Oh yes. Summer is finally, emphatically here, and with it my birthday. (Here in crazy, upside-down and back-to-front Canada, my birthday comes at the beginning of summer, instead of in the middle of winter. I know! Weird, eh?) And to celebrate? White anchovies--or, as the Spanish say (much more glamorously, to my ear) boquerones en vinagre. These silvery, soft, melt-in-your-mouth morsels could only have come from that bastion of culinary genius, with its intuitive appreciation of simplicity, Spain. They bear only a passing family resemblance to their brown, hairy, gritty cousins, because they are deboned before being pickled in vinegar, rather than packed in salt; the two kinds of anchovies, both wonderful in their way, are completely different beasts. The vinegar both softens and whitens boquerones; it produces an ethereal anchovy experience. One Chowhounder has described them as "fish candy", and really, they are that addictive. Ever since I found a supply in Toronto (at Scheffler's Deli in the always-wondrous St Lawrence Market), I've kept a container in the fridge for surreptitious snacking. I am an aficionado of pickled and preserved fish of all kinds--Danish rollmops, Thai shrimp paste, and especially salt cod--but this might well be my all time favourite. No wonder I decided to make my birthday present to myself out of it. Who needs cake? ¡Viva los boquerones!
Birthday Salad
Serves 2 as an appetizer or light main
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil 1 tbsp red wine vinegar salt and pepper 6 loosely-packed cups rocket (baby arugula) 12 white anchovies 100g chevre (soft goat’s cheese) ½ medium red onion, thinly sliced ½ medium fennel bulb, trimmed and thinly sliced 50g roasted red pepper strips (optional) Chive flowers (optional)
Whisk the oil and vinegar in a bowl and season. Toss the arugula, onion, and fennel in the dressing; pile onto plates. Top with the pepper strips and anchovies, and crumble the cheese in large chunks over the salad. Use scissors to roughly snip chive flowers over, and drizzle with a little extra dressing, if desired. Serve with fresh crusty bread, a glass of chilled rosé wine, or (as in Spain) a glass of icy cold beer.
“Heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives! You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."
—Colonel Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), whose troops opposed the ill-fated ANZAC landing at Gallipolli in 1915, in a memorial dedication speech in 1934
I don't generally “do” patriotism, in the ideological sense, and I don't usually get misty-eyed over Anzac Day, a day of remembrance and a public holiday that commemorates the soldiers of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps who fell at Gallipoli in 1915. Like many young Australians, particularly those who don't have (or never met) a family member who fought in the World Wars, Anzac Day makes me think first and foremost—and this is not to my credit—of barbecuing and menu planning rather than Aussie diggers and their seemingly remote, if nonetheless deeply appreciated, sacrifices. (Apparently, to a significant number of my compatriots Anzac Day is all about some AFL grudge match, but how this can possibly be more important than the barbecuing part, I fail to understand.)
I always think with affection of the Anzac Day backyard barbecue, an end-of-summer ritual which takes full advantage of the public holiday and the last balmy days before the cold sets in, to bring together friends, food, and copious amounts of beer and wine. Truth be told, there is usually very little sober remembrance involved in these events; they tend to be more about celebration—of sunshine, friendship, being alive—than commemoration. But this year in chilly Toronto, there was no real Anzac Day celebration for us; we had a big Easter Sunday dinner with friends, and that felt like excess enough for the weekend. Despite the fact that I’ve never really thought too much about Anzac Day before, it seemed odd to think it would pass me by this year without being marked at all. It felt a little bit too much like letting go of something, or forgetting something that used to be important to me.
I remembered when I was a teenager first learning to bake, and how one of the first things I made successfully (because they're pretty much impossible to mess up) was Anzac biscuits—chewy, rugged, golden rounds of goodness that the mothers and wives left at home used to send over to the diggers in the trenches of Europe during the First World War. There is something incredibly homely and even maternal about these biscuits. They certainly ain't fancy. They are a sweet, buttery, satisfying treat that is also economical to make, and a nutritional powerhouse—just what a mother would give a child who needed the comfort of sugar, but also bodily sustenance. My own Anzac biscuit recipe was one of the first I ever called my own; it was adapted, of course, from the basic list of ingredients (it's generally agreed that the biscuits must include oats, golden syrup, and desiccated coconut), but with a few additions that made it uniquely mine. I was proud of my Anzac biscuits. It was my first ever specialty, and possibly the first dish that gave me that overwhelming sense of achievement, that high you get when a dish comes off just as you imagined it, that is like crack cocaine to people who love to cook.
