Both food and literatures are intimately connected to our memories and identities, often in complex, intersecting and overlapping ways. The precocious English schoolgirls of Enid Blyton’s children’s novels filled young imaginations with a romantic, abundant and nostalgic view of British food, unaffected by the austerities of wartime rationing, evoking comfort, familiarity and security. Blyton sold something on the order of 600 million books, making her among the most prolific authors in history, long before Harry Potter took over the genre she helped create.
Bolstered by colonization and globalization, these imaginary menus influenced the ideas, desires, and food memories of generations of young readers all over the world. So pervasive were these literary impressions that my partner, growing up in Northern Ireland, and Ozoz Sokoh, growing up in Warri, on the southern coast of Nigeria, both carry similar indelible recollections of these quintessentially British “Midnight Feasts”: picnics of boiled eggs and potted meats, jam tarts and ginger breads.
Tonight professor and cookbook author Ozoz Sokoh shares her lifelong love of food and drink in books, and explores how words and worlds become tastes and memories. Ozoz Sokoh is a professor of Food and Tourism Studies at Centennial College whose work documents and celebrates Nigerian and West African cuisine, most recently in her debut cookbook, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria. She is particularly fascinated by all the ways we’re similar - dishes, drinks, material culture, techniques, and more - across geographies, cultures, and histories, in spite of our apparent differences.
https://ozozsokoh.com | @kitchenbutterfly
Signed copies of Ozoz's book will be available for purchase at the event.
Dinner by Len Senater
Inspired by some memorable foods in literature
Cod Chowder
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville devotes a chapter (aptly named ‘Chowder’) to the joys of eating chowder. The scene is both deeply evocative, transporting the reader through smells and tastes to 1840’s Nantucket and the timeless comfort of a steaming bowl of soup on a cold night. I’ll be following Chris Dunne’s Newfoundland Cod Chowder recipe from The Depanneur Cookbook.
A Midnight Feast
Inspired by the “Midnight Feasts” of Blyton’s school-age characters, each diner will receive a wrapped package containing some surprise treats sent from ‘home’; a mix of savoury and sweet items, some British, some Nigerian. Guests are invited to open their packages and create a shared potluck with their table-mates. Served with ‘lashings of ginger beer’. Expect to find things like: potted meats, tinned fish, bread & butter, cheese & crackers, hardboiled eggs, fresh veggies (radishes, green onions, carrots, cherry tomatoes), puff puff, chin chin, samosas, and sweets like jam tarts & macaroons, scones & jam, fruitcake & gingersnaps, toffees & boiled sweets.
