Exercises

A Dinner @ Margaret's

by Margaret Carlson    

    What a delicious assignment: invite 12 people to dinner at my Washington house, come up with any menu I want, hire someone to serve and clean up, and charge the whole feast to the company. I could hear the Champagne corks popping.

    There were a few difficulties. Everything had to be come from the Internet, no going to the store, and I would have to write about it. There's no such thing as a free dinner.

    Immediately, I e-mailed an invitation to our local Internet hero, American Online CEO Steve Case. A reply came by phone: Would we mind faxing the information?

    Not at all, but if Mr. You've Got Mail regresses to old tech, can e-commerce really be that easy? With Case onboard, and TIME's Person of the Year issue to dangle before guests, I pursued a Noah's Ark theory of who else to invite: two members of Congress, two teachers, two candlestick makers. I warned everyone they would be TIME's guinea pigs.

    With the party set for Sunday night, the plan was to give myself a week to order, always starting online but resorting to 800 numbers in a pinch, find a middle ground between ordering the totally exotic (alligator meat) and the reliably prosaic (ham), and default to vendors in California when in doubt, figuring those guys in Silicon Valley surely have discovered how to stuff a turkey through a modem.

    First things first: I needed a new salt shaker and a tablecloth that actually fit. I ordered both from Williams-Sonoma (williams-sonoma.com). This is where I first felt Screen Rage, a risk at many sites. This arises after you've just filled in every last scrap of personal data, except your shoe size and SAT scores, and the screen freezes on you. Don't think that Mr. Internet has saved anything for you. (If God is a woman, then the Web is a man, silent and indifferent, with a short attention span.) You have to start over. And over.

    Getting great coffee was a comparative breeze. I went directly to the sources—a Hawaiian plantation, cornwellcoffee.com, for Kona, and to bluemountaincoffee.com for Jamaica's Blue Mountain beans. This is also when I became a Coffee Bore. At most sites it's easier to get in than to get out, since Webmasters tend to fill all the space available, which online is infinite. Did you know that Kona beans thrive in the dark volcanic soil, sunny mornings and cloudy afternoons of Hawaii? I didn't either, but I've brought it up at three parties. I've turned into the kind of person I used to avoid.

    For real food I thought holiday season and went hunting for a goose. At goose.com I found I could acquire a rifle for the purpose—it's an outdoors store. This is when I fell in love with Jeeves, the fictional British butler who helped Bertie Wooster put his pants on one leg at a time, reincarnated in cyberspace as a cheerful search engine that sorts through all the others at AskJeeves (ask.com). As in life, you need a friend of whom you can ask anything: What is love? What's the GDP of Monaco? Where can I buy a goose? The easily distracted might choose to go elsewhere, for there are no nonstop flights at AskJeeves. The whimsical Jeeves served up Mother Goose, along with the chance to hear one (a nasal honk right out of your laptop) and a recipe (Remove stray pinfeathers. Place orange rind and celery leaves under the loosened skin. Truss). That was enough goose for me.

    The encyclopedic Jeeves brought me to goose liver, which led me to foie gras, which took me finally to France Gourmet Traditions (gourmet-tradition.com), a Parisian grocer that had precisely what I wanted. Jean-Marc Donce could get the foie gras to me on time—if I were in the Paris bureau. At its site a Strasbourg charcuterie posted this bad news: "Cannot at this time ship. USDA does not return our calls." Funny, I have that very same problem with government agencies.

    A few more clicks, and I found the same pâté at Greatfood.com, which I ordered, along with mustards and cheese. It's a luxurious site with Hollywood-studio visuals. You can't touch, smell or squeeze the merchandise on the Web, so pictures, however doctored, are essential. It was at GreatFood that I met temptation in the form of dinner for 24 at the click of a mouse. But the meat worked out to about $40 a pound and...it would have been wrong.

    GreatFood had a link to Omaha Steaks (omahasteak.com), which I'd seen advertised but never tried. There was a scrumptious picture of beef Wellington—very festive, very holiday—with a bonus gift of six 4-oz. sirloins. Maybe there is such a thing as a free dinner, after all.

I went to Napa Valley at the eponymous wine.com (What luck to nail down that name), proved I was 21 and ordered better wine than I'd ever served. Since I was already in California anyway, I called up Patisserie Lambert (patisserielambert.com), where I'd eaten in real time—I mean, real life. It's a small shop, remarkably cybersophisticated, with visuals so good you could almost smell the madeleines. And there it was, the cake of my dreams, Chocolate Fantasia, three layers of chocolate caramel mousse cake. A dramatic dessert can redeem many a main-course sin, so I went for it. But Lambert quickly replied that a three-tiered cake was too dicey to ship. Then send the layers separately, I said. Some assembly required? No problem. Then came word that this was actually a wedding cake. Hey, pal, no problem. I'll have someone get married. One of these government officials will preside—captain of the ship, quick ceremony, that type of thing. Just send the cake.

