Olia Hercules - A Table for Friends

To my Mamma for teaching me so many precious life lessons, including how to lay a table properly, and that food tastes best when shared with friends.

Our table is always filled with family, friends and whoever else Ive managed to persuade to join us for lunch or for dinner. Usually more people than we can easily squeeze into our kitchen, certainly more than we can comfortably fit round the table. But that is how I like it: few things in life bring me greater pleasure than to eat in good company.

When it comes to the food, I keep it simple: roast chicken, crisp potatoes, baked fruit, sweet fennel pured and laced with Parmesan cheese, snowy-white meringue layered with whipped cream and dripping with lemon curd. The kind of food you can plonk down in the centre of the table for everyone to tuck into, towering platefuls of it, higgledy-piggledy, unpretentious, colourful and overflowing.

I dont do starters, or the kind of fiddly dishes you might find in a restaurant. I do do pudding and usually on an extravagant scale (I have a sweet tooth) though still never anything tricky. I decorate the table not with fancy floral arrangements, but with bowls of fruit or loaves of bread: vivid and bountiful. I have no fixed idea that this is the only way or even the correct way to host a party, but it is the simplest, most rewarding and the very best way I have found.

This is a book about cooking for friends: how to do it and how to enjoy doing it. My hope is to give you all you need to cook with the kind of relaxedness and self-assurance that will make it fun. I promise, if I can do it, you most definitely can too.

We tend to think of entertaining as some kind of show, a three-course meal for which you need to wheel out the good china. I have no good china and this is not that kind of book. What you will find here, I hope, is a different way of thinking about dinner; you could call it a new philosophy for entertaining, except I dont like the word entertaining or the air of rigid pretentiousness that hangs around it. While this book might offer you inspiration for the occasional birthday party, for Christmas lunch, or for any manner of happy occasions you might want to celebrate with a good meal, its intended for you to use every day, even on week days. Most especially on week days. I believe you need no special occasion to cook: if you keep things simple, if you can find a way to have friends over more often and make gatherings a regular, easy part of your life, you will feel richer for it. Im not a trained chef. I learned to cook through some trial, a fair amount of error, a greedy desire to eat well and many hours spent happily leafing through cookbooks. But a love of sharing food with friends is why I cook, and here tips, tricks, recipes and all is how to do it.

HOW I LEARNED TO COOK

It is a love of eating, the happy anticipation of sitting down to lunch and dinner, that has always driven my love of cooking. I have vivid childhood memories of my mother cooking in the kitchen, but mostly I remember how devilishly good and buttery her saffron risotto was, how indulgently rich her chocolate cake, the one she always wheeled out for birthdays. We arent all born with an innate love of cooking; some of us many of us find it simply because we love to eat. Still now, cooking is not something I enjoy just for the sake of it. For me, its not an exercise in craft, skill or precision; rather I have come to love cooking because it makes relaxing with friends over dinner not just possible, but both affordable and doable. Its the eating and the party I get excited about, the preparations are simply my way admittedly a happy and rewarding way of getting there.

It wasnt until I first had a kitchen of my own in shared student digs that I can say I really learned to cook. In my third year at college, I moved out of the old main campus and into a ramshackle student house. What my new accommodation lacked in grandeur, it made up for with access to a kitchen: only a small one, more of a glorified closet really, but blessed with a rickety oven, a sink and two hob rings. No fridge, though. So, I would cram milk and other perishables into a mini fridge in my bedroom, or in the colder months store all sorts of things I probably shouldnt have outside, along the edge of the windowsill. The kitchen had no table (certainly no space for one), so we ate meals cross-legged on the floor at the coffee table in my bedroom. When friends joined us for dinner, as they often did, I would borrow another coffee table from a room down the hall and join the two together.

I began as most of us with an interest in food do by reading cookbooks: earmarking those recipes I felt brave enough to try, then giving them a go. Sometimes it worked, other times it didnt.