Digital dinner party brings proper sense of occasion to lockdown life

 My digital dinner party may be an innovation that stays with us after lockdowns are only a memory.

Eating together over a video link is nothing new in the world's pandemic response, but I was looking for a sense of occasion. I wanted to play a proper host's role, and I hungered for the atmosphere of a celebratory, formal dinner party. Such entertaining is usually the highlight of our winter months but has been absent from our lives since autumn 2019. Thanks to eight adventurous friends, I think we managed it. 

We started with a WhatsApp group and a contest. Each of the 10 (including us) participants suggested an ingredient or challenge for each of the three courses. Amongst the starter suggestions were "pistachio", "the American South", or the cryptic "smoke in the water." Suggestions for mains included ingredients (chestnut, capers), instructions (roast it, spice it up) and cuisines (England on a plate, French). Desserts might have been anything from "get colourful" to Biscoff (a new ingredient for most of us) to crumble.

Once all the nominations were in I wrote them on slips of paper and staged a random draw for each course, recorded on video and broadcast to our WhatsApp group to ensure impartiality and create a sense of occasion. This happened a full three weeks out from the dinner, so everyone had plenty of time to plan their menu. The random draw gave us a first course of pasta, the instructions to "wrap it up" for our mains and cheesecake for dessert.

Three weeks of amusing culinary chat ensued across WhatsApp, connecting people who mostly didn't know each other well, if at all. This turned out to be a fabulous way to break the ice, so that by the time everyone got together on a live broadcast they felt they knew each other a bit. The digital format also made it possible to bring together five couples who would have been particularly difficult to get around a real table, given their starting points. While two friends were connecting from down the street, the others joined us from Herefordshire, Essex and Norfolk.

I laid down timings in advance to help everyone plan and try to ensure we were eating each course together. We'd assemble at 7 for cocktails, serve starters at 7:30 and mains at 8. But we were flexible. Between conversation and ambitious second courses, we slid our "wrap it up" interpretations to 8:15, and dessert to 9. In the run-up to the start time, everyone laid their tables, setting up their computers at one end and a festive array of china, glassware and candles at the other.

And then ... we dressed for dinner. Men ironed shirts, dug out cufflinks and polished shoes. Women wore makeup and donned dresses. The majority made what efforts we could to tame our lockdown locks, while the bald ones smirked with superiority. We all agreed it was a delight to make an effort, and all of the preparation contributed to it feeling like a grand event.

Naturally, staring at a mosaic of five screens at the other end of the table on an iPad leaves something to be desired. We certainly didn't get the views of everyone's culinary efforts we would have liked ... though shares on social media the next day revealed that people had made as much of an effort with "plating up" as they did with everything else. If we do this again, we'll set our table in front of the television screen in the sitting room and broadcast from there, so we can see people and their plates in more detail.

While there's actually no need to make huge culinary efforts to participate fully ... ready meals could easily have met the three-course challenge and not diminished the fun ... this was a group that was serious about its food. The WhatsApp group hummed with news and photos of special orders and advance preparation, my favourite being our neighbours' video of a squirming box of live langoustine just arrived from Scotland. 

Home-made ravioli dominated the first courses and Wellingtons the mains. (Though the langoustines were a defiant rebuttal wrapped in sole ... if I remember rightly. Like any good dinner party, we'd had a fair amount of wine by that point.) We probably saw the most variety in the cheesecake course. Not only was there the baked or set debate, but the neutral base of the standard version took on an entirely different flavour profile in each house. The suggested but unselected Biscoff made an appearance in the Essex dessert, while Norfolk laid on both a sweet and savoury variety, pictured in the montage of their whole meal posted below.

The menu chez Bencard started with crayfish ravioli in a red pepper sauce. I used a fabulous tip from a Gordon Ramsay recipe for the first time, whizzing half the crayfish into a pate-like paste with an egg white and adding the other half to that, diced fine. The result was a firmer filling that's easier to work with and less likely to "bleed out" in the boiling if your pasta breaks. I made a mistake with my sauce, however. Though my red pepper and carrot combo has become a successful alternative to standard red sauce for my tomato-allergic husband, the flavours overwhelmed the fish here. I should have gone for a simple brown butter with a scattering of pine nuts and herbs. 

Piers took over the main course with a venison Wellington ... a beautiful and planet-friendly alternative to beef ... with rosti, broccoli and a fabulous red wine sauce. We still have an issue with presentation, however, and that plate came out as a tasty but rather lumpy array of browns. Note there's no photo. It being late February, I could take my cheesecake (baked, New York style) in a Sicilian direction with a topping of seasonal blood orange curd and candied blood orange slices. Turns out another benefit of a virtual dinner party is that half of the cheesecake is now in the freezer, saved as a treat for a later date.

