A big birthday lunch

A couple of weeks ago, my mother turned sixty. Although she has always been vague about her age, this has never been due to vanity (she is even more vague about her children’s ages), so she decided to hold a party for the occasion.
Naturally I saw this mostly as an opportunity to gain experience in catering for large numbers. The main problem was trying to find out how large those numbers were, and then to work out what the appropriate scale of catering would be.
My mother invited everyone she knew, or at least everyone whose contact details she had, but was very vague about how many that was and even more so about how many were likely to turn up. It turned out that our original guess of something between 100 and 120, based on a number of rules of thumb and a wild stab in the dark, was not bad - 128 plates were used for the main course.
What is the biggest number of people you have ever cooked for? Up to about 12 seems to work by regular maths, where the recipe gives a good enough guideline. After that, the law of large numbers apparently takes hold and people eat different amounts and expect different choices to be offered.
Amounts for the canapés to go with the champagne were easy enough to estimate, as most recipe books give guidelines (we went with three per person, which was not inadequate), but once you’re into the main course, guidance is hard to find.
We went the cold buffet route, laying food out on trestle tables in the barn (my parents still live on the farm where I grew up). There were three main course options: coronation chicken, which my mother made, mixing it up in a huge black bin purchased for the occasion, smoked trout fillets, and a vegetarian option. My parents, who are abstemious types themselves, assumed that everyone would choose one of these and take a reasonably small portion. Just half the hundred available trout fillets available were put out and I was instructed to keep the vegetarian option small. Since to my knowledge just one non-meat eater was expected, I merely made enough for twenty.
The four salads I made in slightly larger proportions - enough for perhaps thirty each - and my mother at the last minute decided that, as a special treat for herself, she would make egg mayonnaise. In the couple of days running up to the party, everyone kept trying to lighten her load by offering to make the mayonnaise, until she pointed out huffily that she enjoyed this particular task. Adventurously, she decided to trust Julia Child’s unlikely instruction that eggs may be hard-boiled in large quantities in a pressure cooker. This worked extremely well, with just one cracking in a dozen of dozens, although the egg yolks did discolour, despite Child’s assurances that they wouldn’t.
I’m sure any experienced caterer reading this will have worked out already that we were cutting the amounts very fine, especially given most people’s propensity, when faced with three main course options, to take some of each. Luckily I saw the one vegetarian standing in line just before the last portion of chickpeas was taken, so I jumped her to the head of the queue.
The next course of raspberries and cream was simplicity itself to serve, although again the amounts were not particularly generous. Cream does not get whipped up in a trice, so latecomers had to put up with pouring cream, while the extra meringues that we afterwards found hiding in a tin would probably also have been welcomed. Twenty pounds of raspberries disappeared in approximately 15 minutes, which implies that our guests were not only appreciative but also very efficient in serving themselves in the not particularly spacious room where we had set out dessert.
Cheese went down very well with those who found it, although this was the one area in which we over-catered (it is no coincidence that it was also the only area for which I was solely responsible). I have written in more detail about the cheese in a separate post!
Finally, there was birthday cake. In my family, birthday cake is practically by definition a chocolate cake made to my grandmother’s recipe and decorated with Smarties. The only concession I have made to advancing age is to make the cake into cupcakes, which I think are more elegant to serve and eat, as well as providing smaller portions for those of us who no longer want to stuff our faces to the point of nausea.
So for my mother’s sixtieth, it seemed appropriate to make sixty cupcakes, especially as she had rejected the idea of candles. Then of course I had to double that to ensure that every guest could have one if they so wished. One of my sisters arranged exactly sixty of them to form the digits 60, although as we are not a family that are good at ceremony or co-ordination, greedy guests were allowed to start eating them before we had a chance to have a proper embarassing communal singing of Happy Birthday and appreciating all my hard work!