All you can eat

The buffet has come a long way since devilled eggs and lethal hotplates – thank goodness. By Rose Prince. Photography and prop styling by Yuki Sugiura. Food styling by Valerie Berry

Rose Prince is bringing back the buffet

I THINK WE CAN reinvent the buffet. Everyone chuckles at those old-time arrays of chicken glazed with aspic, hams studded with orange slices or cheese and pineapple chunks skewered into melon halves. Typical other dishes were elementary: ‘Beef or salmon?’ became such a well-worn phrase, someone drolly named a racehorse the same (it went on to be fairly successful).

Looking up the origins of the buffet, I find it is French for a piece of brown dining furniture – a sideboard. We had one in my childhood home, which I remember mostly for the electric hotplate on top of it, a dangerous appliance that sparked threateningly when it was switched on.

Like the demolished walls between kitchens and dining rooms, sideboards no longer have much of a role in the way we eat. It’s always nice to see one in use, and still I scour junk shops in the hope of finding one of those handsome but lethal hotplates. Increasingly, many of us tend to put all the food on to the table on platters, for handing around. This works in a social sense, offering to one another being a nice getting-to-knowyou act and so forth, and it’s wholly logical with summer food.

Having bid the weekly roast and gravy a weary, yet fond farewell until further notice, or at least the next chilly Sunday, the dishes I am putting on the table are sort of salad-ish, ambivalent in temperature, in that while they go on to the table warm, they are happy to sit at room temperature. These are my contemporary buffet offerings, all about contrasting yet friendly flavours and textures. Threads of ray (sold often as skate, even though it’s not, thankfully, the same endangered fish) weave through a soft and coppery oak-leaf salad, scattered with toasty hazelnuts. This sits nicely beside a chicken – spatchcocked and roasted with new-season green garlic – a flame-coloured pepper cream and red rice. A third plate, this time of young roasted beetroots and soft curd cheese, puts yet more colour on to the table.

If anything more is needed, it will be bread, perhaps new potatoes and then a pudding – in this instance a large tray of flower-scented meringues filled with cream and raspberries, it being June. These pretty and simple recipes reinvent the help-yourself lunch or supper. In essence, a buffet party, but one that has come of age and will not be remembered only for irony.