FOOD : On Having Seconds : The High Risks--and Pleasant Surprises--of Being a Dinner Guest

WHEN WE’RE DRESSING to go to someone’s house for dinner, Alice often tries to persuade me that there are ways of showing appreciation to the hostess other than having thirds. I suppose there are ways of displaying appreciation for an artist’s painting other than writing out a check on the spot and snatching the painting from the wall, but is “My, how interesting” really what he wants to hear? There cannot be many cooks so confident in their skill that the possibility of their having, say, put too much salt in the soup does not occur to them when a dinner guest says, “Thanks, it was delicious, but I couldn’t eat another bite” or “I’m saving room for dessert.”

“They know I can eat another bite, Alice,” I try to explain, hoping that she has not noticed that I am having some mild difficulty getting my collar buttoned. “And how can I tell them I’m saving room for dessert when it is widely known that my policy with food is to eat it on a first-come, first-served basis?”

“It wouldn’t hurt not to live up to your reputation one night,” Alice says. “In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to change your reputation.”

“My mother told me always to be polite,” I reply weakly.

When I’m on the road and someone asks me to dinner, I am sometimes able to phone Alice late in the evening to report that I have displayed the sort of restraint she so admires. There is some food that inspires abstemiousness even in me. Naturally, I try to avoid exposing myself to it. When someone I have met in another city suggests that I “come on out to the house” that evening, I believe I owe it to myself to try to figure out, as politely as possible, whether he is married to someone who is always pouring canned mushroom soup all over everything. A traveling man can’t be too careful. I stall the invitation with some talk about whether my work will be finished by dinner time, and then I try to feel around for what the percentages are of getting a better meal than I might find trying to sniff out a barbecue joint that uses real hickory wood or a Mexican restaurant that serves tripe. (I don’t particularly like tripe, but, after many years of research, I have finally decided that its presence on the menu of a Mexican restaurant is a badge representing seriousness of intention.) Anybody who finds this approach to a dinner invitation callous or cynical or lacking in graciousness has not spent much time on the road.

“Where did you and your wife meet?” I might say to some politician in Toledo, supposedly making idle conversation but actually hoping against hope for the long shot that he took a war bride from an Italian village known throughout Europe for the perfection of its gnocchi. Or, speaking to a newspaperman in Cedar Rapids, I might say, “I guess the corn is pretty good out this way”--waiting to see if his response is an uninterested grunt or the information that he always waits until dinner is precisely 3 1/2 minutes away before snapping a few cobs off the stalks in his backyard and passing them to his son, who is faster at short distances, to shuck as he proceeds at a dead run to the pot of boiling water waiting on the stove.

Now and then I am simply lucky. In Vermont once, having taken a wild guess that the couple in question might be the sort of people who would make the best use of what the land around them provided, I accepted a dinner invitation with a haste that Alice might have considered unseemly and was rewarded with a dinner that included a dish, made from apples and coarse maple syrup, that was probably the best dessert I have ever eaten.

In El Paso, during a particularly bitter clothing-workers’ strike, I was asked by a priest known for his support of the strikers whether I might like to stay for a bowl of chili verde . The priest seemed to me to have demonstrated the sort of attention to detail often found in gifted cooks: When the company being struck ran a full-page newspaper advertisement that listed 8,000 “happy workers”-- people who immediately became known as “happies”--the priest, with a patience that I have always associated with seminaries, counted the names and found 2,329. It also happens that I have never eaten a bowl of chili verde I didn’t like. The chili verde was magnificent-- the masterpiece, as I learned later, not of the priest but of a local woman who had a singularly delicious way of demonstrating her devotion to the parish.

The staggering apple-and-syrup dessert and the magnificent chili verde are memorable exceptions to a body of experience that runs more in the direction of canned mushroom soup. I may run across the Italian war bride in Toledo and then find out that nothing makes her feel more American than being able to serve frozen food right out of the package--an announcement she makes while I am shoving Sarah’s favorite brand of fish sticks from one part of my plate to another. I fall for a young executive’s eloquent declamation about the wonders of his wife’s cooking, and discover, once it is much too late, that I am eating a dinner prepared by the St. Paul or Denver or Moline version of the newlywed gourmet-food-mongers we used to refer to in New York as “the beef stroganoff crowd.”

“My, how interesting,” I say to the hostess, while silently comforting myself with the reminder that I can at least look forward to beginning my telephone conversation with Alice that night by saying, “Alice, you would have really been proud of me this evening. A man with real willpower is a pleasure to behold.”

ONE EVENING, AFTER we returned home from a dinner during which I had managed to do the sort of eating that compliments the hostess on her cooking and takes care of any leftover glut at the same time, Alice tried the sympathetic approach. “I suppose one of the problems is that too many people we know are good cooks,” she said.

“That is not my idea of a problem, Alice,” I said. “In fact, compared to, say, the problem of spiraling worldwide inflation or the energy problem or the race problem in South Africa, it doesn’t seem like a problem at all.” Alice has not spent much time on the road herself.

