Since moving to Toronto a year and a half ago, I have been an enthusiastic convert to many great North American traditions, not least that of the potluck. (Now that I think of it, most of these traditions are culinary—Thanksgiving, Bloody Caesars, sweet potato fries, chicken wings, and the disconcertingly named “ranch dip”, which always reminds me a little too much of “cattle dip” to be really appealing.)
For the uninitiated, a potluck is a dinner to which each attendee brings a dish to share with the group. It’s a homey, sharing, warm n’ fuzzy kind of way to get to know folks. Each year, the English Department at the University of Toronto holds a potluck attended by faculty and graduate students, an opportunity for much hilarious punnery, and to show off your cooking and/or literary chops (so to speak—told you the puns were good).
Needless to say, this event is right up my proverbial alley. I’ve now attended two of these, and both times have been astounded by the wit, culinary skills, and interpretative and imaginative capacity of my colleagues. Following is a sampler of this year’s menu, in no particular order:
• Milton in the Age of Fish: Paradise Lox, Salmon Agonistes (John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes)
• A Modest Pie (aka Chicken Pot Pie), inspired by Jonathon Swift’s charming paedophagic* tract, “A Modest Proposal”
• Potato Salad to throw at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism (Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”)
• Cucumber Sandwiches, ordered especially for Aunt Augusta (Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest)
• Julius Caesar Salad (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)
• Cheese (inspired by Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey: “Let’s make away with the cheese”)
• Beans and Nothingness (inspired by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness)
• The Sound and the Curry (William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury)
• Stew (inspired by Charles Bukowski’s poem “stew”)
• Assorted Fruit (Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”)
• Areopagiticupcakes (John Milton’s Areopagitica)
• Skittles (D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow)
• Brito-Tarts (inspired by Britomart, the female warrior of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Caption: “BE BOLD. But not too bold.”)
• Plover’s Eggs (Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited)
• Cocoa-nut Cakes (Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South)
• Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Brownies
• Miss Kilman’s Chocolate Éclair (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway)
• Gruel—a.k.a. rice pudding (Dickens’s Oliver Twist)
• Frites (nostalgique et patriote), Roland Barthes’ Mythologies
• Mrs Lovett’s Pies (Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
• Waiting for Gouda (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
* Paedophagia: the practice of eating babies.
The submission that really took the cake was this one—an Anatomy of Criticism cake (in honour of the Department’s most illustrious alumnus, Northrop Frye):
To my eternal shame and regret, this is the only dish I managed to get a picture of; as it’s taken with my cellphone camera, the quality isn’t great, but the cake-making wunderkind tells me that the “sections” represent the five ages of literature as suggested in Frye’s Anatomy:
Myth
Romance
High Mimetic
Low Mimetic
Irony
(The jam you see spouting from piggy's severed head, however, represents jam. Just jam.)
For the uninitiated, a potluck is a dinner to which each attendee brings a dish to share with the group. It’s a homey, sharing, warm n’ fuzzy kind of way to get to know folks. Each year, the English Department at the University of Toronto holds a potluck attended by faculty and graduate students, an opportunity for much hilarious punnery, and to show off your cooking and/or literary chops (so to speak—told you the puns were good).
Needless to say, this event is right up my proverbial alley. I’ve now attended two of these, and both times have been astounded by the wit, culinary skills, and interpretative and imaginative capacity of my colleagues. Following is a sampler of this year’s menu, in no particular order:
• Milton in the Age of Fish: Paradise Lox, Salmon Agonistes (John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes)
• A Modest Pie (aka Chicken Pot Pie), inspired by Jonathon Swift’s charming paedophagic* tract, “A Modest Proposal”
• Potato Salad to throw at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism (Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”)
• Cucumber Sandwiches, ordered especially for Aunt Augusta (Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest)
• Julius Caesar Salad (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)
• Cheese (inspired by Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey: “Let’s make away with the cheese”)
• Beans and Nothingness (inspired by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness)
• The Sound and the Curry (William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury)
• Stew (inspired by Charles Bukowski’s poem “stew”)
• Assorted Fruit (Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”)
• Areopagiticupcakes (John Milton’s Areopagitica)
• Skittles (D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow)
• Brito-Tarts (inspired by Britomart, the female warrior of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Caption: “BE BOLD. But not too bold.”)
• Plover’s Eggs (Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited)
• Cocoa-nut Cakes (Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South)
• Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Brownies
• Miss Kilman’s Chocolate Éclair (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway)
• Gruel—a.k.a. rice pudding (Dickens’s Oliver Twist)
• Frites (nostalgique et patriote), Roland Barthes’ Mythologies
• Mrs Lovett’s Pies (Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
• Waiting for Gouda (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
* Paedophagia: the practice of eating babies.
The submission that really took the cake was this one—an Anatomy of Criticism cake (in honour of the Department’s most illustrious alumnus, Northrop Frye):
To my eternal shame and regret, this is the only dish I managed to get a picture of; as it’s taken with my cellphone camera, the quality isn’t great, but the cake-making wunderkind tells me that the “sections” represent the five ages of literature as suggested in Frye’s Anatomy:Myth
Romance
High Mimetic
Low Mimetic
Irony
(The jam you see spouting from piggy's severed head, however, represents jam. Just jam.)
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