Customer Reviews

Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Not just a wonderful collection of recipes that children will love to help you cook, but a nostalgic wander through the best loved books of our childhoods - Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and so many others. I loved Jane Brocket's last book The Gentle Art of Domesticity, and in this new (very different!) book she matches her talent for cooking with her interest in childrens literature. Alongside extracts from literary classics and the original illustrations, she comes up with her versions of the food the children would have been eating: picnics, high teas, camp-fires, breakfasts, midnight feasts and makeshift adventure meals. My 9 year old - an obsessive Enid Blyton fan - can't get enough of the Famous 5 recipes. What's more, the recipes really work. Her rice pudding is better than Nigella's.

This is an interesting book, based on a good idea. The author shares with us the recipes for many of the foods that are found in children's literature of a particular period. Unfortunately there is an overabundance of Enid Blyton in the book and too little of other, better children's authors.

Enid Blyton's school stories were full of negative portrayals of students of other cultures - comic Spanish, American and French students, who are depicted as being morally inferior to the British students. And CS Lewis' book "The Horse and His Boy" openly describes the white Narnians as being morally superior to the obviously Asian villains.

Jane Brocket is partial to the work of authors such as Blyton and Lewis, and neglects the work of more tolerant and open minded authors like Roald Dahl, and Richmal Crompton. And on occasion a bit of authentic British racial prejudice creeps into her own book, too, as when she comments that an "honest" British Marmalade roll is "morally superior" to Turkish delight.