The Ottolenghi Conspiracy: A Dinner Party Riff

Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. This month, David Plotz talks with John Lanchester about his new novel Look What You Made Me Do . Their conversation explores characters who hide their true nature behind carefully constructed personas, the role of technology in enabling obsession and revenge, and the social rituals that define contemporary London. The excerpt below is a scene from a dinner party in which one character launches into a riff about the pervasiveness of Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbook recipes at social gatherings.

David Plotz: “This is just above all an extremely funny book and there’s many moments to enjoy and to savor that are very funny, but one of the ones that I loved, which I think many people have loved, is a riff that Jack, Kate’s husband, has about Yotam Ottolenghi’s cooking that is sort of a part of a set piece opening dinner party. Can you just read a little bit of that if you don’t mind?”

John Lanchester: “Absolutely. Well, Jack and Kate are at friends’ houses with their friends, Michael and Tanya, and then there’s a young couple there as well. I’ll start with that part.”

“Tanya came through from the kitchen with another tray of small things on sticks–olives, chunks of pineapple. Our eyes met. ‘I’m going through a ‘70s thing,’ she said. ‘Prawned cocktail, coronation chicken, Black Forest gateau, onion soup. Done properly, they’re all delicious. Where’s all that kind of food gone?’ ‘You’ll get him started,’ I said, but it was too late. Jack had reached for a vol-au-vent, swallowed it whole in one bite, rinsed it down with a glass of champagne and seized center stage all in one action. ‘I couldn’t agree more. It’s like this, Yotam Ottolenghi,’ he said. ‘Lovely bloke I’m told. Colleague of yours, yes?’ To Katrina, who gave a complicated half nod. ‘Literally the nicest man in the world, everybody says, and yet the fact is that you have to say, objectively, that he has done more damage to this country than the Luftwaffe.’”

“I’d heard this before and, marriage involves compromise, settled down for the ride. Michael, circling the room, topping up champagne glasses, took the bait. ‘I’m not sure it’s completely true to say that Ottolenghi has caused more damage to Britain than the Luftwaffe.’ ‘No, it’s to do with the net destruction of competence. You go to someone’s house for supper—not here, obviously, Tanya—and you come in the door and you can see from the other side of the room 20 feet away that it’s Ottolenghi. You see the pomegranate seeds strewn all over everything and you know what’s coming. Here we go again. A random assembly of ingredients thrown together by someone who spent 10 hours shopping and 10 minutes cooking, i.e. throwing things together, and the crucial point is that they have no idea what it’s supposed to taste like because it has no relationship to any food they actually know about or have eaten before, except at the houses of other people who use the same cookbooks in the same way and therefore have exactly the same level of total clueless-ness.’”

“‘Sumac? Nobody has a foggiest how to use it. Za’atar, nobody knows what that is.