ITâS a rite of passage thatâs been lurking on the horizon since you left home. But no amount of forward planning can prepare you for this. Christmas dinner is at your place â and youâre doing the cooking.
You know the score: youâre going to have to conjure up at least three courses, along with wine and cheese. A choice of desserts is mandatory. Youâll run out of pans, and will have to wash up every 15 minutes. And worst of all, the world expert â your mum â will be there, casting a critical eye over your efforts. So how can you make sure dinner is divine?
Itâs easier than you might think. Good food, it turns out, is all in the mind. The way people perceive your dinner has less to do with whatâs on their plate than whatâs in their heads. At least that is what Brian Wansink, a food psychologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has found.
Advertisement
Among other topics, Wansink studies how the right environmental cues can make ordinary food seem fantastic. He has spent years feeding people cheap, mass-produced, bog-standard or downright horrible food and then bamboozling them into believing they like it. âTaste is tremendously subjective,â he says. âPeople are not too smart to be fooled.â
Most of Wansinkâs work has focused on places such as canteens and restaurants, but you can turn a lot of what he has learned to your advantage. The basic idea is to harness what psychologists call the âhalo effectâ. Put simply, this means that if you make people feel good about just a few aspects of an experience, everything else about it will seem better.
Restaurant food benefits hugely from the halo effect, Wansink says. It is no accident that restaurants pay lots of attention to their decor and lighting, the appearance of the waiting staff, the look of their menus and even the names and descriptions of their dishes. All conspire to create the belief that the chef will be taking similar pains over your meal. And if the food is half-decent, it works.
Wansink has shown as much by experimenting on the staff and students who frequent his university cafeteria. In one experiment he fed people pieces of a chocolate brownie that had seen better days, then asked them how much they would be prepared to pay for it. People who got the brownie on a paper plate with a cheap napkin were not impressed, saying on average that they would only stump up 57 cents for it. But when they got the same shrivelled piece of cake dusted with icing sugar on a glass plate, they were lavish in their praise, offering to stump up $1.12. âThatâs almost twice as much,â Wansink enthuses. The lesson here is simple: use your best crockery, buy some nice napkins, and camouflage your accidents with garnish.
But itâs not just about presentation. The way you describe your food dramatically alters how people rate it. In another experiment, Wansink served people cheap canned meatballs. Not surprisingly they werenât a big hit. But when he described them as âspicy meatballsâ, people liked them much more, saying they tasted âdeeply spicyâ â even though they were about the blandest thing that he could find. And when he fobbed the same ghastly stuff off under the label of âlocal family gourmet recipeâ, people suddenly loved it.
âLabels really help,â says Wansink, but not any old labels. To pull this trick off you have to tap into one of three basic food-related emotions: sensory (descriptive words such as tender or creamy), nostalgic (traditional, home-baked) or geographic (Italian, French). Of course, you canât label dishes at the Christmas dinner table, and if you announce your dessert as âtraditional creamy Cajun trifleâ, people are going to look at you in a funny way. But there are variations you can use. Take every opportunity to talk up your ingredients. Casually mention that you got the parsnips from an organic farmersâ market, even if you didnât. And if someone remarks on the stuffing, mention with a chuckle that they should make sure they get some more before it all goes: you wonât be hand-peeling chestnuts again next year.
Talking turkey
Even if you find it hard to tell lies about vegetables, there is one element of the meal you must talk up. While most people can tell the difference between spoiled meat and fresh meat, they struggle to distinguish between OK meat and really good-quality meat. âSo they look for environmental cues to reinterpret the sensory experience,â Wansink says. âThere are lots of ways to make people think âOh yeah, this is the really good stuffâ.â The lesson? Pretend you know an organic turkey farmer.
Props can create a halo effect too. Leave a bunch of flat-leaved parsley or chervil in a prominent position, even if you didnât use any. When guests wander into the kitchen, fiddle about with complicated pieces of kitchen equipment and obscure-looking utensils.
At this point you may be getting worried. Surely youâre inviting disaster and ridicule by drawing so much attention to the food? Not a bit of it. Wansink has shown that making people pay close attention to the food theyâre eating makes it taste better. He once gave his long-suffering colleagues a cheap, mass-produced vegetable juice and asked them to rate its flavour. When they were simply told it was a ânew type of juiceâ they said it was OK. But if he told them it was a carefully blended mixture of vegetables and asked them to identify as many as they could, they rated it much more highly.
The wine can also help: whatever you serve, make sure it at least sounds good. Wansink once did an experiment where he served a French meal with complementary wine â a dire, $2-a-bottle plonk. When people knew it was rubbish they rated the whole meal quite poorly. But when he stripped the labels off the bottles and replaced them with something more classy, they rated the food much more highly â and ate more.
By now you should be well on your way to becoming a legend in your own kitchen. But there is one more way to score points. As part of his studies, Wansink has also investigated what earns people a reputation as a good cook. He found that a great reputation comes in three distinct flavours. The first two are bad news for the unskilled: Wansink calls them âinventiveâ and ânew recipeâ cooks, and to qualify as either you need to be good at cooking. Both categories are knowledgeable, skilled and keen; the kind of people who grow their own herbs and think peeling shallots is fun. The only real difference between them is that ânew recipeâ cooks use books, whereas âinventiveâ cooks make it up as they go along. This is not the sort of thing you can fake.
âEven if you find it hard to tell lies about the vegetables, there is one element of the meal you must talk upâ
But there is a third way to gain a culinary reputation, and it has nothing to do with the food. âSocial occasionâ cooks stick to simple, well-known recipes â think casseroles â and use the time they saved on shallot-peeling to make their guests feel at home. So if youâre doing Christmas dinner this year, banish all thoughts of cooking something unusual. Donât even entertain the notion of stir-frying the sprouts in ginger and garlic: put them on to boil, and open the wine. Then all you have to do is mingle.
Just one more thing. These tricks are tried, tested and trustworthy, yet be warned. By all means put them to work, but glory can come at a price. Donât blame us if your mum books herself in for next year too.
