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I have potentially life threatening food allergies. If someone lied to me about an ingredient, i.e. raw celery or carrot say, and said there was none when there really was, well, they'd be calling 911 pretty darn quick. It sucks to have food allergies.

Well I think the author covered that - don't slip in ingredients that will harm someone's health. I think most good hostesses inquire about allergies prior to cooking. If not, I'm sure you've gotten accustomed to asking. That does suck!

But I have a friend who will not try anything new, never. But if you sneak it in there, she'll eventually agree that she loves it. She wouldn't try avocado for 10 years...now it's her favorite food!

I try to know as much about my guests' likes and dislikes, allergies, etc. before I prepare something. I will change my plan to accomodate a few. That's just the way I am.

It's going out to eat with people who have food issues that can be more stressful because I like to go to places where everyone just orders stuff and we share. Sounds simple enough, but it doesn't always end up simple.

I remember when she addressed this at Chow. The comment are interesting:
http://www.chow.com/stories/10896

She always gets torn to pieces by the commenters. There really are some piranhas out there, but sometimes she does display some odd judgment.

"But the real reason for my dismay was that when you let someone feed you, it’s an act of trust, and when he or she announces there is something you don’t like in the food, you feel betrayed. You feel infantilized...

That said, I don’t think it’s wrong to hide ingredients in dishes, provided you’re not violating a guest’s religious or ethical beliefs or triggering potentially life-threatening allergies.

...Nor should you feel guilty about compromising your friend’s South Beach Diet, even though you explicitly promised not to do so. At the last moment, you had to choose between keeping your promise and a properly emulsified and balanced sauce. You quite rightly chose the latter."

Intuitively, I don't think most of us would agree that a properly emulsified sauce is more important than a promise to a friend.

And unless you have to feed this picky eater every day, why not simply choose a dish that won't risk upsetting her or him? Or at least provide an option?

I solve this problem by never befriending picky eaters!

I agree with the article on the fact that sneaking foods that are against one's ethics is egregious. As I found out recently, back when I was vegan, my sister used to sneak milk into my coffee telling me that it was a non-dairy creamer. She did it because she thought she knew best what I needed. I was not amused.

Yeah I'm a vegetarian, and it won't kill me, but if something is cooked with chicken broth I'll get sick or queasy from it. I usually feel ill and then find out later that a hidden ingredient was the culprit. People think if it's not a slab of steak, then it's ok to feed a vegetarian but that's not the case.

I love to entertain, and I always ask "do you have any food restrictions or sensitivities?" before I plan a meal.

Once while eating at a restaurant, my friend was brought to tears when the waiter served her breaded fish instead of grilled. She breaks out in a terrible rash from a wheat allergy. A co-worker of mine is allergic to peanuts, which cause her esophagus to close. As a long time vegetarian, I have gotten sick from eating greasy diner food that was probably cooked in lard. Gross.

Here's the other side of the coin. I have a parent who is a picky eater. No food allergies or ethical restrictions, just a whiner. He has been monopolizing family meals for his whole life. One Thanksgiving I prepared separate dishes without any ingredients that would offend a picky eater. After hours of extra work, those dishes were left untouched because the fully seasoned versions "looked better." I consider that to be a betrayal of trust. No more special treatment. I'll give a full disclosure like: there are mushrooms in the salad, so you'll have to pick around them. Or, I'd love to have you and mom come for dinner, but I'm not making anything special for you.

I've been a vegetarian for decades, and I usually eat with omnivores. I am really fine with skipping something if it's made with meat--I will not starve, and I usually say nothing because I HATE having any attention drawn to it. 99% of the time this is just fine. Now and then someone decides it's funny not to tell me that something was fried in duckfat or includes chicken broth, and the gastric distress later is quite real.

I had a friend (long since dumped) who was very proud of her cooking but very prone to "sneaking" me things. I had my revenge by telling everyone I kept getting food poisoning from her cooking, and that's why I was turning down her invitations. I might have implied she wasn't much of a hand washer...

Like CleanSimple, my sister has food allergies to die for: she is morbidly allergic to honey, also wasp and bee venom. Last week at a party she drank a few sips of white wine and within minutes stopped breathing.

Quick action by her husband, the EMTs, hospital staff saved her life. Turns out there was wasp venom in the WINE! It is not uncommon for bees and wasps to get caught up in the wine-making process. It was a young wine; apparently in old wines the alcohol will eventually neutralized the venom. (How old---that's a good question.)

This was a huge surprise to her, and an extreme example, but imagine if she asked about honey in a dish, and the cook didn't think about honey-roasted peanuts or honey in salad dressing. Needless to say, she rarely eats anywhere except at home. And she won't be drinking any more wine.

I think an example of this where it might be acceptable is with your immediate family. I read a comment once where a womans husband hated beans, so when a soup called for them she added them in a pureed form so they weren't recognizable and he loved the soup. Same with these recent cookbooks where there's broccoli in the brownies (although that seems like taking things too far to me). In these cases you are simply serving food, you haven't lied and said no there are no beans in the soup but instead said hey I made this great soup for dinner tonight. As a kid I can tell you that I hated cooked onions, raw green onions were OK but cooked never (I didn't like the slimy texture). When the onions were big I saw them and picked them out and my mom never lied to me if I asked if they were in there but its not like she said at the beginning of each meal, this contains three of your hated ingredients. When the onions were minced I probably never noticed them, because what doesn't have onions? So don't lie but non-disclosure is entirely different. That being said this is no way applies to vegetarians or people with food allergies, the only exception is picky eaters who are free to bring their McDonald's to the table as far as I'm concerned, it only makes them look bad.