I stopped making them, though, for some reason, and this year I came to the shocking realization that I haven’t made Anzac biscuits since I was about fourteen. My prized recipe, that I knew off by heart, has disappeared from my memory. It probably wasn’t that special anyway, and I doubt the annals of culinary history will mourn its loss, but I wanted to see if I still had the touch—especially since, after that one early triumph and after all these years of practice, I’m still a pretty lousy baker. So I determined to try again. They came out beautifully, like sunshine on a cold, grey day, warming my cold Toronto kitchen and filling the house with the fragrance of home. The recipe I used follows.
My youthful innovations notwithstanding, the authenticity of the Anzac bickie recipe is ferociously defended. (And may God forgive you if you blaspheme the honourable name of Anzac by Americanising them to “cookies”. Just ask Allen Williams, a US food blogger who was subjected to the wrath of his readers and forced to amend his post when he tried that little joke on. Indeed, the enshriners of the Anzac biscuit into law—see below—make particular reference to the fact that an "Anzac cookie" is, by definition, a contradiction in terms.)
The fast food chain Subway also got a taste of the famous Anzac spirit in 2008, when their Australian outlets started peddling something claiming to be an Anzac biscuit. The term “ANZAC” is legally protected, as is, in fact, the definition of the biscuit itself, which “must remain basically true to the original recipe” (though I’d be interested to see if anyone can in fact point to an original, definitive, Ur-recipe). Subway’s faux-Anzacs differed so substantially from the real thing that the Department of Veteran’s Affairs decided to sic the lawyers, and actually ordered global corporate giant Subway to either make the damn biscuits properly, or cease selling them altogether. Subway’s American suppliers apparently couldn’t produce them cheaply enough for Subway using the original recipe—which is pretty revealing, given that this recipe, whose main ingredients are rolled oats, flour, and brown sugar, was developed by working-class women during the food shortages and inflated prices of World War One—and they were forthwith dropped from the menu. For myself, I can only regard the Veterans’ Affairs’ intervention in this matter as a triumphant victory for real food and the preservation of culinary heritage, and I applaud them wholeheartedly. (Is this about as close as Aussies get to a European/D.O.C.-style food quality protection system?) If Subway learned one thing from this debacle it was the strength of feeling that attends treasured culinary tradition, especially one so closely linked in the national consciousness with contemporary Australian identity and the suffering and sacrifice that forged it. As the World Wars recede from the popular imagination into history, and many of those who participated in even the Second World War begin to pass on, we may not be thinking so much about the men and women who fought and died, and the (mostly women) who tried to bring comfort through food to loved ones on the other side of the world. We may be collectively guilty of turning Anzac Day into an excuse for a bit of nationalistic lip-service before getting down to the real business of eating and drinking (okay, and football). But we know one thing. Don't be messing with our Anzac biscuits.
Anzac Biscuits
1 cup of plain flour
1 cup of rolled oats (old-fashioned, not instant)
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup desiccated (dried) coconut (unsweetened, medium-ground)
1½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tbsp boiling water
120 grams butter
2 tbsp golden syrup*
Makes roughly 24 biscuits
Preheat oven to 180C (approximately 375F). Line two baking sheets with baking parchment. Combine the oats, flour, sugar, and coconut in a large bowl and mix well.
Combine the syrup and butter in a small saucepan and melt slowly together. Combine the bicarbonate and boiling water in a small bowl, and then stir into golden syrup mixture.
Now combine all the ingredients and mix well. The mixture should be moist but not gloopy, and hold together well. Add a few drops of water if too dry, or a touch more flour if too wet. (This is why Anzacs are so difficult to mess up—simply adjust until you get it right!) Dollop large teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto trays, well spaced apart. (Yes, just a teaspoon—this is no gigantic American cookie, but a modest, snack-sized biscuit.) You can flatten the dollops to make them thin, but I prefer my biscuits chewy rather than crunchy, so I make them somewhat thicker. This is a matter of preference. Whatever you do, don't make them too neat—they're supposed to be craggy and interesting-looking (as far as I'm concerned, anyway).
