#setting the table

According to the mid-century florist Constance Spry, by midday on the date of your party you should have turned “the contents of two tins of turtle soup into a pan”, added a glassful of dry sherry and left it “ready for reheating”. 

Your main course, Spry wrote in her 1961 entertainment manual Hostess, sauté of beef with button mushrooms and jellied stock, should be ready. The pancakes for your crêpes pralinées must be “spread out” primed to be baked, smothered with praline butter and rolled “in the shape of a cigar”.

You must have trimmed your flowers to below eye level and shined the silver. The sherry glasses should be polished and ready to quench the thirst of the turtle-soup eaters.

The resulting evening would, in theory, have had the shape and appearance of a dinner in one of England’s finest country houses at the time Spry was writing the book. But rather than taking “a thirty-six person staff” — as it would have in the 1930s, according to butler and writer Arthur Inch’s own handbook, Dinner is Served (2003), this meal could be prepared and served entirely by a lone woman. (There is no suggestion that a man attempt it.)

The years following the second world war saw a slew of such hosting guides, each promising to unlock the secrets to gracious party-throwing. Done right, they tantalise. A party can unlock access to a new milieu and even advance your career. Do parties today still carry the kind of social weight they did back then, or even at the tail-end of the 1990s when another author, Sally Quinn, who was married to the then Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, irreverently dissected Washington’s glitzy social scene? And is there anything we can still learn from these doyennes of entertaining?

The party scene has certainly evolved for women. In Dinner is Served, which draws on Inch’s lifetime experience as a butler serving Churchill and the Queen Mother, and, later, as technical adviser on Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2010), he notes that not only were ladies seated for dinner first but that, in the name of chivalry, ladies should actually already be seated “before the men enter the room”.