KATE WILSON

From memories of far-off sounds of the dinner parties her mother once hosted to her own more recent Sunday lunches, Woolworths TASTE editor KATE WILSON reflects on why she loves to get people eating around a table.

When I was in my early 20s, my mother gave me her prized 18-person Villeroy & Boch dinner service with a pattern of blue trumpet-shaped flowers. I was living in digs with a weed-smoking housemate and a collection of mismatched furniture – but I had porcelain plates and gravy boats. When I use this precious crockery now, it reminds me of the dinner parties my mother used to host in the ’80s: threecourse, slightly raucous affairs heavily influenced by Robert Carrier, and attended by shoulder-padded guests who had to figure out where they were seated by deciphering cryptic descriptions of themselves written on the place cards.

My mother was a gifted host, and the sound of voices and tinkling silverware drifting from the other end of the house was magical to 12-year-old me. I didn’t just want to be there; I wanted my own dinner parties to be just like that one day. I have never been one to sit down for breakfast (except at a restaurant), and I’m ashamed to say that lunch is almost always a desktop affair; but I do love a big family meal or grown-up dinner. Some of the most defining memories of my life, both good and bad, have happened around a table.

As a child, there were the Sunday lunches at my grandparents’, sitting around the plasticcovered patio table and eating incinerated braaied chicken off paper plates, crisscross patterns embossed on our thighs from the garden chairs. Or, in winter, eating Nana’s roast chicken at the imbuia dining-room table where my grandfather, legend has it, once unwittingly shared a joint with my mom’s Michaelis friends. We were together then, as a family, in a way we’d never be again. I only wish I had known that at the time. At the risk of sounding like I’m narrating a gangster epic, it was a weekly ritual that kept the kids safe and the grown-ups honest. And so, ever since realising how formative they were, I’ve tried to replicate the happy chaos of those family meals, and the imagined magic of my mother’s dinner-party tables.

In the early days, when I was learning to cook, I would plan elaborate, ill-advised menus and invite too many people over for dinner. I would manage to deliver a presentable starter before succumbing to main-course anxiety, drinking too much and only getting to the next course around midnight. Friends used to joke that if you were invited to dinner at Kate’s, you should eat beforehand. I didn’t mind. I loved cooking for people, but I loved the magic of the dinner table more. The longer I could keep everyone around it, the better.

Over the years, I got better at timings. I scaled back; I paced myself. I discovered the joy of the make-ahead main course – Ossobuco Alla Milanese, from the blue River Café cookbook – but I still miss those midnight main courses. There were other people’s tables too, of course, not all of them memorable for the right reasons, so I also learnt that much depends on the good humour and generosity of the host – something my mother never failed to get right.

And then I met Mike, and suddenly my table included two always-hungry teenage stepsons. It also turned out that Mike, like my grandfather, loves a family table more than anyone, so for a time, before his sons grew up and moved away, our 10-seater dining table was at full capacity every Sunday. That table might include my stepsons and their partners, my mother, my sister, her husband and in-laws, sometimes my father, sometimes my father-in-law, and quite often several friends. Tables were pushed together, the dinner service got a full outing, and although the roast was never incinerated, I only realised when I was no longer able to have people over, during lockdown, that those meals were the closest I have come to recreating the chaotic, happy, tinkly tables of my childhood. They won’t be the last.

KATE has been working in magazine publishing for more than 25 years, starting out as the editor of youth culture magazine SL. She was editor of House and Leisure and then Marie Claire, and then launched Women’s Health before making the switch to food in 2015, when she became editor of Woolworths TASTE. She counts getting a table at El Bulli,

interviewing Anthony Bourdain and teaching her four-year-old to crack eggs as some of her greatest achievements.