A Baedeker for the Bashful Host

Since hosting is the reason for the season, a column on it, dedicated to Wayne Dunbar and his spiritual heir, Phil Crossman

I live alone. I love cooking for myself. I know how to cook the things I love to eat. But what I rarely do is have friends and family over. I am nervous that others won’t want to eat the type of cooking I do, my house won’t be clean enough, I won’t have the right banter, people won’t want to come back. But I envision dreamy evenings when my downstairs is steamy with good company and good food. How do I get from here to there?

-The Bashful Host

Dear Bashful Host,

My parents ran a summer camp in Canaan, Maine. From the start of June through the end of August, my father lived in Maine. I often skipped the last few weeks of school to join him.

Those childhood months do not in any way qualify me as a Mainer. But they embedded in me a deep love and even a little understanding of how Mainers think and what it is to be a Mainer.

The vehicle of the learning was the camp caretaker, Wayne Dunbar. I’ll describe him in the classic tradition: Wayne was seven feet tall and had skin tough as an elephant’s. Instead of a paddle, Wayne sterned his canoe with a pole. Wayne slept standing up. Wayne only had one pair of boots and one pair of pants, and if the pants weren’t clean Wayne stayed home. Butterflies landed on Wayne’s fingers and raccoons curled up on his head for their naps.

Wayne didn’t speak much. But in addition to sometimes muttering the words “north wind,” and forecasting rain if the cows were sitting, Wayne would say, in response to requests for directions: “You can’t get there from here.” He said it in strong Maine accent. I’m not skilled enough at writing dialect to attempt it. But if you’ve listened to Bert and I, you have an idea.

I thrilled to hear Wayne give his reply to Manhattan parents dropping off their kids and hoping to get back to New York. He would listen intently to their plights, nod, and then deliver the bad news: “You can’t get there from here.”

Wayne Dunbar, incidentally, was an excellent host. But that’s not why I thought of him. It’s because you, dear cook, also can’t get there from here. But unlike the hapless Manhattanites facing down Route 2, you aren’t lost at all.

The “there” you describe, where “downstairs is steamy with good company and good food,” is means to its own end. You know the formula already—it’s as though you put the recipe in the dish’s name. A steamy room, good company, and food are all humans are after—somewhere warm and inviting, other people, and supplies.

I understand anxiety over whether a meal for one will translate into a meal for eight. I make certain dishes only for me: 1/3 a pound of pasta, with a whole can of really good oil packed tuna as its only sauce, and lots of black pepper; a bowl of yogurt rice (or curd rice, it’s really called) with cilantro, fried shallots, and roasted peanuts; very brothy beans, a soft cooked eggs, and chili crisp. Guests might like them, but they’re mine, and I wouldn’t serve them to others any sooner than I would entertain in my underwear.

But the gesture beneath the meal applies. And to those ingredients whose worth you already understand—warmth, company, sustenance—I will add one more, before sending you off to the races (to the finish line): Abundance.

Abundance is the key to making simplicity festive. Abundance makes its own party; it doesn’t need window dressing. After warming the kitchen (just a stove does this well), and turning lights down, so the dust doesn’t stand out (no one cares if things are clean; think of the permission you’re granting by not polishing the faucet!), and inviting people you like, all that is left is buying or producing an abundance. It can be an abundance of bread, warmed in the oven, with lots of good butter. It can be an abundance of mandarin oranges, in a huge bowl, at the table the whole time, through the lentils and rice. If you’re making soup, make a lot of it—the same tomato or black bean or potato kale you would have made for yourself. It should be seasoned correctly—with salt—and have a good amount of whatever its fat is so it doesn’t taste like spa food. Order four different kinds of pizza. Have a party where everyone brings a pie, and buy a massive wedge of aged cheddar to accompany them. Have a lot of wine or beer if you’re a drinker, a lot of cider and seltzer if you’re not. Have a whole box (or two) of cider donuts to eat with mugs of mulled wine, or mint tea.

When I was little, Wayne Dunbar lived in a double wide trailer with a huge garden out its front door. I would sit, as a child, on the trailer floor, dipping freshly picked cucumbers and tomatoes in salt, and thinking there was no more wonderful place on earth. Years later, when I was nine or ten, my family visited him in a house he’d designed and built himself. It was mid-winter in Canaan, Maine and was, in the local parlance, “cold as a witch’s tit.” But the thermostat in Wayne’s house, heated by solar panels and insulated to the hilt, pushed 80. We spent the day there, and as I remember it, I asked to never leave. I don’t know what we ate—probably crackers and noodle soup from a can.

Dear cook, guest don’t come for your banter, your clean floors, or even your cooking: they come for the steamy room, full of themselves—their own voices and hearts. Start at the end, and see where it takes you.