    No go. I settled for two separate cakes with raspberry sauce on top. In a marvel of packaging, considering their delicacy, they arrived intact. Just to amortize the FedEx charges, I threw in a couple of tomato tarts. Major cost lesson: it's not the food, it's the shipping that kills you.

    There is no grocery website that delivers to my ZIP code, so fresh vegetables are hard to come by—thank goodness. I find the very sight of raw broccoli and cauliflower on a buffet table dispiriting. I don't go to parties looking to balance my diet with the four major food groups or to consume the recommended daily allowance of fiber. For my own evening party, I hit Cajun Joey's Specialty Foods (cajun-joeys.com), where sugar is the fifth major food group. Joey hasn't met a vegetable that can't be mashed, pureed, or creamed. The carrots, corn, spinach and artichokes looked great and ended up tasting like candy. I was thrilled.

    I can't tell exactly just when the task of looking for food on the Web finally began to overwhelm me. It might have been when I found out that because of the law in Washington, the wine would take at least ten days for delivery. But wait...fast delivery was possible to West Virginia. The political columnist in me wanted to know why: the power of Senator Robert Byrd? Some anomaly in the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? But the Martha Stewart in me just wanted the wine. A round trip to West Virginia would take more time than I had left, yet I needed a case of Merlot to ensure that my guests were less than keenly sensitive to the cellophane and cardboard from which their meal had so recently been liberated. I needed a way around the Rules. What if I could find a local store with a website but faxed the order? My seven years covering the Clintons were coming in handy. How do I get a case of wine to my doorstep by Saturday? Don't ask, don't tell.

    The trouble didn't necessarily end with delivery. When I sampled the beef Wellington, although remarkably juicy and delicious, I realized it wasn't going to slice cleanly into pieces suitable for lap dining (fearful everyone would be busy during Washington's party-gridlock season, I had let the guest list swell to a crowd of 30). I was worried enough to e-mail my editors in New York City: How about a back-up ham, that mainstay of Irish funerals? "Boring," they replied.

    But not as boring as going hungry. Dinner by committee was my worst idea yet. Through Jeeves, I reached the Smithfield Collection (smithfield-companies.com/collection), and despite the pretentious name for a company that slaughters pigs, I got delivery of a crusty, honey-soaked ham in an ice chest left under the porch, per my instructions, in one day's time.

    At this point, I realized I needed a real-life Jeeves. Who better to serve food with pride sufficient to obscure its Internet origin? Ironically, my virtual Jeeves couldn't produce a human one. I located a domestic agency in Beverly Hills on my own, but its best price for a footman in a morning coat was $500, minimum. In a panic, I had our bureau administrator, Judith Stoler, call the caterer she uses for TIME functions, which, by the way, has an online site. A waiter would come on Sunday night. Was this breaking the rules? Let's just say there's no controlling legal authority.

    There are many outlets for flowers, but it is hard to get just what you want—pale peach, but please, no pink—if your screen, like mine, bleaches the colors. The good news is that the roses I ordered arrived fresh and on time. The bad news is their color roughly matched that of the ham.

    On Saturday, calling frantically for items that hadn't arrived, I lived out the sorry fact of modern life that at any given moment, 1 in 5 Americans is on hold for the next available customer representative with the added indignity, around the holidays, of having to endure endless rounds of Jingle Bell Rock. Not to single out Williams-Sonoma—because it happens just about everywhere—but when you get your stuff depends on what a company's definition of "submit now" is. You submit, they process, and depending on the distributor, or the manufacturer, the popularity of your item, or who's out with the flu that day, you will get it overnight—or in a week. The polite "associate" at Williams-Sonoma sent me an apron and refunded my shipping costs. I guess there's such a thing as a free apron.

    Since the tablecloth would come too late for the party, I sponge-ironed the creases out of my old one until it almost fit. The foie gras, sourdough and olive Pugliese breads from San Francisco did not arrive until Tuesday. I became a culinary Luddite, baking two dozen rolls. On the day of the dinner, the waiter called in sick at 4 p.m. Well , that's why God made daughters—and editors visiting from Manhattan who know their way around a corkscrew.

    Dinner and a good time were had by all, confirming my belief that people go to restaurants for good food and to friends' houses for good company. There were lots of leftovers. And the ham was the size of an aircraft carrier. The morning after, I staggered to my desk and clicked my way to D.C. Central Kitchen (dccentralkitchen.org), which recycles food to homeless shelters. A team came right away and wiped out all traces of My Cyberdinner.

    My effort cost more than $2 000. That's not exactly a value meal. But when I read that during the week I was dining à la Web, Internet users spent more than double what had been spent the preceding week, I felt pleased that in this little piece of Web history I had played a part. Next time I have people over, I'm likely to revert to my old ways. I could have crawled to Safeway and back in the time it took to make an Internet dinner. But it was nice meeting Jeeves, even though he didn't work out in the end.

    All in all, a virtual success.

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