Join James Beard Award winner and veteran party thrower Amy Thielen for a talk on her newest cookbook all about rethinking the way you entertain, making dinner parties less formal, more frequent, and as fun for the cook as for the guests.
After living for years in the rural countryside, Thielen has developed a steep aversion to the formality of entertaining. But don’t be mistaken, Amy throws a lot of parties—holiday parties, birthday feasts, longest-day-of-the-year barbecues, no-occasion dinner parties. According to Amy, “the best dinner parties are always a little off. They hit both high notes and low notes. They swing. The missteps make us human, and cause the understanding to flow around the table, unbroken, like good conversation.”
Winter feasts on freezing midwestern nights. Big sprawling summer bashes. In Amy’s corner of the world, northern Minnesota, in-house entertaining is more than a way of life—it’s pretty much the only option. “You can call cooking a compulsion or you can call it an art or you can call it a drag, but you can’t call it a waste of time. A meal with friends or family is nothing more, and nothing less, than a fleeting event that fills a momentary spiritual need. If you think about it that way, nearly every inconsequential occasion calls for [a party].” And when a dinner party is done right—aligning people and season and mood—the food will fade into the background. “The next day, it will resurface as an idyllic sense memory of flavors and textures that everyone will remember as better than they actually were. That’s just how it works,” notes Amy. “The real hostess gift is the fact that everything— absolutely everything—tastes better at someone else’s house.”
Preaching leniency, not-guilty pleasures, and the art of making it in advance, Thielen soothes the most common party anxieties one by one. Not afraid of meat (but obsessed with vegetables), these 125 loyal recipes are arranged in menu form—from intimate dinner parties to larger holiday feasts to parties that serve up to twenty. With a feast of gorgeous photography and plenty of down-in-the-pan cooking nerdery, Company encourages a return to the habit, and the joy, of cooking for family and friends.