Bake for 10-12 minutes, until golden. Cool on a rack and store in an airtight container; the biscuits stay chewy for a few days, but are perfectly good for up to two weeks.
Crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside.
* Apparently golden syrup can be difficult to find in North America, though I had no trouble locating it in the baking section of my local No Frills. If you’re not so lucky, you could try substituting light molasses, or go Canadian with maple syrup—this was going to be my Plan B if I couldn’t get golden. If you do get your hands on some, you must, must, MUST try making golden syrup dumplings—this is what good Australians are given to eat when they get to heaven. Here’s the recipe from one of Australia’s grand dames of cooking, Maggie Beer: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/cookandchef/txt/s1679273.htm
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 literaturedweebs 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. Your Honours, 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). Ladies and gents, 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 self-satisfactory grown-up-ness, 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.
Warning: the following post contains graphic food porn images. Vegetarians should look away now.
The Turducken chef.
The money shot.
Turducken Deconstructed.
* A chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey, all stuffed with stuffing. North American festive dish. Its rise to prominence in the last decade is thought by scholars to be a manifestation of the tendency to excess that generally accompanies imperial decline, and/or the End of Days.
I’m a Cabbagetowner, and have been a Jet Fuel devotee for a couple of years now, but on my first visit to the Rooster on Broadview Avenue, I vowed to start making the freezing ten-minute bike ride across the Don Valley more often. Don’t get me wrong, Jet Fuel is great—I’m especially appreciative that they never look askance at my spending a couple of hours there on the strength of a three-dollar coffee—but it’s a very different beast from the Rooster. The ‘Fuel is the Anthony Bourdain to the Rooster’s Nigella Lawson, if you will; the Arcade Fire to the Rooster’s Colleen Brown. As a grad student, I spend a significant amount of my time in cafes, and while Jet Fuel’s take-no-prisoners, rock-n-roll, sex-drugs-and-caffeine approach is fun, it can be wearing, and not especially conducive to concentration. So across the valley to the Rooster I rode one afternoon, feet frozen to the pedals, to try my luck with the new fowl in town.
The first thing I noticed was the vibe. I consider myself a Jet Fuel regular (I visit on average twice a week) and I’m sure the staff recognise me, but not once have we exchanged more than half-sentences—our interactions usually consist of me being barked at, and then having to shout a coffee order over screamingly loud music. That’s just the Jet Fuel way. I don’t mind it, though I can see how newcomers find it intimidating. If you leave the queue to find a table after ordering your coffee, no-one will deliver it to you. Your order will be shouted across the room a few times and then considered abandoned. Once, when the wifi wasn’t working, I went up to the counter to ask for help, and was met with nary a shrug. The message? We’re busy making kickass coffee and listening to kickass music. Nothing else matters, pal.
How different at the Rooster. The coffee is pricier--$3.75 (tax in) for a cup of latte to Jet Fuel’s eternally-reasonable and generally-reliable $3 monster-latte—but as soon as I arrived I was feeling…what’s that sensation again? Oh yes—I felt welcomed. Having problems with the wifi? A staff member will help you out until the problem is fixed. A little friendly but unobtrusive banter with your coffee? Can do.
