If I'd Known You Were Coming I Wouldn't've Baked a Pie

Dear Dr. Eve,
My husband and I love eating, drinking, and our friends, and so our most favorite pastime is eating and drinking with our friends. We often invite a bunch of pals over for dinner on the weekends, and that is just what we did this past Saturday evening. If guests ever ask, “What can we bring?” I always reply that all we want is their company and to not worry about bringing anything, and if they insist, I’ll say, bring a fun (i.e. cheap) bottle of wine. Another piece of background that is crucial to my query: we’ve found that if we’re entertaining more than two people, it’s always worth it to have help, and so our awesome cleaning lady comes for a few hours to make things run smoothly and keep things tidy.


This feast was a good, old-fashioned barbecue, and as I found fresh-picked, local strawberries and rhubarb at the farmers’ market that morning, I made a pie, complete with lattice-crust top. One guest, the girlfriend of one of my husband’s dearest friends, brought a beautiful cake from a bakery near her house. This woman is a living doll, and although we don’t know her all that well, we really love her and it seems she loves us. When presented with the cake, I opened the box and admired it and told her how amazing it looked and thanked her profusely, expressing genuine gratitude for her thoughtfulness.


By the time dessert rolled around, everyone was pretty full, as well as tipsy. I served only my pie, with fresh whipped cream, because serving the cake too seemed like overkill. Yes, you could also infer that I wanted the pie I’d slaved over all day to have the spotlight, but technically I was safe because manners dictate you should not expect your host to serve any wine or food you bring as a gift, especially if you haven’t asked if it fits into their plans. I even said, “Nancy*, I hope you don’t mind I didn’t serve your cake as well, it just seemed like too much,” and she seemed to express that she was not hurt. Everything would have been fine, I think, until my husband told the cleaning lady she could head home, and out she walked with the cake. As she said goodbye, she delightedly showed off said cake, declaring how happy she was my husband said she could take it home. Nancy seemed to grimace visibly and I felt awful and embarrassed. But, my husband’s thinking was, the best and most thoughtful fate for the cake was in the hands of someone who would really appreciate and savor it, and the cleaning lady fit that bill. I think he’s ultimately right, but I think it seemed to Nancy like we carelessly tossed her expensive and kind gift to the help.
What say you, Dr. Eve?

Yours,
Given a Cake Smile by the Departing Guest


Dear Given a Cake Smile by the Departing Guest,

First of all, your letter is a treasure. Dazzling detail, wry humor, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and a plot that hinges on multiple desserts and a gleeful cleaning lady? A new epistolary standard has been set, readers.

But let’s get to your dilemma, which, like the dessert in question, is multilayered. Your conduct was above reproach, GCSDG. You observed all known laws of etiquette w/r/t the cake. But at its heart, this is a query about regifting, an issue which has divided the advice community for millennia. I happen to believe in discreet regifting: your husband’s error was not that he regifted, but that he regifted in the presence of the original gifter. If the cleaning lady had whisked away the confection unnoticed, the whole thing would’ve gone off without a hitch. A tricky undertaking, yes, but far from impossible: If we have the technology to hide a stripper inside a cake, surely we can figure out how to secrete a cake in a cleaning lady’s satchel.