Never Test A Recipe on Guests

Love and Honesty

The midwest¹ is the land of potlucks. Office potlucks, graduation celebration potlucks, church picnic potlucks, family reunion BBQ potlucks. I’ve even been to a wedding where each guest brought a dish to pass, a bridesmaid made the wedding cake, and I ate better at that wedding than at many a catered wedding. Each attendee supplies the most decadent, innovative, addictive, locally sourced, or noteworthy item their kitchen can produce. Because the most popular dishes will be the topic of conversation at the event, and after, bringing good potluck fare can cement your place in the social hierarchy, or render you locally famous (“invite Henrietta, and ask her to bring those wonderful deviled eggs!”). From funeral potlucks (heavy on the dessert), potlucks to feed volunteers staffing local events, to fundraiser potlucks to defray neighbors’ medical bills—the people of the midwest relish opportunities to bond with their communities by bringing a dish to share.

Against this broad pro-social backdrop, a different dynamic exists at the family level. Inspired by magazines, friends, novel veggies in the CSA box, or the internet; mom will muse aloud “I think I’ll try making a new kind of broccoli salad for the book club potluck Saturday night.” Like hope that springs eternal, she will voice an inspiration and a possible potluck on which to unleash it a few times a month—but she is always met with the same refrain. “Mother,” reminds dad, “Never Test A Recipe On Guests.”

Never Test A Recipe On Guests

There are two wisdoms contained within.

First is the obvious one: if you try a new dish and it flops², you’ll have sacrificed an opportunity to serve your fellow man a morsel that would have brought them joy. In the same way it’s ruder to let a 200-person meeting run long than a 10-person meeting, a potluck is a high leverage opportunity. Rather than a marathon, it’s a sprint, and so you should train for it—and bring a proven winner.

The less obvious wisdom, but the focus of this essay and the kernel I hope the reader will chew on, is this:

Your family,³ who loves you, will be honest with you.

The receipt of honest feedback is how we grow and become better. In a self-reinforcing way:

-people who love you want to see you grow and become better

-you can trust people you love to give feedback that is in your long-term best interest, so you can hear unwelcome news without becoming defensive

-family have a vested interest in interpersonal harmony, and in skillful cooking at every meal—so each person in the family can practice learning, patience, forgiveness, and tactful feedback presentation, knowing that everyone shares the same goals.

This post, in a nutshell:

1. Host a potluck, or make your next gathering a potluck.⁴ They are delicious, they encourage participation from everyone and increase attendance vs an event without food, they keep local org. budgets low vs an event with catered food, and they provide a lot of cohesive matrix for community development by encouraging volunteering. ⁵

2. Cultivate bonds with honesty as an expectation. These are your family, or your “chosen family” or closest friends. Be explicit that you value honesty (“long term growth is more important to me than short term discomfort.”) And when your friends are honest with you, accept uncomfortable information as the gift that it is, and thank them.

3. If you want to strengthen your friendship with someone, ask them “how would you make this better?”

4. Never test a recipe on guests.

This essay is part of a series on rural tech and how it works.

1. The midwest as I know it. Surely there are many ways to experience ‘the midwest’, and I only pretend to speak from my own experience.

2. New recipes have some distribution of success, from “worse than your standard repertoire” to “smack in the middle of your standard repertoire” to “wow, that’s something special.” The more cooking experience you have, the more likely you are to have an inkling of a recipe’s promise before you try it, and the less often you strike upon a “well that was a waste of good butter”-tier recipe. But that risk never drops to zero.

3. I am using “people who love you,” “people you love,” and “family” interchangeably here. Feel free to substitute with whichever feels more natural for you.

4. If you have an existing gathering that hasn’t offered food before, the low-risk way to take small steps into potluck culture, is to have your event provide a no-frills entree (say it’s grocery store rotisserie chicken), and invite guests to “bring a side to pass.” That way nobody is bearing the brunt of providing all the protein, and every participant is adding to the fun, but people don’t go hungry if everybody was too busy to cook the night before.

5. Potlucks encourage low variance participation from each individual chef’s range, but given the community cross-section, there is still high variance across the serving table.