Cook the Books 2011: The Cakening

Holy frosting, Batman! Who would have guessed that the University of Toronto English Department harbours not one, but TWO virtuosos in the glorious, ancient, and honourable art of making desserts look like other stuff? The annual departmental literature-themed potluck, Cook the Books, was not just about the cakes, of course, but it was hard to escape the wattage of the creative brilliance beaming from not one, but TWO Amazing Cakes. Cook the Books has historically been an excellent opportunity for some of Toronto’s finest literature dweebs professors-in-training to show off their patisserie chops (that is, their mad skillz—not their chops fashioned from cake). This year, however, they truly outdid themselves. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Exhibit One:

Yes, indeedy. That, my friends, is a uterus cake. Or, as its creators entitled it, “A Wonder(aw)ful Cake”, inspired by a scene in Joyce Carol Oates’s deliciously freaky novel, Wonderland:

Twisted geniuses, I salute you. As for whether anyone was brave enough to tuck into the fondant uterus, I couldn’t say. 


Exhibit Two was inspired by a novel that has been alternately hailed as the nineteenth century’s greatest work of fiction, and its most deathly boring: George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Nobody, however, could level the latter accusation at this twenty-first century “cakeover” (that’s a revisioning of a great literary work in the form of a dessert). I give you: Middlemartians.

I think what impressed me most about this one was the way chef captured the slightly prissy pout of Dorothea Brooke, even as she hoists a green frosting ray gun, ready to blast her way through the English countryside, destroying hordes of alien invaders.

As in previous years, contributions overwhelmingly took the form of baked goods, suggesting either that English graduates have a higher than normal proportion of sweet teeth, or that they spend an inordinate amount of time engaged in that favourite grad school activity, procrastibaking (which produces pleasantly smug feelings of wellbeing and a self-satisfying, if illusory, sense of pseudo-maturity, while also providing a convenient distraction from one’s dissertation). Thus, we were treated to: Miltonic Devil’s Food Cake (inspired by Paradise Lost); The Scone Diaries (inspired by Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries); Ladies’ Day Banquet Raspberry Chocolate Chip Almond Flour Scones (from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar); Eat-a-Puss Cupcakes (inspired by the Oedipus Cycle—see picture); Banana Karenina Bread, with apologies to Tolstoy; Oreopagitica, inspired by Milton’s free-speech treatise Aereopagitica (ingredients: Oreos, cream cheese, sugar, baker’s chocolate, eggs, intellectual freedom); a Critique of Pure Raisin and a Critique of Practical Raisin (thanks, Kant); a Clockwork Orange Cake; and a Cold Compote Flan, inspired by Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (“Did I cowdle thee as a mommet for this?”).

Representing for the savoury side of proceedings were my own contribution, Hay and Ham Sandwiches, from Alice in Wonderland (with thanks to Riverdale Farm for the hay); No Country For Old Hen (fried chicken), accompanied by Samuel Taylor Coleslaw; Peter Pan-eer cosying up to Anaïs Naan (the flavours of which more than compensated for the terrible puns); Sister Curry, inspired by Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (“Like the inhabitants of Dreiser’s Chicago, various vegetables mingle and clash in this Thai curry melange, from the hard-working carrot, to the parvenu sugar-snap pea, to the baby corn dilettante”); Phoebe’s Fried Rice, from Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien; an Autobiography of Bread, with thanks to Anne Carson; The Bun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Brie, a tribute to Hemingway; The Remembrance of Things Pasta, or In Search of Lost Thyme (what Proust would have eaten were he not so hung up on those madeleines); and A Brown, Brown Samosa, with apologies to Robbie Burns. This samosa-cooking potlucker even graced us with a re-interpretation of Burns’ “My Love’s Like a Red, Red Rose”:

O, my Luve’s like a brown, brown samosa

That’s newly fried in ghee.

My Luve’s like a cup of chai

That’s sweetly drained by me.

As crisp art thou, my spicy snack,

So deep in luve am I,

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the chutney gang dry.

Then there were The Grapes of Wrath; Pamplemousse (the bitter sweet); Loaf’s Labour’s Lost; The Prince and the Paupcorn; To Brie or Not to Brie; A Red Plum or White Cream (a gastronomic rendering of A Midsummer Night’s Dream); and “spiced dainties, every one,/From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon” from Keats’ The Eve of St Agnes (dates, figs, and Turkish [Lebanese?] delight).

Once again, our game-for-anything English Lit. grads rose to the culinary challenge, and Cook the Books 2011 delivered another banquet of imaginative delicacies. Surveying the bounty, I thought of our comrades in the upper years, approaching the end of their programs, and those who have already left to take up teaching and research posts across America and the globe. We’ll miss their ingenious contributions, but this year’s potluck was heartening evidence that the baton is being passed to a new generation of eager cooks and bakers. If all goes according to plan, I have only two more of these events left to take part in myself. My hope is that the waves of graduates that leave the department each year for adventures in new and unfamiliar faculties will carry this tradition with them, as evangelists of the edible word.