Back in the 1980s, when my generation first tasted the joys of independent adulthood, we would have dinner parties. No matter how poor or unemployed, we expected to dress up, have three courses and make conversation with each other. It seems laughable now, and was brilliantly parodied in the first Bridget Jones's Diary, where Bridget is such an incompetent hostess that she produces blue soup, but it was essential to rejecting our own parents' counter-cultural manners.
My own culinary disasters included a meal involving ox-tongue, then supposed to be wildly fashionable as well as cheap. None of my guests, bless them, turned a hair when presented with a slab of puckered greyish meat that looked, well, just like a giant tongue. The formality of the dinner party forbade it.
These days, everyone I know is far too exhausted by long working hours, children or money worries to dream of hosting dinner parties. I have only been to one in the past 12 months, and although it was a delight, it also reminded me why I usually loathe them. As a guest, I've too often found myself sitting beside a total stranger who makes no secret of having Googled me, and who proceeds to interrogate me as if at a literary festival for the next two hours. As a hostess, I have been mortified by guests who remind me they are vegetarian only when they arrive, or who bang on about some political hobby horse as if on a soap box. Too often, the formal dinner leaves you feeling fed up with those you are genuinely fond of – and puts you off those you had wished to know better.
How tempting, then, to invite people round for a jolly-sounding "kitchen supper". The phrase triggered a national debate about class when uttered by one Cabinet minister in reference to David Cameron's cosy get-togethers with Rebekah Brooks, but new research suggests that Britain has become a nation of "kitchen supper" hosts. We have turned from believing we have to dress for dinner even when alone, like Bertie Wooster, to eating in our bedrooms in front of laptops, and as such, the kitchen supper is part of the national trend for casting off our reputation for unnecessary formality. Who doesn't find the kitchens of grand houses more interesting than their dining rooms? Many of us, after all, would rather eat in the servants' hall at Downton Abbey than with the elegant aristocrats above.
This trend is even affecting domestic architecture, given that the smartest new multi-million pound homes no longer have a dining room, preferring (if this newspaper's own Property section is to be believed) to install a sauna instead.
Yet this informality is deceptive. We may no longer have bone china dinner services, damask napkins and placement, but we must have bigger and better kitchens to reflect the way that cooking has become less about sharing food and time together than a form of performance art which guests are invited to witness.
This is especially attractive to men who have taken over cooking as a form of creative self-expression (so much so that my husband went off to the Ashburton Cookery School in Devon for a week this summer, returning with a set of expensive new knives and a maddening expertise in the correct way to chop vegetables). But the kitchen supper goes further. It flatters invitees with a presumption of a more intimate relationship than may be the case. Come and see us as we really are, it suggests: not dressed up, not wearing a social mask, but sweating over dirty pots and pans like real human beings. There, in the steamy, womb-like warmth, we can all let our hair down.
The kitchen supper seduces us into inappropriate relationships which an old-fashioned dinner party and its manners and mores would have kept at bay. As David Cameron has no doubt discovered, it might have been better to junk the sauna and keep the dining room after all.
