With the start of the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, Etiquetteer felt it was time to bring back the Dress Dinner Challenge as a way to anchor the week and create an opportunity for some rarely exercised Perfect Propriety in the home. And since the end of January always marks the anniversary of Etiquetteer’s very first column, a dinner party for one turned out to be a Perfectly Proper way to celebrate 20 years of writing about manners.
Considering the frigid temperatures outdoors, Etiquetteer opted for an icy pale gray suit with white shirt and a floral bow tie of blue sharp enough to cut. And with Etiquetteer’s pandemic hair large enough to contaminate any meal, it became necessary to color-coordinate some kitchen headgear.
As is traditional for formal dinners, the menu is given in French lightly infected by whimsy (Grâce à Google Traduction) — except where the item in question didn’t originate in France*:
Manhattan cocktail
Craquelins Fromage
Bifteck de jupe mariné au vin rouge et à la Dijon au thym frais
Sauce Hollandaise à mixeur oubliée
Épinards en branche Pomme de terre au four
Salade verte sans imagination
Poires pochées à l'orange et au gingembre Gâteau quatre-quarts
This whole menu developed around a bottle of Médoc. It’s the other wine in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado;” Montresor breaks open a bottle with Fortunato as they stumble along in the cellar looking for the cask. I was curious to try it.
Etiquetteer skipped the soup, as it were, and got right to the heart of the matter. Red meat was the obvious choice to accompany Médoc, and what the shop had was skirt steak, the bubble gum of the steak world. A good long soak in a mixture of red wine, thyme, garlic, and mustard softened it up helpfully, but there were moments when Etiquetteer wished he’d “argued the law with his wife,” like Father William. With all the fussing over it, Etiquetteer completely forgot to make the Hollandaise sauce . . . but then it was a rich menu to begin with . . . calories!
Plain old spinach**, to Etiquetteer’s surprise, was a staple vegetable on the formal dinner menu, so that was very easy to achieve. A baked potato with sour cream and chives would decidedly not be on a formal dinner menu; then it would be more Perfectly Proper to see something frillier like Duchesse Potatoes. But at a stag*** dinner it might be more likely, and Etiquetteer was decidedly going stag.
Etiquetteer returned the salad to its proper place following the meat on a formal menu, but it was an unremarkable green salad straight out of the box, without even a curl of carrot or a pinch of herbs to distinguish it. But then Etiquetteer put more of an effort into dessert for a change, experimenting with pears poached in orange and ginger along with a first-ever attempt at a pound cake to soak up all that syrup. That pear could probably have been poached another few minutes, but it was still mighty tasty, and the pound cake was both crisp and dense.
Between courses Etiquetteer was delighted to be engaged by friends at a distance, which made lingering over the Médoc much more enjoyable. Have you enjoyed video dinner with friends over the course of the pandemic? The tragedy of the pandemic is that it keeps us from being together in person. But one of the conveniences is that, when dining alone, you can put your laptop or phone anyplace on the table without getting pushback . . .
Won’t you plan to join Etiquetteer one or more Saturday nights this winter for the #DressDinnerChallenge? We all need something to look forward to with Perfect Propriety! All you need to do is wear your good clothes, set the table with the good stuff, light a few candles, and make (and enjoy) a nice meal. Bon appétit à l'avance!
See what candlelight can do for the complexion?
*Millicent Fenwick teaches us in The Vogue Book of Etiquette that oxtail soup, a recipe that originated in England, is always given as “Oxtail Soup” on a formal menu, and not as “Potage à la queue de bœuf.”
**When served plain, Mrs. Fenwick instructs that it’s properly listed as “Épinards en branche.” When creamed spinach, “épinards à la crème.” The latter was also a specialty at the late Locke-Ober of Boston, may it rest in peace.
***As a reminder, a stag dinner is any dinner at which no ladies are present. These days it’s more typical to think of a stag dinner only in terms of a bachelor dinner (and accompanying hijinks).