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Introduction
It's really just a matter of common sense coupled with some imagination and forethought to choose the right kind of entertainment. Along with choosing the right variety of amusement, remember that folks generally like the simple things best and if there's a touch of originality in addition, you've won their hearts. For you see you've made them feel that you took the trouble to plan something "different" in their honor.
Because it's different, it isn't necessarily hard to prepare there are lots of novelties in decoration, amusement and "eats" that are perfectly simple and inexpensive. They are what help to make entertaining easy, in fact. And just at this point you see comes in the reason for the writing of this little book.
It aims to make entertaining easy by suggesting plans that are simple and a little out-of-the-ordinary to fit the most frequent occasions when you wish to entertain or perhaps must do so. Special care has been taken to consider time and expense, but at the same time to bring in a touch of the unusual.
Don't miss the fun of entertaining because you've always thought it hard work! This book has been prepared to show you how easily, after all, it can be done. And may you have the reward of joy and satisfaction that comes with successful hospitality! [12]
The author’s own statement of what the book is for. There is nothing to cook on this page, and reading it first explains the shape of everything that comes after it.
- Not a cookery bookThe plans in this book are schemes, not recipes: an occasion, a set of invitations, a decoration, an amusement and a short menu. Come to it for cooking and you will leave with a party and no method, and that is deliberate.
- Time and expenseThe author says special care was taken over both, and that one sentence separates this book from the formal menu books on the same shelf. It is written for a hostess who does the work herself, in a house with little or no help, so every plan has to be affordable and achievable by one person.
- ‘Eats’ in quotation marksThe author puts the word in quotation marks because she knows it is slang, and the register of the whole book sits exactly there: brisk, chatty, a little arch, addressed directly to a you who is assumed to be a woman running a household.
- Entertaining as a dutyThe telling phrase is when you wish to entertain or perhaps must do so. Hospitality here is partly an obligation — to a church, a school, a class, a visiting relation — and a great many of the plans that follow are for occasions nobody chose.
- Novelty means themeWhat the book calls a touch of the unusual, or something different in your honour, is what we would now call a theme, and the method is identical: pick a conceit and carry it through the invitation, the decoration, the food and the games. The book is doing a century early what a party board on a phone does now.
The anxiety the Introduction is written against is the giveaway: it closes by telling the reader not to miss the fun of entertaining because she has always thought it hard work. That is a book for a household expected to entertain and no longer able to do it comfortably, which is a different world from the one the formal menu books address, where a cook and a kitchenmaid are taken for granted and the hostess’s only task is to write the card. Here the hostess is the cook, the decorator and the organiser, and the promise being made to her is not elegance but manageability. What she is offered in place of grandeur is originality, which costs nothing but thought, and the book is entirely open about the trade.