Don't let dinner parties die

Whatever happened to dinner parties?

They were the staple of entertaining friends at home for hundreds of years. You'd get a group of people together -- part of the fun and the challenge was in selecting the right people who would most enjoy meeting and spending time with each other -- and serve them all a well-planned meal. That was also part of the fun and the challenge, selecting foods that would complement each other and encourage bonhomie and camaraderie.

Then you'd sit back and watch the magic of strangers becoming friends.

A whole social code, complex but necessary, was devoted to dinner parties. Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt wrote entire chapters about it. Thank-you notes had to be written the next day, of course, and once invited to one you had to return the favor by inviting the host to a dinner party of your own within the next few months -- without making it seem like an obligation.

But in what seems like just the last few years, the whole tradition of the dinner party has died out, or at least faded.

Sure, there are still parties. On Super Bowl Sunday, millions of Americans will have their friends over to watch the game. They'll open bags of chips and serve plenty of beer. But that isn't really the same thing as a dinner party, is it?

Watching the Oscars with your friends doesn't count, either, even though cheese balls, crudites, and wine might be involved. True dinner parties are purely social events. They are about conversation and good food, not television.

When I was growing up, my parents' dinner parties always seemed both mysterious to me and elegant. My brother and I would meet the guests (I suppose the amusement we provided them was different from the amusement we thought we were providing -- they thought we were cute, while we thought we were interesting and well versed in the conversational topics of the day). But then we were banished upstairs where we could only imagine the intriguing and fascinating things going on below.

If I had heard of the Algonquin Round Table by then, I'm sure I would have suspected it was something like that: sparkling repartee, witty banter, and discussions of art and politics on the highest of levels.

My mother would often wear a tartan plaid jacket over a floor-length red velvet skirt -- the fashions of the '60s and '70s were not destined to be classics -- and my father would wear a suit. The evening invariably began with a round of champagne cocktails, which still strike me as the height of sophistication.

A cherished family story took place at a dinner party in the late 1960s. My mother, a high school teacher at the time, had invited another teacher at the school whom she did not know well. The other couple declined the champagne cocktail, were quiet during the meal, and left soon after. The other teacher was cool toward my mother for the rest of their time together at the school. It was only later that my parents realized what had happened. The other couple saw the sugar cubes at the bottom of the glasses, darkened with Angostura bitters, and concluded that my folks had spiked the drinks with LSD.

While my wife and I were dating and after we were first married, we held occasional dinner parties and went to others. My wife carefully wrote down in a book whom we had invited and what was served, so we wouldn't make the same dish for the same people. But as the years progressed, the entries in that book became fewer and fewer.

I suppose we fell into the trap of thinking that we didn't have time to throw a party, or that we had too many other things to do. I suppose our friends fell into the same trap. And judging by the way I don't hear other people talk about the dinner parties they have attended, I suppose most of us have fallen.

But it's not too late to change. It is still early enough in the year to make a resolution. Why not plan to invite over some friends for dinner and fix them something special, something you don't ordinarily make?

You may even get an invitation in return.

Contact Daniel Neman at dneman@theblade.com or 419-724-6155.