Creative Arts Workshop Takes A Bite Out Of Fiction

Lego James summited a giant frosted peach. Moby-Dick’s insides were starting to melt. Julien Sorel got blanketed in raspberries. In separate corners, Hemingway’s Robert Jordan traded his bullets for chocolate chips, and sweet Lizzie Bennett firmed up her relationship with a toothpick.

That was all par for the course at the 14th annual Edible Book Tea, held last Saturday at Creative Arts Workshop (CAW) on Audubon Street. Organized each year by CAW book arts chair Paulette Rosen, the event embraced its inherently punny theme, kicking off April Fools’ Day with cakes, cookies, sandwiches, and edible sculptures based on literary works.

Edible book teas — also called edible book festivals and edible book days — started in in California 17 years ago, when Judith A. Hoffberg and Béatrice Coron proposed them as a way to celebrate the legacy of French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Pairing the anniversary of his birthday with the inherently funny, sometimes prank-peppered nature of April 1, the two proposed a forum where themes bookish and culinary could come together. (You can read more at their website.) In the early 2000s, that tradition ​“finally made its way over to the East Coast,” Rosen said. Seeing similar versions at the Center for Book Arts in New York, she gobbled it up, and made sure CAW was involved by 2003.

“The enthusiasm, the way we’ve been able to branch out … that kind of inclusiveness is wonderful,” she said. Of the event’s free nature, and new offer of a tea station and children’s activity table, she added that ​“We just want people to feel welcome.”

Instead of using Edible Book Day’s official rules, Rosen tells participants they just need to show up with something literary-ish and edible. The event is open to the public, although most are students and teachers at CAW.

In 14 years, Rosen said Saturday, the event’s open-door policy has made for some spectacular creations: cakes shaped like typewriters, stone fruit, and members of the Supreme Court; savory dishes that use spinach-lavash wraps and flax seed crackers as book-binding materials; homages to well-loved favorites, including Robert Frost and Jane Austen; her own chicken and rice soup. This year was no different, bringing with it an ice cream Moby-Dick and bell-shaped toll house cookies …

References to children’s favorites James and the Giant Peach (at top) and Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius …

… Bookbinder Sandy Rhodes’ tribute to Margaret Atwood’s Tempest retelling in Hagseed, with asparagus and noodle binding, flax cracker bookends, and thin seaweed pages to recall its oceanic theme.

And several others. Watching as members of the public flooded the space and began to devour each work, Rosen said she was planning something for the event’s 15th anniversary. The wheels had just been set into motion, she said, but two things were certain. One: she would probably pull out a few new literary stops for the event’s New Haven birthday. Two: she would still be bringing her chicken rice soup, under a different name. Readers, cooks, and book artists alike have come to depend on that every year.