Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

To Eat or Not To Eat, That Is the Question...

When you invite guests for Saturday night at 9:00 PM, what does it mean exactly?  Does it mean dinner?  Snacks maybe?  Coffee and cake?  Ice cream?  The answer is unambiguous: unknown.  We've been invited to friends at 10:00 PM on a Friday night, and we had more than enough time to eat out, read the bed time stories to the kids, fetch the babysitter and go through the detailed instruction manual with her, and still be on time, for a first class seven course gourmet French dinner.  On the other extreme, we've been invited at 6:30 PM on a Saturday night, only to watch some unusual activity in the kitchen, which was later determined to be the live-in maid preparing dinner.  It took us a while to realize that the family was actually waiting for us to leave before dinner could be served...

So my wife and I have invited two couples of friends for Saturday night.  They didn't ask, and we didn't clarify whether this was a dinner invitation or just a coffee and something.  The thing is, I myself wasn't so sure.  When I asked Dorit she said something unclear like: people have dinners before 9:00, this isn't dinner.  Then what is it?  Nobody knows.  However, she spent a lot more at the store that week, she bought a lot of stuff I have never seen before, she spent time with her mother on Skype, and quite a few obviously used stain-paged cook books were spread on the kitchen counter.  She spent hours in the kitchen, flour marks on her face, tons of used dishes in the sink and a few pots were simmering on the stove, the oven is spitting out pastries, pies, and quiches at an industrial rate.  It's not dinner.  It's a wedding.

I can only imagine the two couples engaged in the following conversation: "is it dinner?", "but it's at 9:00 PM", "it's not too late for dinner", "what should we do?"  They could of course have dinner and get surprised, or they could fast all day, and get surprised still.  But the best thing to do is to eat something which will allow you to enjoy dinner if it's served, and to not pig out if you find out that there's no way to be culinary satisfied by the fruit salad, the cake and the espresso...

I have witnessed a similar situation years ago during a family trip in Europe.  This is how it played out.  We, my parents, my brother, my sister, and I were invited to my mother's uncle who lived in the small German town of Aachen.  We weren't sure whether it was a dinner invitation although the time suggested that it very well may be.  To be on the polite side, we haven't eaten a thing all day.  After the quick cheek-watering pleasantries, my brother and I looked around, then at each other, and with the disappointment kept for healthy and starving teenagers we realized: there's no food on the table, no smell of cooking/baking coming out of the kitchen.  We were in deep trouble.  There were, however, a couple of bowls with pretzels on the coffee table in the living room.  They evaporated in a couple of minutes.  Then came some fruit.  Gone.  Toffees, marshmallows, potato chips, all gone in the blink of an eye.

We stopped for a minute, embarrassed.  This was no behavior for polite, civilized well mannered human beings.  But we were still hungry.  My father looked around, then looked at us, and with a long sigh said: "just be yourselves, and behave naturally".  We needed no more encouragement.  In a couple of seconds we became locusts.  Everything that was put on the table disappeared in seconds, along with juice, water, some liquor if I remember correctly, soon it all became a blur of stuff put on the table and sucked into our hungry selves.  The uncle and his wife started to panic.  There was no end in sight.  Eventually, of course, when there was nothing left in the pantry or anywhere else in the house, we left.  Drove to the MacDonald around the corner.

We were so sick the next morning.  But we have learned an important lesson.  Never to go hungry when invited to an unknown type of invitation.  Dinner: don't eat.  Coffee and cake: have dinner first.  Unknown: eat just enough to not embarrass yourself in case of an unpleasant surprise.  As for me, I rarely have a problem.  Given my reserves, I can sustain surprises of both kinds...  Speaking of surprises, want to have some fun?  Next time you are invited to a coffee, show up with a nice bottle of red wine, and make sure the hostess hears you when you say: "I am absolutely starved, I could eat a horse".  You're invited to put the results down in the comments section of this blog.

Both my wife and I come from similar families.  Both our mothers, when faced with guests, will always have enough food around to feed ten times as many guests, and will always be anxious that it will not be sufficient.  Both will always be left with ridiculously huge amounts of (delicious) leftovers.  Urrh, I think we're the same.   If you're invited to us, please come hungry, you won't be disappointed...

Posted at 08:28AM Nov 09, 2007 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[4]