Hetty Lui McKinnon always wanted a round table. When the Chinese Australian food writer moved to New York, she finally got her wish.
The table literally and figuratively opened her home up to a community she was trying to create. “When you eat around a round table, everyone can see each other’s faces. Everyone can speak equally,” McKinnon says. “It created this incredibly warm environment.”
It became the centrepiece of her quaint Brooklyn apartment. Over the course of a year, she hosted monthly lunches for Linger, her latest cookbook. She served salads, bites and sweet treats to her friends, testing her recipes in real time.
Host was not a role she always felt comfortable in. Before Linger, McKinnon threw “really complicated” dinner parties. These involved shops that spanned over days and an “obsession with table settings”.
“I just remember being very stressed by hosting,” McKinnon says.
The decision to write Linger through the immediacy of the lunches helped McKinnon realise that hosting is not a “performance”. Nor is it a story about a “perfect host, perfect house, perfect life”. Rather, it’s about coming together and simply “taking time out of your day for yourself … to have lunch”.
“It’s more important to eat with a person than it is to have this perfectly laid out table,” she says. “People are so overjoyed and honoured to be invited to your home to have a meal or … anything.”
She hopes others will let go of the pressure of hosting too. “You can have people to your table without the stress and the cliches.” McKinnon believes hosting is simply inviting someone to do something with you. “I think it can be anything … it doesn’t have to be this whole complicated thing.
“You can host with just a sandwich or a glass of wine.”
Remembering the first lunch hosted for the book, McKinnon says her friends “had no idea what they were walking into … there was just these big plates of salads”.
Over time the lunches grew into a beloved part of her circle’s social calendar. Often the people who attended the lunches didn’t know each other – but left with each other’s phone numbers.
McKinnon is emphatic when she says: “Food tastes better when you share it with people.”
For McKinnon, menu planning is whittled down to two questions: What’s in season and what am I craving?
The next step is working out the types of dishes she wants to serve. “I would think about the balance of the dishes, like some lighter dishes along with something hearty,” she says. This could look like starting with a “hero dish” – for McKinnon this is usually noodles – then building the rest of the menu around that.
Setting the mood
McKinnon entrusted the soundtrack of Linger to her 19-year-old daughter, Scout, who was given just the titles and themes for each menu. It was a moment of connection between mother and daughter. McKinnon feels as if she shares the book with Scout. “The music is so different to what I would have chosen … and I love that,” she says.
Eighties or 90s hits are a mainstay in McKinnon’s kitchen. The music she listened to growing up helps her relax when she has guests over. She recommends picking songs that people recognise, but don’t get in the way of conversation. She’s averse to instrumental background music though. “I hate it,” she says.
McKinnon says her small apartment will inevitably be a little cluttered, but she’s come to embrace its cosiness and accept that a little mess is OK. But she will “always” clean the bathroom before having people over.
“I don’t think people are that judgmental about other people’s homes, like I never go to someone else’s house and go ‘oh God you live in a small place’,” she says. Not stressing over your space comes with the acceptance that people will “find out a lot about you when they see your home”, McKinnon says. “What do you want people to know about you?”
Cooking the food
As a self-proclaimed prepper, McKinnon ensures all dishes are ready and on the table before guests arrive. “If the host isn’t at the table, what’s the point?”
“If you’ve invited people over to your house, you need to be part of it,” she says.
To do this, for Linger, she prepared various aspects of the dishes a couple of days in advance – dressings, grains, roasted vegetables, herbs and nuts needed for toppings can all be cooked ahead of time. That meant, the morning of, McKinnon could assemble the dishes efficiently.
Salads can also be built ahead of time, but only dress and toss them when you’re ready to eat. This ensures the leaves stay crisp and the salad doesn’t get watery. If you don’t have a large selection of dinnerware, shallow bowls are great for tossing and serving salads, McKinnon says.
She is also a big proponent of serving food a room temperature as it “makes your life so easy” and removes the stress of timing different dishes.
“The food should always be wonderful but it doesn’t have to be … the thing that you that takes you away from the table.”