We spent a lazy Sunday mildly hung over, alternating between sedentary pursuits and cleaning up the prodigious mess in kitchen and dining room. Almost like old times. I'm grateful to adventurous friends who were up for something different. Who's next? Given that the UK government roadmap currently won't allow more than six individuals from more than two households to congregate indoors until 21 June at the earliest, there's plenty of opportunity to do this again. 

Age may be the best predictor of pandemic resilience

 I managed to avoid all the usual diseases and broken bones of childhood only to acquire chicken pox at the age of 21. A week after my return from Christmas holidays at Walt Disney World I was covered in itchy spots. The doctor at the student health centre was uncompromising: I was to isolate in my bedroom for six weeks while asking my apartment mates, who had thankfully all had the disease, to sort food and drugs for me. While a relatively mild hindrance for children, chicken pox in adults can be lethal. So I was to take care of myself and stay far away from anyone else.

My professors were understanding, but what followed was an odd adaptation of journalism school. This was 1987; long before the publicly-available internet or video calls. Reporting involved physical research and face-to-face interviews. The solution was to report on the world I could access through my television screen ... the State of the Union, the Super Bowl, made-for-TV movies ... filling in commentary from people I could contact by phone. While it honed my writing and reporting skills, it was a strangely artificial way of interacting with the world and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief when, no longer contagious, I could re-join the student newsroom.

I hadn’t thought of that for decades. Until this morning, when I started wondering what I could possibly come up with to refresh a blog that had lain empty for another pandemic-restricted month.

The blogosphere is already awash with viewpoints on the historical merits and demerits of Bridgerton. Recipes and philosophising about Veganuary and surviving dry January abound. Work-related content belongs on LinkedIn. Any commentary on the American election risks angering a percentage of my friends and family and, worse, could attract trolls. (This blog’s usual fare of fine dining, opera, high-end tourism and cultural sightseeing isn’t their usual territory, but they are a true threat across social media.) You can find better January gardening tips elsewhere and I fear I’d bore you with my new-found lockdown hobby of drawing and painting. I could take you on a tour of our newly-redecorated downstairs loo-cum-cartoon-gallery, but that’s best done on video.

Taken as a whole, however, that list is what’s keeping me sane. Intellectually ... if not physically ... I’m resilient and unbowed by lockdown.

Some recent survey results at work reveal at least one reason why. Statistically, my husband and I occupy the sweet spot in pandemic-survival. We’re steadily employed, we have no children, we’re not responsible for caring for any vulnerable people and we live in a big enough house to have separate working spaces and living spaces. It turns out our age, however, may be the biggest factor of all. The study showed an almost straight-line progression: the older you are, the easier a time you’re having. Note that the respondents are drawn from our half-million employees around the world, so statistically significant for professionals of working age ... but separate from the unemployment, student angst and old-age concerns so often making news headlines. 

Since those survey results I’ve been part of numerous conversations amongst the over ‘40s in various “safe” spaces ... both intellectually and physically ... fretting over the findings about age. Have we done something wrong in the way we’ve raised children over the past 30 years? Is the snowflake generation real? Our fault? and unfit for the rigours of real life? Are they totally ignorant of context, unable to realise how easy their challenge is versus generations before who’ve had to face war, genocide, societal oppression and plagues with far higher death tolls?

The 20-somethings I work with and the teenagers I call family don’t give me undue cause for concern, though their reaction does add to my mountain of arguments about why people should study more history. It’s hard to put your experience in context when you have little awareness of the past that could provide it. Re-examining those memories of my own brief quarantine, however, gave me a different kind of perspective. 

I wasn’t bothered by six weeks, but I suspect I would have found more than that to be cataclysmic. I was at the beginning of my career and every action seemed to matter. Socially, every weekend was filled with portent. We were looking for our lives, aware that each step might reveal the job, connection, lover or place that would define our future. It’s hard to remember that sense of daily life being momentous ... probably because I found and settled into my track decades ago. These days I have difficulty placing all but the most significant events in specific years without checking my notes. (Or this blog.) 

Yet every year of the ‘80s is distinct in my mind. I entered the decade at 15 and left in my mid-twenties, having just landed at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder I would go on to climb fairly steadily until now. Losing any of those years would be unimaginable. Any one of them had a greater impact on the person I became than any three or four that followed.

So, my fellow mature and comfortable pandemic refugees, the next time you’re about to castigate the youngsters pause and think how your own life might have changed if you’d lost 12-to-16 months of your formative years to house arrest. If that doesn’t work, perhaps you need to put To Kill a Mockingbird on your lockdown reading list.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”