What makes a great party? The food?
No, no. It’s the host or hostess or both. Everything depends on their emotional temperature, on their making the party go. That can be twice as much work as the food. The food is merely the excuse. The guests are going to say, ’She really knocked herself out for us. She makes us feel very special. She values us enough to spend three weeks of her life making this party.’ Believe me, that’s noticed.

What’s a rotten cook to do?
You create the same impression without the cooking. You have to do it in your own style. The most important thing is to make people feel at home, to welcome them and really mean it. Some people can never give a good party because they’re too worried. They worry about the food, how they look, what they’re wearing. Being anxious about yourself is not a good idea.

What if you have a cooking disaster?
So what? If you think the food isn’t very good, you put it out. You don’t fret and you don’t apologize. You make others enjoy it by enjoying it yourself. The focus has to be on them and not on you. The way to kill a good party is to be self-conscious in any sense.

Anyone who gives parties has lots of disasters. It’s never perfect with me. Never. I don’t worry about that. Besides, most disasters have to do with the guests. In my academic world, people get into arguments. The Vietnam period was a period of disastrous dinner parties. People would start shouting about the war. They would leave rice on the table, shove back their chairs and leave.

Tell us about one of your disasters.
Often everything on the table is just awful. I had a Grand Marnier soufflé, and you have to prepare that ahead of time. It’s tricky to do because it will rise in the oven and fall when you take it out. There’s a two-minute window when you can present the soufflé at its maximum height before it starts to fall. But I was following a Julia Child recipe that says the soufflé will hold for 40 minutes.

So I put the soufflé in the oven, and when it came out, it hadn’t risen at all. It was all there in the bottom ofthe soufflé dish. If you tell people, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry, the Grand Marnier soufflé flopped!’ there will be no response. They’ll have to pretend it’s all fine. So you say, ‘I’ve been experimenting here. This is a Grand Marnier pudding.’ So they get the flavor of the Grand Marnier. And they can say, ‘Well, I think I prefer a soufflé. Or a vanilla pudding.’ They give you an out.

How important are drinks?
Very important. But that’s my crowd. People my age are drinkers. They were around before everybody went on to wine. Their hearts sink when they enter a room and see two bottles — one white, one red. They wonder, ‘Where’s the scotch. Where’s the vodka?’

In My Kitchen Wars, you describe fabulous parties we’d all love to attend. But do you ever regret the three weeks of preparation each one took?

Oh, no. Many times they were really fun to give, fun to enjoy. Not so much to clean up after, but that’s part of the ritual. For about two decades, '50s and '60s, I regret nothing because there so much discovery. You learned about lots of things through food. That’s when Julia Child was giving us Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Since competitive cooks tend to travel a lot, you were exploring a whole world of travel through food. And you could acquire skills in your own kitchen. French cooking is hard, sure, but that’s the challenge. You say, 'I can lick that. I’m American. The French think they can do everything, but I can too.’

Are people who cook their own party food a dying breed?
Certainly in New York. We have the same kind of affluence that we did in the '50s and '60s, but both members of a couple have to work, so there’s no time to cook. They have people do it for them, as in France. Today we can buy so many things. The difference in takeout and delis is extraordinary. You can get good paté; you can get good bread. You don’t have to do it yourself.

And you don’t have to serve gourmet food. We used to do hamburger parties and on the Fourth of July, we served fried chicken and hot dogs. Some people have to have everything fine, but I don’t worry about that. I use my restaurant china, commercial stuff. I do have good silver, but I piece it out with my crummy everyday things.

So the era of competitive cooking is over?
Women can’t do that anymore because that’s when women were exclusively in the kitchen and men out at work. So competitive cooking was a way of professionalizing women’s work. When the system broke up in the '70s, as women went first to male schools and into male professions, they pretty much excluded the kitchen from either work or play. There’s a generation of women who really pride themselves on saying 'I don’t cook' — meaning 'I’m not like my mother.'

But aren’t many Gen X women embracing cooking as an art?
It’s coming back around a little bit now, but after all it’s 30 years later. It’s a new century. In the broadest terms, there’s been a realignment of the domestic science. Since there’s a generation of men who’ve learned to cook — in the home, not as professional chefs — it’s OK for women to say ‘I cook.’ Women will say, ‘You know Jim does the kitchen stuff.’ It’s OK for women to say that because cooking isn’t a gender thing anymore. It’s something to be shared.

Eventually, though, you turned to other things.
The reason it wore out for me is that the social context changed radically in the '70s. My children were old enough for me to go back and finish a Ph.D., which had felt like unfinished business. And there is always the frustration that everything you do in the kitchen is ephemeral.

If you’re like me, you want a beginning, middle and an end. I want something to hold in my hand afterwards, something tangible, something that lasts. For me, that was a college degree and my books.

What party advice would you like to leave us with?
No advice. No rules. Just enjoy your parties. If you don’t enjoy them, don’t give them. Do something else.

From Underwire.msn.com