Shop Your Own Cupboards First

There is a specific moment that costs hosts more money than any other. You are in a shop, four days out, holding a stack of small white bowls. You are fairly sure you have some at home. You cannot picture them. They are six pounds. You buy them.

You had seven.

The twenty-minute audit

Once — properly, not while cooking — open every cupboard that holds anything you serve food or drink from and count five things:

1. Serving bowls and platters. Not dinner plates. The things food arrives in.
2. Glasses, in the roughest categories you actually use: wine, water, everything else.
3. Chairs, including the ones currently doing another job in a bedroom or an office.
4. Table linen — cloths, runners, napkins — and whether they are ironed, because an unironed tablecloth is functionally a tablecloth you do not own.
5. The awkward ones: trivets, serving spoons, a big jug, ice cube trays, a corkscrew that works.

Most people finish this and discover they can serve twelve and have been hosting eight as though they could barely manage it.

What to actually buy

After the audit, the list is usually short and dull, and dull is the point:

• Serving spoons. Almost everyone is two short. They cost very little and they are the thing that stops a dish going out with a teaspoon in it.
• Ice. More than you think, and it is not a cupboard item — see the ice piece for the arithmetic.
• One thing you genuinely lack, if the audit found a real gap. A jug if you have none. A tablecloth that fits the extended table rather than the unextended one.

That is usually it. The rest of the money people spend on hosting goes on duplicates of things sitting two feet above their heads.

Borrowing counts

If you are eight short on matching glasses, the options are: buy eight glasses you will use twice a year, or ask the person who is already coming and lives four streets away. Borrowing is not a lesser form of hosting. Mismatched glasses at a full table read as a real evening; sixteen identical rented ones read as a venue.

The only rule about borrowing is to write down what came from whom before the evening starts, because at eleven o'clock nobody remembers whose platter that was, and it lives in your cupboard for a year.

Why this is worth doing once

The audit is genuinely a one-off. Cupboards do not change much. Do it before the next gathering and every gathering after that starts from "here is what I have" rather than "I think I need to go shopping" — which is a different feeling entirely, and a cheaper one.