Potluck and French History

Last night I was invited to a potluck dinner. A term rather unknown by the Swiss (that's why I'll explain it, mainly because I didn't know what it meant, although my audience is probably wiser than I am), a potluck dinner is a gathering of people where each person brings a dish made by themselves for everybody to share. I wondered why people would call that potluck, because hearing the word and its meaning, the first thing that came to my mind was a kind of russian roulette with food. (Which probably is the case in many a potluck dinner occasion. Be careful about what you try!)


Apparently (according to my friend Wikipedia), the word origins in the 16th century england but meant rather "food provided for an unexpected or uninvited guest, the luck of the pot". And then, the Americans picked up the word (probably errorously referring to the word "potlatch") and used it in the sense of "communal meal, where guests bring their own food"; sometime in the 19th or 20th century. Although the Irish apparently already used it as a term to describe a meal with no particular menu where everybody brought a dish. It originates in the time when Irish women gathered to cook dinner and they had only one pot; so they brought their ingredients (whatever they had to bring that day) and threw them together. Surprise!
Suddenly I can imagine how they invented Irish Stew... 


And for lack of a better second subject, I'm going to bring up a fun fact about the day:
On April 25th in 1792, exactly 220 years ago, the french officer Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed in Strasbourg the "Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin" (roughly translated: War-song for the army of the Rhine), which became the French national anthem in 1795, better known today as "the Marseillaise". (It lost its status under Napoleon but was reestablished in 1830.)


And I even found a picture of de Lisle singing it. (I wonder if he sang it reeeeeeally slowly or if the painter was extremely fast...either way, they did a good job!)

The piece was originally dedicated to the governor of Strasbourg, Graf Luckner, and to this day, it is played daily at 12.05pm on the market square of his birthplace, Cham in der Oberpfalz. And below is Graf Luckner. (hm... Maybe he should have sung a song, too, so the painter wouldn't have been able to paint all those wrinkles?)

Allons enfants de la patrie... *sing* and au revoir for now!