Our topic was ‘Food and drink’.
For breakfast we had Shel Silverstein’s ‘Sorry I spilled it’. Crumbs!
Dinner is an altogether more elaborate affair and you might be entertaining guests:
Invitation
Two Christian reflections – George Herbert’s ‘Love III’ (Love bade me welcome…), one of the 88 poems included in “The Fire of Joy”, an anthology by Clive James of poems to learn and recite; and ‘Yet if his majesty our sovereign lord…’ attributed to Herbert’s near contemporary Thomas Ford.
Preparation:
Ken Gambles’ ‘Basket case’, a very funny poem about supermarket shopping, written in response to a pre-Calcutt Poetry Group challenge.
‘Land of Cockaygne’ (anon, 14c); the place is made out of food! An idea revived in ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountains’ (anon 20c).
Or you might dare to shop at Christina Rossetti’s frightening ‘Goblin Market’.
In WS Gilbert’s ‘Ferdinando and Elvira, or the Gentle pieman’ from the Bab Ballads, Ferninado discovers that the portly piemaker also writes the mottoes in crackers.
Also crackers, for which you might need some better butter, is the tongue twister ‘Betty Botter’ which we were all required to read in turn.
Another cook, achieving good results despite a lack of attention to hygiene, is introduced in the prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’.
Aperitifs
Ron Butlin’s ‘A recipe for whiskey’ is delightfully whimsical.
Starters
‘Figs’ (DH Lawrence) – it’s not just what you eat but how you eat it. We had the first thirteen lines, stopping before it got too erotic for the Calcutt crowd.
Fresh oysters from ‘The walrus and the carpenter’ by Lewis Carroll.
The above-mentioned Ferdinando messily waves his mock turtle soup ‘enthusiastically round’ – and leaves without paying for it.
Mains
Carl Dunford’s mouth-watering ‘English fish and chips’ – doggerel fish?
Lamb – but not barn owl – in Wendy Cope’s ‘Kindness to animals’.
Sides
Sydney Smith’s genuinely delicious-sounding ‘Recipe for a salad’.
Ken Gambles’ ‘Onion and cucumber’, to accompany a Sunday roast.
Edward Thomas’s ‘Swedes’, although still in a clamp likened to the then recently-opened Pharaoh’s tomb.
Wine
WB Yeats ‘A drinking song’ – short and sweet.
In unpleasant contrast, Wendy Cope’s alter ego Jason Strugnell’s sonnet ‘For DM Thomas’ complains about the cost of plying girls with drink.
Sweet
Wallace Stevens’s ‘The emperor of ice-cream’ – a wake rather than a dinner party. A strange but magnetic modernist poem, another of Clive James’ choices.
Two poems evoking powerful memories;
Donald Hall’s ‘Maple syrup’ – still tasty after all these years.
Karin Gotshall ‘The raspberry room’ – with “berries thick as bumblebees”. Great imagery.
Coffee
Wendy Cope ‘At Stafford services’, living in a Hopper painting.
Brandy
Evelyn Duncan ‘Picking up’ in which home-made pear brandy gets the removal men drunk.
Abstinence
Gerald Manley Hopkins seeks the ascetic path in ‘The habit of perfection’.
In an extract from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’s wedding feast’, the wedded couple and his grandmother the cook are so solicitous for their guests that they don’t eat.
Wendy Cope commits to ‘The new regime’ – but not yet…
Strange diets
In AE Housman’s ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’, the poet’s friend can’t stomach melancholy poems and is recommended to dull his mind with beer. The poem also tells how ancient king Mithridates ate samples of all poisons to make him immune.
‘Henry King’ in Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tale had a fatal craving for string.
After-dinner conversation
Our attention was drawn to a poem arising from another poetic challenge concerning yet another ancient king … Horace Smith’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’.