Does Oscar Wilde whet your appetite? How about Zora Neale Hurston?
If those authors’ names aren’t mouthwatering, check out these twists on their books: “The Picture of Dorian Gray Poupon” and “Their Eyes Were Watching Cod.”
Culinary artists and literary buffs alike are preparing more palatable titles like those for the International Edible Book Festival, an event that started in 2000 and is celebrated at libraries across the United States and Canada and even in countries like Morocco and Latvia. The festival is the brainchild of the late Judith A. Hoffberg, an art librarian and curator, and the artist Béatrice Coron. Each year the event occurs on or around April 1, the birthday of the French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose 1825 La Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste) remains a culinary classic.
The festival’s premise is delectably simple: Create an edible concoction inspired by a book and, if desired, describe it with a groan-inducing pun.
This Friday will be the fifth year that the University of Puget Sound has observed the event, and participants there have a tough course to follow. “All Quiet on the Western Bundt” and “A Thousand Splenda Suns” were among the winners at last year’s festival, which awarded prizes in such categories as “Most Beautiful,” “Most Creative,” and “People’s Choice.”
Not all of the submissions in 2010 were saccharine sweet, however. One woman offered a postmodern take on David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water. Her entry? A glass of water.
Jane Carlin, library director at Puget Sound, snagged the “Most Literary” award two years ago for “Rabbit(s) Run,” an Updike homage that featured marshmallow bunny Peeps lined up in single file on rice cakes. (Bunny Peeps failed to win the judges’ admiration last year in a dark submission that had them acting out Andy Riley’s The Book of Bunny Suicides.)
The only thing Ms. Carlin will reveal about her entry for this year’s festival is that it will feature sheep crafted from marshmallows and spaghetti.
“We don’t eat some of these edible books,” she says, because although their materials might be digestible, “I don’t think they’d be particularly appetizing.”
At Eastern Illinois University, Todd Bruns is spearheading the institution’s first-ever edible book festival, scheduled for April 11, during National Library Week.
Mr. Bruns is a veteran of consumable volumes. He baked his first collection of literature-inspired cakes as a librarian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2005. One of his entries, based on Richard Balzer’s Peepshows: A Visual History, also employed the popular Eastertime Peeps.
Both Ms. Carlin and Mr. Bruns agree that the event is more than just a flavorful fiesta. It’s an opportunity to bring awareness to literature and book-cover art, attract some local media coverage, and—they hope—disprove the stereotype that libraries are inherently no fun.
To that end, Puget Sound is giving this year’s contestants an even greater incentive to put their best food forward: the lure of prizes.
“We’re giving out the most far-fetched, wild, and wacky cookbooks that we could find,” Ms. Carlin says, “just to fuel the creative juices for the following year.”