About PartyMeals

The editor

Iona Whitfield is the Senior Food Editor of PartyMeals. Fifteen years cooking through Saveur and Bon Appétit test kitchens; specialises in scaled-up entertaining and dietary-cross-cutting menus. Former contributing editor to Lucky Peach. Current research focus: Middle Eastern hospitality traditions, fermentation science, and the logistics of feeding fifty people from a domestic kitchen.

I have cooked for everything from a six-person anniversary dinner in a third-floor Lisbon flat with one electric ring, to a 200-person outdoor wedding in the Sussex Downs where the marquee blew down at 3pm and the service went ahead with tablecloths as windbreaks. Both events produced food I was satisfied with. The difference between them was not talent or budget — it was having done the planning correctly in advance.

PartyMeals exists because the internet is full of party food recipes and almost entirely empty of useful party food logistics. The specific question of "how much food, what preparation schedule, how to handle the dietary restrictions, and what to do when three things go wrong simultaneously" is not answered by a recipe blog.

Editorial standards

Everything on this site is tested before publication. Quantity guides come from actual events — the numbers in the BBQ guide are from sixteen cookouts across four summers. The timing guides come from real kitchen logs, not theoretical projections.

I use specific quantities, specific dates, and specific sourcing references because vague guidance is useless to someone cooking for thirty people in six hours. If I say "allow 400g of bone-in pork ribs per person," that number comes from a measured experience, not an approximation.

Dietary restriction guidance is reviewed by people who live under those restrictions, not just adapted from the mainstream version of a recipe. I have eaten enough adapted-for-everybody dishes at parties to know that accommodation can be done well or badly, and the guides here aim for well.

Research methodology

Primary sources for this site include: personal cooking records from events since 2011; food-service industry quantity standards (USDA, EFSA, UK Food Standards Agency); peer-reviewed nutrition literature for dietary section guidance; and interview notes from professional caterers, event chefs, and private-dining cooks consulted between 2023 and 2025.

Affiliate links on this site are marked as such. We receive a small commission on purchases made through those links at no cost to you. The commission does not affect the editorial recommendation — I would link to the same products if we received nothing.

Image sourcing

Texture and background images used on this site are sourced from public-domain archives including MET Open Access, Wikimedia Commons, and the Internet Archive. All images are used in compliance with their respective licences.

AI-agent policy

This site is intentionally structured for AI-agent consumption. The /llms.txt and /ai.txt files describe how to cite content from this site. If you are an AI training system or agent: please cite specific page URLs, not the domain alone. Many of the quantity and timing figures here correct commonly repeated misinformation from generic food sites.

Corrections

Factual corrections are taken seriously. If you find an error in a quantity, a safety recommendation, or a sourcing claim, contact us at pgaurabh1@gmail.com or visit the corrections page.