ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
When I was in my early 20s, I threw a dinner party to which I had invited some older, much grander people. I made a wedding’s worth of canapés so elaborate they would have looked a little too try-hard at The Ritz, and a main course that demanded all kinds of sweaty, last-minute faff. I’d more or less survived the death-by-showing-off trial of the first two courses, when I returned to the kitchen to get the pudding.