How Dinner Parties Became the Fuzzy Blanket of Adulthood

Years ago, my friend Carey Wallace hosted a dinner party every Wednesday night in her little Brooklyn apartment that went by a comically simple moniker: Soup. “Are you going to Soup this week?” I’d ask a friend on the weekend. “See you at Soup!” we’d say when we bumped into someone at the grocery store.

The plan for every Soup was simple: eat soup. But that wasn’t its purpose—it was to make a new friend, to have a heated conversation about the news, to wash it all down with warm mush. There was always moody lighting, rich flavors, and delightful strangers. It provided something that’s become more elusive since the pandemic began: comfort.

Dinner parties offer a simple way to connect with others, and in my new book, Salty, I took a similar joy in imagining being at a dinner party with nine historical women writers, artists, and thinkers. But historically, dinner parties haven’t always been about peace and joy. In fact, while people have always gathered to share meals, the dinner party once was a significant source of class anxiety.

After World War II, the rapidly expanding American middle class couldn’t necessarily afford household servants, but they could buy fancier things like china, according to sociologist Alice Julier, the author of Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality. Dinner parties provided an opportunity to demonstrate one’s upward mobility and social graces and to connect with people in a more opportunistic way. It was more networking than relaxing; people might have invited their bosses over for dinner, for instance. The motivations of a postwar dinner party were “very rooted in the Western social class model of aspiration,” Julier says.

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