Personally, I'll accommodate preferences and allergies whenever possible, and warn people when it's not. I tend to be the odd one who brings an ingredients list to potlucks. I'm also so used to having potlucks with vegetarians that most of my potluck dishes are vegetarian and many are vegan--and easy to modify to take something out if I find out ahead of time. I know too many people with food allergies to be comfortable with "secret" ingredients.

What I really dislike is when no one says anything until the time of the meal, and then tells you that they can't/won't eat whatever. It is a mutual responsibility. Those with food restrictions are always welcome to bring something of their own over, or to ask (politely) for something special--just let me know ahead of time!

A friend of ours is a picky eater. No allergies or ethical issues here. He just doesn't like a lot of foods - especially spicy foods. He's one of our closest friends so he is always invited whenever we have a a dinner party, so I feel very restricted in what foods I can serve at those parties. Indian is out. Chinese is out. Mexican is out. I have to stick to American and European dishes.

However, this friend is starting to show cracks in his resolve. For example, he came over to hang out one afternoon recently. I had just baked some pumpkin bread. "I don't like pumpkin bread," he said .... and then proceeded to eat two slices. When I asked why, he said it was because he really likes my cooking and he figured that if *I* made it, it was worth a try. I'm sure it helped that my husband and I were happily eating it in front of him. Peer pressure is alive & well! ;)

Since that day I've been subtly introducing a few things to him at our dinner parties and he has been pleasantly surprised most of the time. I've never lied about the food & I've taken the position that if he doesn't want to eat it, then he can just push it aside and have an extra helping of dessert. It has worked pretty well so far. Maybe sometime in the next year I'll introduce him to chicken korma. A gal can dream!

One thing you could try, Nougat, is to make the Mexican or other spicy food--say, enchiladas--but serve it with two or three substantial side dishes so that your friend can fill up on those if he doesn't want the main dish. This is generally what I do with vegetarian guests because I think that's preferable to cooking something specially for them; the vegetarians I've known don't want me to go to extra trouble and they don't like being the odd one out who gets a different entree from everybody else. It seems like a shame that you're so restricted in what you can serve at your parties. And I bet he would feel bad about it if he knew.

I'm pretty vocal about my food preferences when I know someone else is going to be cooking for me. I figure, we all have things we'd prefer not to eat, and it's not hard to leave out cilantro or feta or choose a dish where those ingredients aren't the centerpiece and I make the same consideration when cooking for others, as well.

I hold a book club at my apartment once a month where I cook (this is my secret reason for starting the club, hehe). One of my friends is a vegetarian for health reasons so I often end up making two dishes since I don't plan ahead very well. However, I draw the line at the raw food thing she was doing for a while. I don't know how to "cook" it, I don't have even a quarter of the ingredients (what the h*** are liquid aminos?) and I'm not interested in it myself nor are the other guests. I served hearty salads when she was doing that, but I'm awfully greatful she's eating cooked food again.

I NEVER lie about what's in a recipe because someone might be asking for food allergy reasons. If they're know to be picky eaters, I'll see if I can get them to just try it, just this once. Or I'll just cut it up too small for them to see. Another friend hates the texture of cooked onion but if it's pureed in the sauce she likes the flavor just fine, go figure. She actually thanked me a couple of weeks ago for helping to expand her food horizons. Now THAT gave me the warm fuzzies!

Having fought a losing battle with my weight for years, I try not to sabotage anyone else's diet but I don't try to avoid creating temptation, either. Dessert is my favorite thing to make and guests mean I can try a new recipe for chocolate flan or ricotta fritters and have the stuff for a quick cake on hand if it flops.

When I first read this post, I was on the side of "it's okay to sneak a little as long as it's safe", but now that I've spent some time thinking about it, I'm not. It seems to me that the purpose of eating together with friends shouldn't be to show off whatever fancy dish you just learned, but to feed your friends. I'm sure there are situations where I'd feel an exception is in order -- like a meal planned for many people and one picky eater who can remove hated mushrooms from the salad, or a very particular person you eat with every day -- but in general, if you know in advance about a strong dislike, it seems rude and counter-productive to to conviviality to ignore that.

I also think it behooves the guest to try the dish in question (assuming this is a simple matter of preference, not a medical or ethical consideration) before rejecting it out of hand. (Isn't that just good manners?)

RebeccaCT: I'm not sure I know what you meant by "I know too many people with food allergies to be comfortable with 'secret' ingredients." Do you feel like you're "outing" someone with food allergies because they don't have a severe immediate reaction to something you cooked with secret ingredients? If that's what you meant, that's a really scary attitude to have. Maybe you know people who mask their pickiness by claiming to have an allergy, but there are those of us with legitimate and severe allergies who rely on the kindness of their friends to be honest with them when dining together.

@Danio--I think you're reading the comment backwards. I took it to mean she's uncomfortable w/"secret" ingredients because of the danger of feeding an allergic person something problematic.

yes, i think you're right, cmcinnyc! Sorry for getting on my soapbox for no reason.