In a way, of course, she was right. A lot of people we know in New York serve dinners that demand gestures of appreciation--sometimes two or three gestures, if there seems to be enough in the pot. Some of the people, I suppose, are reformed members of the beef stroganoff crowd. Some of them went through a period of ingredient purity during which dinner conversations were so dominated by talk of how to prepare stone-ground flour or where to buy the true fig that I found myself imagining a cook pure enough to grind her own cleanser. Then, before all the talk of authenticity and purity could have any serious effect on my appetite, the period was passed, and so were the seconds.

One New York cook we know who never seemed to go through any of the unfortunate phases is a friend of ours named Colette Rossant, whose dinner invitations I have always treated the way a savings-and-loan lobbyist might treat a note asking him to a small poker game with the members of the Senate Banking Committee. Colette is French, and had had no trouble at all remaining so in the South Village, which everybody else thinks is an Italian neighborhood. The Italian cotechino sausage she buys from Mrs. Canevari on Sullivan Street is somehow transformed into extremely French saucisson en croute by being carried a few hundred yards into her kitchen. She does her shopping daily, like any French housewife, and if she finds a loaf of bread not quite as fresh as she expects it to be, she does not hesitate to bring the matter up with the man who baked it.

I have occasionally tried to envision what must happen among the shopkeepers of the South Village when Colette Rossant, the Scourge of Sullivan Street, starts out with her shopping bag over her arm. “She’s coming! The lady’s coming!” the butcher must shout, spotting her from the doorway as he sweeps out the store. The baker rushes over to snatch away the day-old bread he had slid onto the top of the bread pile for the unsuspecting. The fruit and vegetable men begin to police their orange displays and squeeze the wilted leaves off the outside of their lettuce. Unlike the Italian war bride in Toledo whose dinner table I dread, Colette defies Americanization. She is so far above frozen food that I have always suspected she may not keep ice cubes. The Rossants live within walking distance of our house, and Alice claims that when we are walking there for dinner, she is often forced to grab me by the jacket two or three times to keep me from breaking into a steady, uncharacteristic trot.

Sullivan Street is the scene every June of the Feast of St. Anthony, an Italian street fair I happen to love. (I happen to love all Italian street fairs: The One World Festival held every fall by St. Vartan Cathedral is one of my favorite annual events.)

Lately the Italians who run St. Anthony’s have been permitting some foreign-food booths to creep in. Unlike the Armenians--whose commitment to One World is so strong that Philippine bean-sprout fritters and even Tibetan dumplings are permitted right next to the stuffed grape leaves--the Italians keep the outlanders so far south of Houston Street, where almost all fair-goers start their eating, that few people could possibly make it to the Korean egg rolls or the Greek spinach pie without being so stuffed with sausage sandwiches and calzone and clams and pasta that they can only stare numbly at the souvlakia signs.

One year, in the foreign ghetto, we noticed two teen-age girls operating a booth whose sign said, of all things, “Crepes suzette.”

“Crepes suzette!” Alice said. “At St. Anthony’s!”

The girls, of course, turned out to be Rossant daughters--like their mother, unreconstructed.

Once, a few days before we were due at the Rossants’ for what Colette had promised to be a particularly worthwhile feast--the preparations for which, I assumed, had tradesmen as far uptown as 14th Street quivering at their counters--I felt a cold coming on.

“A cold!” I said to Alice. “This is a disaster!”

“Are we comparing it now to spiraling worldwide inflation?”

“This is nothing to joke about, Alice,” I said. “You know I always lose my sense of taste at some point during a cold.”

As the evening approached, my taste buds seemed to wither away. While Alice was dressing for dinner, I was still desperately alternating wild gargling and nose-blowing in an effort to clear some taste. As soon as we walked in, I picked up a couple of pieces of celery from a bowl of crudites that Colette had put out with drinks. I could taste nothing. I staved off a serious depression by telling myself that celery doesn’t have much taste anyway. Then I tried some cotechino . Nothing. A man who cannot taste Mrs. Canevari’s cotechino cannot taste. I spent the rest of the evening trying to imagine, by texture and by the blissful looks on the faces of the other diners, what the food I was eating tasted like.

“What sin did I commit to deserve this?” I asked Alice when we got home.

“If I had to guess, I’d guess gluttony,” Alice said.

An hour after we had gone to sleep, I woke up coughing. “Go take some cough medicine,” Alice mumbled.

“I don’t have any cough medicine.”

“There’s some of Abigail’s in the medicine cabinet,” Alice said. “Red. Be careful not to take the other red stuff--it’s to make kids throw up if they eat something dangerous.”

I stumbled off and came back to bed. Ten minutes later, I sat straight up in bed, possessed by a wave of nausea.

“Oh, you haven’t--” Alice said. But by the speed with which I was making for the bathroom, she knew I had.

Moments later, I understood for the first time how those characters in Sholom Aleichem stories can find themselves talking personally to the Divinity. “There must have been some misunderstanding, Lord,” I said, when I was able to talk. “I didn’t even taste it in the first place.”

From “Alice, Let’s Eat,” by Calvin Trillin. Copyright 1978 by Calvin Trillin. Published by Random House. Reprinted by permission.