usually my best belovèds, but often with some new people thrown in to make everyone behave themselves. We created our whole house around having people in it, with a dining room that lead into the kitchen, which opened onto the garden. My favourite thing in life was to open the front door on Saturday night or Sunday lunchtime or any random Wednesday, and let it all unfold: loud conversations, second helpings, strong chance of show tunes.
Perhaps because I was taken up with working out how to get two dogs, a cat, and a lifetime of possessions to the bottom left-hand corner of France, or because I was up to my ears in builders’ quotations, and sorting out hot water and WiFi, I didn’t spend much time thinking about what our daily lives would look like outside the cosy haze of having holidayed here for so many years. I am very much a glass of rosé half full sort of person. I was sure it would all be fine so long as I could have a bath and make a phone call, possibly at the same time.
But you can’t make old friends and suddenly I missed the ease of friendships nurtured over decades of shared dinners.
It took a few weeks before I began to think about how, and when, we’d be able to fill this old house with friends and put some laughter back in its walls. We already knew quite a few people from holidays over the past decade or so, warm acquaintances, and almost as soon as we had our hands on the keys, lots of neighbours came to say hello. We felt welcome. People were kind. But you can’t make old friends and suddenly I missed the ease of friendships nurtured over decades of shared dinners. There are no short cuts to intimacy. You just have to put in the table time.
Now, the village is coming out of its winter slumber and the restaurant terraces on the port are filled with people again. On my walks, I see soft clouds of almond blossom on distant trees and the gnarled old apricot in front of my study window is covered in buds. I guess I live here now. Instead of looking inwards at the house, cultivating its garden, it’s time to look outwards and cultivate some friends.
It has excellent tips on how to struggle on without staff, first communion lunches, advice on receiving ministers, deputies, senators and mayors: where to seat them, what to feed them and what to say to them.
In preparation for my social debut, and in an attempt to head off any appalling faux pas, I thought I’d do some homework. I love old entertaining and etiquette books and snap them up whenever I see them. This is how I have on my shelves two significant works in the genre. The first is Marcelle and Albert Aurières’ Cent Façons de Recevoir (A Hundred Ways to Entertain), hot from 1959. It has excellent tips on how to struggle on without staff, first communion lunches, advice on receiving ministers, deputies, senators and mayors: where to seat them, what to feed them and what to say to them. There’s also the helpful suggestion that barbecuing is a good way to entertain at your summer house (“Les cow-boys du Far-West ont résolu le problème pour vous. Faites comme eux.”). The guidance on smoking isn’t don’t, but that even if you only smoke English cigarettes yourself, you should also provide French and American brands for your guests, and have you thought about cigars?
The second book is Nadine de Rothschild's Le Bonheur de Seduire, L'Art De Réussir: Savoir Vivre du XXI Siecle (The Happiness of Seduction, The Art of Success, Knowing How to Live Well in the Twenty-First Century – snappy). It was published in 2001, but you’d hardly know it.
Dear Nadine had humble beginnings, working in a Peugeot factory before racing off to Paris at 16 for a life as an artist’s model and actress. In 1962, she married Edmond de Rothschild, of the French branch of the Rothschild family. It’s a long way from car parts to all the Meissen, crystal and silver you can use, but Nadine was obviously a quick study in luxe. From her I glean that for lunch, the napkin goes on the plate, folded in a triangle, and at dinner, the napkin is folded in a rectangle and placed to the left of the plate. Also, Nadine is our go-to woman for candle etiquette. This is the news I can use: white candles in town; red in the mountains; blue or green by the sea. She also recommends two butlers for a dinner for 12, which I think you will agree is the absolute minimum.
Can you tell I was procrastinating? There was nothing to do but to do it.
I made the gift to myself of an easy start. Years ago, I made friends with Lizzie on Twitter because of our shared love of gardening. Coincidentally, she and her wife, Ali, live just a little north from here. Since we arrived, they’ve been incredibly kind to us, including inviting us to our first lunch with lots of French people where I had to fortify myself with a large glass of red and plough on, tenses and prepositions be damned, or mangled. It was a wonderful four hours. I came home and slept for another two.
I invited them for Sunday lunch. It felt good, comforting, to get out our pretty blue-and-white Wedgwood plates, the posh glasses, and the cutlery my husband inherited from his grandmother. I laid out the old linen napkins, ones I’d bought here in France years ago and have now repatriated. I didn’t fold them in triangles and put them on the plates, but no one seemed to mind. They brought us a bag of coffee (how do I miss thee, Algerian Coffee Stores? Let me count the beans), homemade jam, and eggs from their hens. I served pumpkin and chestnut soup, then slow-cooked pork with white beans and salsa verde.
Next came the conundrum that occurs whenever you have French people and English people around a table. Cheese before pudding, or pudding before cheese? The French think cheese should come first, so you can enjoy it with the last of the red you’ve drunk with the main course – plus a new red, or sweet wine, all of its own - and also that it’s odd to switch from savoury to sweet then back to savoury again. I see the logic, but then I love to sit around the table talking, and slowly working away at the cheese board is conducive to this. So I did what I always do when faced with a dilemma. I swerved it, and put the cheese out along with the walnut tart, so everyone could do as they wanted. It might be a faux pas, but it was a delicious one and I hope Nadine de R and M et Mme Aurières would understand. I’m new here. I’m doing my best.
Endive canapés with chicken and walnut salad
I used some leftover rotisserie chicken I bought from the market for this, but obviously you can use any cooked chicken. The secret to making this work is to chop all the ingredients quite small, smaller than you would for a normal salad. It means you can load up the endive leaves more neatly and eat the canapés more elegantly while standing up – something I give a lot of thought to, due to being quite embarrassingly clumsy.
If you have the chicken skin, don’t discard it. Fry it until crisp, cool it and then crumble it over the canapés as the garnish of dreams.
Makes about 20 canapés
40g walnuts, chopped quite small
2 tbsp Greek yoghurt
2 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tsp Dijon mustard
700g roast chicken - remember to keep the skin if you have some – chopped quite small
40g Medjool dates, about 2-3, stoned and chopped
1 small stick of celery, finely diced
1 small preserved lemon, halved, pulp and seeds removed, finely chopped
4 tbsp finely chopped parsley leaves
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2-3 endive, stem trimmed and then large leaves removed – you want about 20 big leaves, you can use the small hearts later, shredded in a salad
Warm a small frying pan over a medium heat and toast the chopped walnuts for a couple of minutes, rattling the pan from time to time, until they’re just fragrant. Tip them onto a plate to cool – reserve some for finishing the canapés.
In a bowl large enough to hold all the ingredients, whisk together the yoghurt, mayonnaise and mustard. Add the cooled walnuts, chicken, dates, celery, preserved lemon and most of the parsley (reserve some of the parsley for finishing). Give everything a very good mix, taste and season with salt and pepper.
If you have any chicken skin, place it in a non-stick pan over a medium heat and fry it until it is golden and begins to turn crisp. It will crisp up more as it cools. Place it on a piece of kitchen paper to cool, then chop it finely.
Fill each endive leaf with spoonfuls of chicken salad and arrange on a plate. Scatter over the reserved walnuts, parsley and crisp chicken skin. Serve quickly.
That American woman who is moving back to America clearly tried to entertain with only one butler.
Oh, and can anybody explain to me about rôtisserie chickens and their potatoes? Do you race back home with them and serve them tepid? Do they get reheated, and how? Do they go under a duvet and keep resting until needed? Do you just tear them apart with bare hands in a corner of the carpark - no, that IS just me.