Personally I always thought I am pretty generous when it comes to (dinner) parties. Always making sure there is enough food and drink for everyone and to everyone’s liking. Recently I have had to admit defeat when it came to organising a dinner party. This one was catered for (bliss) and I was discussing the requirements with the cooks. The mathematics are mind boggling. Once we had decided on the menu, we came to the critical point of deciding on quantity. Having uttered: “seriously? you’re joking right?” a number of times I finally figured it out. You cannot run out of food. It’s not polite. So what you do is the following. Start with the number of people in your household (let’s call it 4). Then add a little to be safe. So we are now 6. Take the number of guests which in this case was 6 and multiply by 3. Ok – we are now looking at 24. Then add a little just to be sure. Right, this party was catered for 28 people. We were 10. The food was splendid, the cakes to die for. But three days later we were, of course, still enjoying the left overs. Except for the cakes, they finished on the night. Funny that…

Dr Natalie Schoon, CFA