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Dinner Party Debt

Beware of accepting dinner invitations: someone’s keeping a tally

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Our friend Dave loves to cook. Dave will call us up and say, “Come on over. I got a leg of lamb,” as though it had just sort of landed in his lap. Dave talks very fast, which he needs to do to answer the question “What are you making?” in a reasonable amount of time. The last time my husband Ed and I went to Dave’s, the answer was — and I’m not kidding here — “I’m going to start with oysters with lemongrass and a blood orange granité, then a fish plate with halibut and preserved lemon, a little cauliflower soup, pasta with anchovy sauce. For the meat course, I’m thinking bavette steak with white beans and fennel. Ed eats beef, right? If not, I’ll whip him up some Thai snapper.”

We happen to have a Thai cookbook, which we use constantly (for propping up the Italian cookbook), and it has a recipe for snapper. So I know this isn’t something you “whip up”. The shopping alone would require a month’s sabbatical. The recipe called for, among 278 other ingredients, “1 tablespoon coarsely chopped kha.” As I know from our Scrabble dictionary, ka is what the ancient Egyptians called the soul. Who sells this? What sort of knife does one use to chop life energy?

Generosity like Dave’s is difficult to reciprocate. I once tried to cook for Dave and Kate. It was humiliating. I made angel hair pasta with toasted walnuts and some variety of cheese that had not showered in a while. When I tried to mix everything together, the angel hair pasta simply moved around the bowl in a solid lumpen knot.

“You forgot the conditioner,” said Ed, who has since quietly absorbed the cooking duties on the rare evenings when we’re not eating at Dave’s.

I have tried to convince myself it’s OK that Ed and I have not properly reciprocated by preparing 22 six-course dinners for Dave and Kate. “He understands that we’re not up to it,” I said to Ed. “Besides, he’s not keeping score.”

“Everyone keeps score,” said Ed. “How many times have we had Lou over without his inviting us?” Lou is one of a small group of bachelors whom we sometimes invite over for a meal at the last minute. It is never intimidating to cook for these men, as your culinary talents need only surpass those of the local chicken shop.

But Ed was right. I knew exactly how many times Lou had been over.

Last week I e-mailed Dave to tell him I was writing a column about dinner party debt. Dave was leaving on a business trip that afternoon. “Have a good trip,” I wrote. “When you get back, you’ll be eating at our house for the next year and a half.”

I had anticipated some reassuring reply, along the lines of: “Oh, Mary, I cook for you guys because I love to cook. In fact, what are you doing next Saturday? I’ve got a school of tuna.”

However, Dave wrote: “Look forward to collecting.”

It’s true. Everyone keeps track. We owe Dave, we owe Steph and Jerry, we owe Bill and Adair big time. We actually sat down and made a list. It was shocking. What should we do? said Ed. Can we offer them a cash alternative? How can we ever erase such an enormous pile of IOUs? Is it possible to declare dinner party bankruptcy?

There should be a system that allows us to collect credits for feeding Lou, which we can then apply to Dave and Bill and Steph.

If I could, I’d sell Dave my soul to repay his kindness and generosity. And I know for sure that he’s got the right knife to chop it up.