My coffee was decent—strong, rich, if slightly burnt-tasting—but what really makes the Rooster crow are the details. To wit: three separate (full!) jugs of cool water, one plain, one with orange slices, one with cucumber slices; gorgeous brown stoneware cups and saucers that remind me of my mother’s 1970s dinnerware; beautifully executed patterns in the crema (there ain’t many folk calling themselves baristas who can actually do this); and high-quality snackables—lemon squares, butter tarts, Danishes etc, plus tasty-sounding gourmet sandwiches for $8—another big score against the JF, whose snackables, while homemade, delicious, and well-priced, are inevitably sold out by 11am. Perhaps the highlight of my visit was when I accidentally dropped a blob of butter tart filling into a cup of hot apple cider, thus inadvertently creating a steaming caramel-apple wunderdrink that could only possibly have been improved by the addition of some kind of booze (suggestions welcome). Big, comfy, squashy chocolate leather armchairs; great, chilled-out music (no raging against this espresso machine, thank you very much); and lovely wooden benches along the front window, the perfect size and height for getting some work done whilst enjoying the view a view over Riverdale Park to the city highrises and the setting sun. What’s more, they will make your coffee the way you want it. After hearing the girl in front of me order it, I was emboldened to try a non-fat latte. Just try asking for that at Jet Fuel if you dare—but be prepared for a withering gaze that will make you feel, if not look, like you just shrank three dress sizes. What clinched it for me, though, was the discovery, towards the end of a visit, of a pair of binoculars sitting on the window ledge. I spent a gleeful ten minutes picking out details of Riverdale Park West and Cabbagetown beyond. Having finished my coffee some time ago, I ordered a hot cider ($3) just to be able to stay a little longer. The CN Tower looked like it was two blocks away, and the bare black branches of the trees outside made psychedelic patterns against the orange sky. Jet Fuel, though, was nowhere to be seen.
If I withhold what art thou? dead dry lump
Thou bearst nor grass or plant nor tree, nor stump
Thy extream thirst is moistned by my love
With springs below, and showres from above…
Man wants his bread and wine, & pleasant fruits
He knows, such sweets, lies not in Earths dry roots
Then seeks me out, in river and in well
His deadly malady I might expell:
If I supply, his heart and veins rejoyce,
If not, soon ends his life, as did his voyce;
That this is true, Earth thou canst not deny…
Nor fruitfull dews, nor drops distil'd from eyes,
Which pitty move, and oft deceive the wise:
Nor yet of salt and sugar, sweet and smart,
Both when we list to water we convert….”
- Anne Bradstreet, 1612?-1672. "Water", from The Four Elements.
I am fascinated by our attitudes to water. I believe that all of us know, innately—somehow, literally, in our blood—how important water is to us, how crucial to all that we cherish: to youth, beauty, to the very composition of life. We have all felt, at one time or another, the effects on our bodies of a lack of it, and many of us—particularly those of us from drought-prone regions, like Australia—have witnessed first-hand the devastating effect that a lack of this precious resource has, not only on landscape and wildlife—though these are often the first to suffer—but on communities, livelihoods, and indeed, entire ways of life.
And yet, somehow, we continue to treat this life-giving entity—possibly the purest, most beguiling, and most beneficent element of all—as though it’s utterly expendable. In reality, as has been apparent now for some time, the world’s supplies of fresh water are dwindling. At one time, not so long ago, drought (and its frequent attendant, famine) were something we could dismiss as “a third world problem”. Not any more. Although most of the planet’s estimated 1 billion people without access to clean drinking water still live in developing countries, the rise of global warming and its unanticipated effects on rain patterns, increasing drought and desertification, and the degradation of our river systems by chemical runoff from agriculture, industrial refineries, and other sources, mean that today, water is increasingly scarce in the first world—even in countries, like the USA and Canada, that had previously thought themselves immune from water shortage worries.
Some of the genuinely chilling facts I’ve learned in the course of contributing to today’s Blog Action Day on Water:
Today, 40% of America’s rivers and 46% of America’s lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.
Every day, 2 million tons of human waste are disposed of in water sources.
Many scholars attribute the conflict in Darfur at least in part to lack of access to water. A report commissioned by the UN found that in the 21st century, water scarcity will become one of the leading causes of conflict in Africa.
Dirty water kills more people each year than all forms of violence—including war.
It takes 24 liters of water to produce one hamburger.
The shiny new iPhone in your pocket requires half a liter of water to charge. That may not seem like much, but with over 80 million active iPhones in the world, that’s 40 million liters to charge those alone.
The US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year (despite access to clean, safe, regularly-tested drinking water from the tap throughout the US). Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled.
