In the intervening years, I have still not developed a foolproof way to get all dates into my calendar, but I have learned that dinner parties need not take days of work.
I'm from the pale ranks of the potato-eating Anglo-Celts, but having grown up in the most multicultural parts of Sydney, learning that dinner would be a bit different with Dinah's Hong Kong family than with Aphrodite's Greek one was happily unremarkable – because, of course, to them, our home cuisine experience was different, too.
"I remember, with surprising fondness, your regular 11 p.m. call asking what I'd learned since dinner," said Ritchie Patterson, the Department Chair of Physics at Cornell University and a doctoral student of Winstein's in the 1980s.
Now the financial literacy program includes student-operated branches, a Partners in Learning Celebration dinner honoring outstanding students and teachers, and a scholarship program.
"No one is cooking at home anymore, so we are losing all the wonderful lessons we learn at the dinner table," she said in an interview in 2002.
But we hear nothing of their manufacture until, near the end of the book, we learn of a dinner Jobs had with President Obama this February.
If I consult The Hollywood Reporter, I learn that for dinner we ate steamed-shrimp salad with champagne vinaigrette, followed by medallion of beef: right-wing food, you could say.
Visitors to Kuusamo in Lapland can learn about Lappish dinners on a cooking course using seasonal ingredients (€50pp for a three-hour course, +358 40 860 8365, ruka.fi/summer_eng/activities).fi/summer_eng/activities
I want to explore new culinary territory, to learn something from the dinner.
