CHICKEN A LA RUBBER

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Big, catered parties have got better at most things, from the flowers to the canapés. So why is the main course still dire? Josie Delap reports ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2010

One of the best hotels in Brussels was hosting a banquet for 200 ambassadors, diplomats and business people, and the main course was chicken in fish. Not chicken or fish: chicken in fish. As a one-time party caterer, I was shocked. Bland, dry poultry stranded in a sauce that tasted like cream boiled with haddock skin—it was a coupling more unhappy than Belgium itself.

In one way, such wretchedness was surprising—it followed a starter of salmon mousse that I ate with pleasure and a squeeze of lemon. But in another, it was all too predictable: while the standards of most aspects of mass catering have raced ahead, the main course waddles far behind.

Big events, both public and private, have improved enormously over the past decade. People choose imaginative venues: weddings in the London Eye, charity galas at the Met in New York, secret parties whose location is revealed by text on the night. The twangs of a string quartet are no longer the only entertainment; they’ve given way to sparky alternatives such as trapeze artists, mini-funfairs and burlesque acts. The flowers are bigger and bolder. And most party food has raised its game to match. When were you last offered cheese-and-pineapple-on-a-stick—unless it was ironic, and/or used artisan, organic, rare-breed cheddar? Plates of sushi and miniature cones of fish and chips have seen off the soggy vol-au-vents of yesteryear, and the puddings are whizzy with popping candy. And yet, and yet…when it comes to a sit-down dinner, odds are you’ll still be served a hunk of chewy, tasteless meat. Who is to blame?

Partly, it’s the people doing the cooking. That misguided poulet à la poisson experiment aside, most caterers play it all too safe: boeuf en croûte, chicken in Parma ham, lamb noisettes…And they do it for a good reason, at least in my experience. When I cooked for parties and weddings, my favourite dish was a Greek watermelon salad with slivers of red onion, stained magenta with lime juice, sweet mint and salty feta. It was the perfect summer salad: light, refreshing and unusual. If I was lucky, a third of it got eaten. It was delicious, but people turned the damn thing down without even a taste. Their timidity irritated me, but I could hardly shovel it on to their plates uninvited.

A salad, no matter how interesting, is not what most people want to eat at a party. They expect their main course to be hot, and to include meat or fish. Achieving this for more than a handful of people all at once is a nightmare. Perfect steaks for 500 means cooking sous-vide—vacuum-sealed in a water bath—at 63 degrees; that in turn requires temperature-controlled, combi-therm ovens, plus battalions of staff to cook and plate the meat, dollop on the sauce, sprinkle the garnish and whisk it to the tables. None of which comes as standard in a marquee.

Jay Rayner, the food critic of the Observer in Britain, is clear on whom to blame: the guests. “There is a fundamental mismatch between diners’ expectations of a meal and what a cook can actually do,” he says. “Guests want fancy-pants plated food—but you can’t do à la minute cooking for 500.”

Rayner has one solution to suggest: “braise everything”. Certainly caterers could kill two over-cooked birds with one stone if they used cheaper cuts of meat and slow-cooked them, so avoiding the chicken-posing-as-dog’s-chew problem. Prue Leith, the founder of Leith’s catering, is an advocate of meat cooked for hours in some kind of sauce, disconcertingly known to the trade as “wet food”. These kinds of dishes can be kept hot almost indefinitely and never dry out. Reheating only improves their flavour.

Other professional foodies are leaning the same way. Henry Dimbleby, one of the founders of the upmarket British fast-food chain Leon, served beef daube with celeriac mash at his own wedding (and for his birthday he had a spit-roast lamb, another option if meat is a must); Thomasina Miers, a restaurateur and the author of “Mexican Food Made Simple”, had slow-cooked rabbit at hers.

What about the vegetarians? A meat-eating colleague on this magazine makes a point of ordering the veggie option at big events, as “the occupational hazard of the meat is that it’s dry; the vegetarian option is usually more palatable—and it comes to the table quicker.” If caterers really wanted to keep costs down and reduce the numbers of special options, they would cook vegetarian across the board. But you need balls of steel to deny diners their pound of flesh. Yotam Ottolenghi, the co-founder of the Ottolenghi delis and a cheerleader for vegetables, says that chefs are still biased against vegetarians: “They like cooking meat.” The worst vegetarian meals, he says, “are the ones that try to disguise themselves as meat. You just end up with something grey and sad. The best vegetarian main celebrates the ingredients without trying to apologise for the lack of meat. It doesn’t try to be what it is not.”

Going ethnic works too. Thomasina Miers suggests Mexican or Indian—perhaps serving a big molé and covering the table with appealing extras like bright salsas, coriander and radishes. Leith would go for a mild curry, burnished with spices but light on chili. “If you put all the bits and pieces on the table—the chutneys, the poppadoms, coriander—it looks lovely and everyone sees it as a treat.”

If all else fails, another colleague, who has reported from eastern Europe for decades and survived countless official functions, has a foolproof solution – in Russia, at least. “Head straight for the caviar, fill up on that, and then get the hell out of there."

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT

Journalists are obliged to go to a variety of big functions, so we asked colleagues to pick out caterers who can deliver a decent main.

All in Good Taste in Pittsburgh served roast rack of Elysian Farms lamb for Barack Obama at a dinner for the G20 summit, while Michelle and the other spouses devoured their jumbo lump-crab cakes. From $60 a head

Leith’s provides the food at Glyndebourne opera in Sussex, where it successfully serves all the tricky meat mains—including sirloin steak—to a house-full of non-picnickers during the interval. From £40 a head

Moving Venue, which handles events such as the Innovations awards at the Science Museum in London, has proved it can pull off roast fillet of beef with potato fondant and chargrilled wild mushrooms in less than hospitable surroundings. From £70 a head

Rhubarb is a regular caterer at some of the largest venues in London, including the Albert Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral. Its “bowl food”—like the dishes of sticky beef and noodle served at the 2010 Baftas party—is particularly successful, but it will happily dish up a first-class steak and duck-fat chips too. From £46 a head

Villedieu-Traiteur in Marseille caters for the grandest of occasions and its clients include the Elysée Palace in Paris. But it has some affordable options for the less illustrious, including duckling with peaches and crispy quail with pine nuts. From €22 a head

Josie Delap is the Middle East and Africa editor of The Economist Online. Picture Credit: avlxyz (via Flickr).