That's you on that plate, offering your pretensions and aspirations, your skills and sacrifices for all to see. Fear of exposure has driven some cooks to high peaks of achievement, and led others to fantasize about leaping into the Cuisinart. If you talk to the veterans about the dishes they have served and eaten over the decades, the conversations usually begin with nostalgia and funny stories, then soon give way to anxiety and even aggression. People might invite company to their homes in order to belong, but often, they cook to win.

This seems to be one of those dilemmas of democracy. Americans think that they don't believe in class distinctions, but they are actually afraid of being thought low class. In places like Italy and France, we consider the food of the people to be healthful, esthetically pleasing and even profound. But the food of our people can be embarrassing. Let's face it: Too often, it contains canned cream of mushroom soup.

There was, of course, a time when such dishes were acceptable for company. This period, which followed the Second World War, was, not coincidentally, one of the most democratic moments of our history. The late 1940's and early 50's were a time of hardly any servants, and a lot of wives who weren't used to having their husbands at home. Women's magazines and cookbooks were written for a nation of newlyweds. (''Even a nice husband is rarely useful in preparing vegetables,'' McCall's maintained in 1948.) They sought to assure their readers that canned and frozen foods were yet another marvel of modern life.

But for most cooks, opening cans and thawing things were not enough. An impression had to be made. One answer was to spend money on ingredients guests would recognize as expensive, which explains one magazine's recipe for fresh lobster meat topped with a can of tomato soup. Another was to make dishes that showed that the meal was prepared laboriously, if not well. Molded gelatin salads, with ingredients that ranged from bologna to ginger ale (see recipe), were a great example. The hard part of a molded salad is the unmolding. One friend recalled being first relieved when a complex creation came out of the mold in one piece, then horrified when, like an irradiated movie monster, it oozed off the plate into an opened kitchen drawer, coating the cutlery.

The 50's also brought a vogue for semiexotic dishes. By then, beef stroganoff had transformed ordinary stew, which had never been a meal for company, into a socially acceptable dish - just by adding sour cream, itself a relatively new ingredient. Swedish meatballs had become a staple of the buffet table, somewhere between the turkey at one end and the ham at the other. And the craze for things Californian had popularized the avocado, the decade's ''new'' fruit.

In the history of the postwar dinner party, the watershed came in 1961. In that year, Jacqueline Kennedy became the new First Lady and made pretentiousness far more socially acceptable than it had been, and ''Mastering the Art of French Cooking'' by Julia Child, with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, was published. The book, along with Child's television series, ''The French Chef,'' introduced Americans to sophisticated cooking techniques, and made many complicated recipes comprehensible for the first time.

The world of the 60's was divided between those who mixed flour and water for a gravy and those who made a roux to start the sauce. Stew in yet another guise - boeuf bourguignon - was both fancier and heartier than the earlier stroganoff version. But the definitive dish of the pretentious 60's was another retread, a 50's favorite in couture crust: Beef Wellington, even today, provides memories to savor over your oat bran.

Food has since become so fashionable that it's easy to forget that those cooks of the 60's who came into Julia Child's fold believed that they had transcended style and found truth. At the time, this led to some social tensions. Those who were opening cans felt intimidated by those who were laboriously pushing stuff through sieves - and, in truth, those doing the real cooking did feel morally superior. Preparing difficult food was a very useful way of making social and cultural distinctions. If the ''can-openers'' feared inviting the ''wire-whiskers,'' it was probably all for the best anyway.

Still, for some the spirit of informality held on in the form of such participatory cuisine as fondue, which involved sticking bread into molten cheese, or strawberries into liquid chocolate. The worst involved chunks of raw beef cooked, like martyrs, in boiling oil. But, as one friend put it, this was a way to invite company, ''and have fonduing it.''

There were several key developments in the 70's. The food processor, first introduced in 1973, began to catch on, and soon it became possible to attend a dinner party in which every dish had been beaten to a pulp. Meanwhile, nouvelle cuisine had undermined seemingly inviolable French cooking traditions, and unleashed a parade of fashions into the world. Hostesses, for instance, faced the problem of how to make a piece of salmon, a parsnip puree and three bonsai carrots somehow evoke a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Since then, the trends have come almost too fast to count. Kitchen cupboards are now filled with lemon grass, fermented black beans, sun-dried tomatoes, Mexican peppers, bulgur and kasha. Refrigerators are crowded with greens and fruits few people had seen fresh, or even heard of, 30 years ago. Even Amish farmers have hitched onto the pesto bandwagon. In 1983, the plain people of Lancaster County, Pa., started planting whole fields of basil for commercial sale, becoming part of a move by Italian food promoters to bring their products to the forefront of American home cooking.

On the other hand, it's possible these days to be served a postmodern meat loaf, which is defined by the possible presence of veal and the certainty of self-consciousness. Such a dish is an expression of shared references to a time when hosts would never have dreamed of serving meat loaf to company. Still, we stop short of topping it with a tomato-soup sauce. That would be authentic food of the people. You have to draw the line somewhere. GINGER ALE SALAD (Adapted from ''Carolyn Coggins' Company Cookbook,''

Doubleday, 1954.) 2 envelopes unflavored gelatin 1/2 cup grapefruit juice 1/2 cup sugar syrup (see note) 1/4 cup orange juice 1 teaspoon lemon juice 2 cups ginger ale Pinch of salt 1/2 cup drained cherries 1 cup grapefruit sections 1 cup orange sections Iceberg lettuce for garnish Mayonnaise for garnish.

1.> In the top of a double boiler over medium heat, combine the gelatin with the grapefruit juice and stir to dissolve the gelatin.

2.> Remove from the heat. Add the sugar syrup, orange juice, lemon juice, ginger ale and the salt. Stir well. Chill until slightly thickened. Add the cherries and the grapefruit and orange sections.

3.> Pour and spoon into one lightly oiled six-cup mold or six individual one-cup molds. Chill until firm, about one to two hours. Unmold and serve on a bed of lettuce. Top each serving with a dollop of the mayonnaise.

Yield:> Six one-cup servings.

Note:> To make sugar syrup, combine one cup sugar and one cup boiling water.