I think, though, that there is a silver lining to this gathering storm cloud. It seems clear to me that the conservation of water is an issue with a unique ability to unite people from across the political and ideological spectrum. This is because, like food, water is so close to us—so fundamentally necessary to our health and happiness. We all of us want our children to have clean drinking water. We all want to be surrounded by greenery, not brownery, in the middle of summer. Many of us have derived a simple, strong sense of pleasure from the pristine beauty of a lake, or a river, or a treasured swimming spot. I find it hard to believe that anyone could be cavalier about the loss of these things; the difficulty, as with so many environmental issues, is in making the connection to our daily lives. It’s in understanding the causes of water pollution and water shortage, when they are apparently so overwhelmingly complex; when there are immensely powerful vested interests working every second of the day to ensure that we don’t understand them; and when fresh, clean water comes out of the tap—for free. How could something that is on tap, and free, be of any value? We thought the same thing about clean air once.
Water is inestimably precious to me, for many reasons, but partly because it is the necessary foundation of so many other things I find beauty in. For starters, of course, the quality of our food, and our cookery, depends on our access to clean, fresh water. And think of the incalculable imaginative influence this one element has exerted on the vast ocean of our literary canon, with its innumerable representations of floods, droughts, rivers, oceans, drowning, thirsting, bathing, rainstorms, epic sea-journeys, lake-lairs, sirens, and shipwrecks. From the Book of Genesis, to Homer’s Odyssey, Beowulf, The Lady in the Lake, Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, The Mill on the Floss, Our Mutual Friend, Mrs Dalloway; and, of course, poets of all eras and persuasions, from the Renaissance, metaphysical, and Romantic schools through to T.S Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Charles Bukowski’s wrenching “Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame”—all have used the natural lyricism and elemental significance of water to examine the human condition. Yet we continue to literally throw it away, even as drought affects our farms, as the globe warms, as people die of thirst.
To become informed, start talking, and find out what you can do, check out the following links:
“Mere water, muttering over inanimate stones,
hemmed between hills and slowly eroded banks
bound by the cordon of trees it undermines,
is nothing a man cannot dam or divert, so he thinks.
Mere water, muttering meaningless syllables,
taking the line of least resistance, slinks
passively downstream, making its road of pebbles
as men made roads by following ambling cattle
between the readymade mountains' limestone tables.
But shallow and muttering, water glitters like metal,
knowing itself the cutting-edge of a vast
landscape-carving machine whose work proves fatal
to mountain and valley alike. Millennia past,
its glacier grandfather gouged wide Ribblesdale out
from an exalted plateau of plankton-dust.
These drumlins are glacier-droppings. When thawed out
the ice left a cobbled valley of leaking lakes
that dwindled down to this river that mutters about
the Master of the Cloud-and-Ocean Works
who writes his name in water, so the river
bears the imprimatur that mankind lacks
and prints his changing signature forever.”
- Anna Adams, “A River.” From Green Resistance: New and Selected Poems (1996), Enitharmon Press.
Books and cooking, food and fiction, eating and reading, gourmandising and philosophising.
This is a blog in honour of the art of food, and about food in (literary) art; a survey of imaginative feasts throughout the history of literature, and a record (with recipes) of the meals they inspire; and an examination of the intricate relationship between eating and reading.
As an Australian living in Toronto, one of the world's most multicultural cities, I've spent the last year discovering the joys of roti, pierogies, bibimbap, elk jerky, and poutine. Torontonians are almost as enthusiastic about books as they are about food, and this suits me just fine. Technically, I'm here to gain my PhD in Victorian Literature from the University of Toronto, but I've never let school put me off my food before, and this blog is a way to combine my two primary obsessions. I intend to cover some pretty far-ranging territory, from the feasts of ancient Rome to the cookbook-cum-novels of Isabel Allende; but there will also be recipes of my own (and others') creation, pictures when I manage to get them, images and reviews of Toronto's literary and gastronomic offerings, and occasional inchoate ramblings about food and books in general.
All the reviews on this site result from visits that are unannounced (unless the post clearly states that I was invited) and paid for in full. I do not accept cash, gratuities, advertising or sponsorship. The opinions published on this site (with the exception of comments) are mine alone, and all the work you see here is original and subject to copyright law. Recipes are (to the extent that any recipe can be) the author's originals unless otherwise acknowledged.
The money shot.
