In the time I’ve been writing this blog (more than ten years now), I’ve only included one post about children’s literature: Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales with a Yuletide recipe for fudge.
Despite that, I have frequently written about children in relation to food and I referred to many of these episodes in my last post about mothers and food But there are others: school pupils having midnight feasts in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield , nostalgic memories of chocolate spread in Michael Frayn’s novel Spies and children hunting for their own food in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
Golding’s disturbing post-war novel (it was published in 1954) documents the breakdown of civilisation when a group of boys end up on a desert island after a plane crash. With no adults to guide and support them, the children are left to their own devices and are forced to fend for themselves, finding their own food and cooking it.
Out of all the books I have written about so far, Lord of the Flies is – as far as I can recall – the only one in which children cook (albeit in a rather rudimentary fashion). However, a recent re-read of the children’s book Ballet Shoes (following the lovely 2024 production at the National Theatre ) provided me with another example.
Ballet Shoes was the first children’s book by Noel Streatfeild (1895-1986) who published more than 80 books – for both adults and children – in her lifetime. Working as an actress for ten years before devoting herself to writing, Streatfeild’s children’s books are often about young people struggling with careers in the arts: ice-skating in White Boots (1951), circus acts in The Circus is Coming (1938) and film and TV work in the Gemma series (Gemma, Gemma and sisters, Gemma alone and Goodbye Gemma – published between 1968 and 1969).
But Ballet Shoes, first published in 1936, is probably Streatfeild’s best-known and most loved story. It revolves around the three adopted Fossil sisters, found by the eccentric palaeontologist, Matthew Brown (known fondly by the girls as Gum – Great Uncle Matthew) on his global travels, and brought back to the large house he owns in South Kensington, London (near the Natural History and Science museums). When Gum departs on his travels yet again he leaves the three girls – Pauline, Petrova and Posy – in the care of his great-niece, Sylvia, and her nurse, Nana, with enough money to support them all for five years.
But after five years Gum has not returned and the money has almost run out: faced with the cost of maintaining a large house, Sylvia and Nana leap into action, withdrawing the girls from school (for home tuition) and letting out some of the spare rooms to boarders.
As luck would have it – and this is a fairy-tale of sorts – the boarders turn out to be just the right people to help the family and support the Fossil girls’ development and education. The car-mad Petrova has her passion met by the Citroen-driving Mr Simpson who, with his wife, is the first lodger to move in; then a dance teacher, Miss Theo Dane, arrives and quickly recognises the potential of Posy, the daughter of a dancer who handed her over to Gum with a pair of ballet shoes – Miss Dane also arranges with her employer that all three girls can attend the stage school at which she works for free; and finally, two female academics who are willing to tutor the girls: Dr Smith, a mathematician, and Dr Jakes, a literature scholar with a special interest in Shakespeare (ideal for Pauline, the budding actress).
With all this support, the three girls are now equipped to begin their journey to becoming autonomous and financially independent women.
But even successful career women benefit from being able to cook. Part of the expense of the house in Exhibition Road is owing to the wages of the domestic staff – reference is made to a cook and a housemaid – a standard feature of middle-class households at this time. However, following the Second World War there was a decline in the number of household servants: people who would have normally have taken those positions were instead moving into what were perceived to be better jobs (in factories, shops etc); also, the invention of affordable household appliances (washing machines, vacuum cleaners etc) rendered redundant the need for household staff. Pauline, Petrova and Posy are growing up in a world where they may well be expected to cook rather than paying someone to cook for them.
This point is not stated explicitly in the story, but on two occasions Pauline is described as helping Cook. On the day that Mr and Mrs Simpson call by about the rooms ‘Cook was teaching Pauline to make buns… ’. On another occasion ‘Cook wanted Pauline to come and help her ice some cakes’. Whilst the ability to make buns and ice cakes might not be regarded as proper cooking, all cooks have to start somewhere, and tea-time goodies seem as good a starting-point as any (the first things I learnt to make were butterfly cakes and flapjacks).
The British cookery writer Elizabeth David (1913-1992), in her book English bread and yeast cookery (published 1977) quotes the definition of a bun from John Kirkland’s 1927 publication The Bakers’ ABC: ‘A bun may be defined as a small, soft, plump, sweet, fermented cake’. As David says, buns – whether they be Bath buns, hot cross buns, spice buns, Chelsea buns… or any other bun you can name – are ‘English institutions’ with a history dating back around 500 years to Tudor England.
The buns that Pauline are making are simply ‘buns’ – we have no more information than that. So from David’s book I opted for a recipe for ‘Tea buns’ which she says was passed to her in 1974 by a Mrs Broadbent in the Isle of Wight. As David says, the recipe makes ‘nice, simple little fruit buns’, a good starting point for a child learning to cook. Thank you Mrs Broadbent.
ICED TEA-TIME BUNS
Ingredients (makes approximately 16):
Bun dough:
280ml milk
60g butter
1 large egg
15g dried fast-action yeast
60g raisins
60g sugar
500g strong white flour
½ teaspoon salt
Icing:
200g sieved icing sugar
Warm water
Method:
Place the milk and butter in a small saucepan and place over a medium heat until the butter has melted. Allow to cool slightly and then add the beaten egg.
Place the flour and salt in a large bowl. Stir to mix, then add the yeast, sugar and raisins and mix again. Then add the liquid ingredients and mix to combine. Place the dough on a lightly floured work surface and knead for 5-10 minutes until smooth and elastic (or use the dough hook on a food mixer).
Place the dough in a large bowl, cover and put in a warm place to rise (it should take about an hour for the dough to double in size – it will spring back if you press it lightly with a finger).
When the dough has risen, empty it back onto a floured surface, knock it back down again and then shape the dough into 16 buns. Place on a couple of floured baking trays, cover with a tea cloth and leave to rise again (for 45-60 minutes). Towards the end of this time, preheat the oven to 200C / 180C fan / Gas mark 6. Bake in the oven for approximately 15 minutes or until golden brown. Place on a wire rack to cool.
Gradually add the warm water to the icing sugar to make a spreadable – but not too runny – mixture. Either apply the icing with a knife or dip the bun into the icing (easier, but a bit messy! – it’s what I did).
Place back on the wire rack until the icing has set.
