Potluck sign up sheet

What a potluck sign up sheet needs to stop duplicates

The whole job of a potluck sign up sheet is preventing the thing every host has lived through: four bowls of pasta salad and no dessert. A sheet that only asks for a name and a category does not prevent it, because "side dish" is not specific enough to tell two people they have chosen the same one.

Ask for the category and the actual dish. "Side dish — roasted carrots with honey" is a claim somebody else can read and work around. "Side dish" is not.

The second thing that goes wrong is quantity. Twelve people each bringing something that serves four leaves you short if half the dishes are desserts. Asking roughly how many a dish serves gives you a number to look at before the day rather than a surprise on it.

Allergies belong on the sheet, not in the group chat

Somebody at a gathering of more than about ten people will have an allergy, and the person who knows what is in the casserole is the person who made it. Asking at sign-up puts that information next to the dish rather than in a message thread nobody can find at six o'clock.

Keep it to the common ones — nuts, dairy, gluten, shellfish, egg, soy. A longer list makes people skip the question, and the point is to get an answer rather than a complete one.

Oven space is the constraint nobody plans for

A domestic oven fits two dishes. If six people arrive with something that needs twenty minutes at 180°C, four of them are eating cold food. Asking whether a dish needs heating, chilling or a socket turns that into something you can see in advance and stagger.

Somebody has to bring the things that are not food

Every list fills up with main courses and desserts, and then thirty people arrive and there are eleven plates. Serving spoons are the item forgotten most reliably of all: a dish that needs a spoon and does not have one blocks the whole table while somebody goes to look for one.

Put the unglamorous things on the sheet as their own rows and they get claimed like anything else — plates, cups, cutlery, serving spoons, ice, napkins, bin bags, a folding table. Nobody volunteers for these unasked, and everybody will take one if it is written down next to their name.

The other thing worth asking for is a note of what is in the dish. Not a recipe — the four or five things that would matter to somebody who cannot eat them. It takes the person who cooked it ten seconds and it saves the conversation being had one guest at a time over the table.

Paper or a link

A printed sheet on a noticeboard works when everybody walks past the same noticeboard — a staff room, a church hall, a classroom door. Print it, pin it, and photograph it before the day so you have a copy when it goes missing.

A link works when they do not. Guests fill it in from a phone, everyone sees what is already claimed, and the list updates itself instead of arriving as thirty separate replies. Both versions of this template are on this page.