Instructions: Any day now, little innocent you will end up at an office party standing next to a cold-cut platter paved with rosy slices of bologna, salami and ham. Having nothing better to do, you will pluck a slice out of the neatly arranged wheel, fold it up and pop it whole into your mouth.

This will be an unpremeditated act. Nobody really intends at a celebratory event to eat lunch meat identical to what is in the company cafeteria. But we do. Its as uncontrollable as hiccupping.

As this wretched year draws to a close, we all deserve parties that feature costly, teensy crab cakes or la-di-da beef thingies on bamboo sticks - not discs of ground-up, extruded, fatty meat substances mixed with sodium nitrate and other chemicals, interspersed with cubes of processed cheese, olives, parsley and a radish or two.

Indeed, people in high places (shall I mention the name of a certain someone who lives in a white house in Washington?) are exhorting Americans to live large by spending money on expensive hors doeuvres - well, thats what I take him to mean. In this way, we are supposed to get our lives back to normal.

Caterers the nation over, however, say this isnt going to happen. This holiday season, companies are paring down office parties - what with memories of Sept. 11, the downturn in the economy and free-floating anxiety about anybody bearing a sharp or powdery object.

Alas, it seems cold cuts will be escorting us into 2002.

Lets try to make the best of this situation by examining the deli platters upsides, downsides, origins and uses through decades of holiday parties.

Where did they come from?

No, not Ohio.

James T. Ehler, a food historian who lives in Key West, Fla., guesses that cold-cut platters evolved from the Italian antipasto, which also includes smoked and cured meats. In fact, these days, incorporating roasted peppers and other elements of Italian cuisine on a cold-cut platter is considered upscale, according to Ivy Goldspiel, director of Catered Too in San Jose.

But the words cold cut and the platter style were adopted in England as long ago as the 16 th century, says Ehler.

The first course, or antepast as they call it, is some fine meat to urge them to have an appetite, says the Harleian Miscellany, a collection of scarce, curious and entertaining pamphlets from 1590 found in the library of Edward Harley, the second Earl of Oxford.

American evolution

Back in the United States, lunch-meat plates big enough to squash a cat flat first began finding eager audiences in the 20 th century. In the 1930s, Prohibition was repealed, and Americans could drink out in the open. Appetizers that soaked up some of the alcohol became competitive, spawning Martha Stewarts who fiddled with food. In her book Fashionable Food, Sylvia Algren notes that a 1938 issue of American Home magazine recommended spiffing up appetizers by serving them in a dustpan. Another tip was to rescue celery and olives from dullness by serving them in fascinating galvanized iron chicken feeders with their neat little rows of oval holes.

The cocktail parties of the 1950s took playing with appetizers further with dips, cheese balls and ways to gussy up what was by then becoming the beloved cold cut. The bologna cake was an affair that used cream cheese to glue cold cuts into a tower. This clearly was the precursor to tall, stacked food - the potatoes on top of the vegetable, the meat on top of that - that recently was all the rage in fancy restaurants. And how could we forget the ribald cocktail lily, which is bologna given a Georgia OKeeffe treatment?

Low-maintenance

Aside from their malleability and craftability, cold cuts are an obvious choice for hurried hosts or hostesses because they dont wilt and dont need a bed of ice or a steam tray to remain edible.

And, with a platter, you can hit most of the food groups: meat slices fanned out like a slippery deck of cards atop kale, which sidles up to vegetables and cheese slices or cubes. Toss in a side tray with small buns and a vat of mustard and youre offering a meal that doesnt require a fork. Its magic!

Although pastrami will raise costs, it almost goes without saying that a cold-cut platter is cheaper than oysters, shrimp or crab, which require forks and cannot be formed into cute cakes.

Despite all this, professional caterers cant get excited by cold-cut platters. If you had told me three years ago that Id be doing so many cold-cut platters this year, Id have laughed at you. Honestly, Im telling people who order them from high-end caterers to go to Togos - unless, of course, you want a real tray instead of a plastic one, says Goldspiel of Caterers Too.

The only recourse this holiday season is surrender. After all, the uncontrollable eating of cold cuts is about as normal and American as it gets.

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