Looking back over my past entries I've been trying to work out what I have learnt from doing this blog...
I have realised that parties and the food we eat at them play a big role in our lives, especially as children. Children's literature throughout the years has shown different interpretations of what food means: from teaching kids manners, responsibility, how to cook, gender roles and even about controlling female desire. In the present day children's literature has moved from the didactive narrative of the Victorian era to a more fun, light hearted narrative form such as in Roald Dahl books where food becomes a function for humour as the revolting is used to entertain children. The texts I have analysed have shown all the different interpretations in relation to party food or a theme for a party and so I think it is clear to see how children's literature is a perfect starting point to look at if you want to come up with a creative theme or kind of food for a party that kids will love. The recipes I have shared with you are a great example of this and I hope they have given you ideas for some exciting parties of your own. I've really enjoyed making the recipes myself and have also enjoyed looking back at my own childhood. I have discovered that food can signify important memories in our lives and particularly our childhood, thus it is good to have happy memories of baking in the kitchen with your Mum, choosing your birthday cake each year and of feasting on yummy food at parties. So I would definitely encourage letting kids help make any of the recipes I've suggested as although it will be messy, you're bound to build lots of memories of fun and laughter in the kitchen as even my Mum and I do now, and I'm 21!
Happy cooking, eating, and partying!
(And maybe I'll be back with more posts or a new blog!)
For my last lot of party food I thought I would show you something savoury. These Porcupines are simple to make and great as party nibbles that look fun at a kid's party. Although I would say mine look more like some strange alien like creatures rather than porcupines!
Makes 2 porcupines
Ingedients
2 oranges or grapefruit
150g (5oz) Cheddar cheese, cubed
1 x 227g (8oz) can pineapple pieces, drained
50 cocktail sticks
2 stuffed olives, halved crosswise
1 small gherkin, halved (I used dried mango slices instead as I'm not a fan of gherkins)
20 cocktail sausages, grilled
Cut a slice off one side of each fruit so they will stand firmly.
Thread cheese and pineapple onto cocktail sticks, and stick into one fruit to make the porcupine's spikes.
Pierce 2 olive halves and 1 gherkin piece (or mango slice) with halved cocktail sticks. Push them into the fruit to make the porcupine's eyes and nose.
Place a sausage on each of the remaining cocktail sticks and stick them into the other fruit. Make the eyes and nose in the same way.
Recipe from: Handslip, Carole. The Sainsbury Book of Children’s Party Cooking. London: Cathay Books, 1985.
I decided to use this recipe after reading Toast by Nigel Slater last week for my lecture. Although it is not a children's book it is a memoir of Nigel's childhood where he writes about his memories in separate sections all titled with a different food that reminds him of each memory. So I thought it would be good to look at someone else's childhood memories of food and what it meant to him. In the section 'Cheese and Pineapple', Nigel talks of his family not having parties but instead just friends that drop by. His view of being a child at these impromptu parties was that "Everyone was taller than me. It was as if I wasn't there," (42) which shows how children can be overlooked at adult parties and how they are no fun for kids, especially if there's only one child there. As the only child there, Nigel is used more like a waiter who has to pass round the food. His family possess a certain snobbery with everything surrounding food as they do not eating certain foods or brands as they think they're 'common': "Babycham, sandwich spread, tomato ketchup, bubblegum, HP Sauce and Branston Pickle could never even be discussed let alone eaten" (55). This is also shown when Nigel talks about the food he has to serve visitors with as he states a families' social status depends on "whether you had Huntley & Palmer's Cheese Footballs or not" (42). This shows a snobbery with food as people's social standing could be judged on whether they serve guests the fashionable food of the moment. Nigel also discusses the cheese and pineapple they serve which reminded me of my Porcupine recipe, although mine is a more fun child-like version. Nigel is in fact horrified by the cheese and pineapple, he sarcastically calls it "The pièce de résistance" (42) and exposes it for the basic dish it is:
"Few things could embarrass a would-be chef quite as much as having to hold out a whole grapefruit speared with cubes of Cheddar and tinned pineapple on cocktail sticks to men in cardigans" (43).
He does not like that this dish is seen as 'fashionable' by the grown-ups as he really appreciates food and sees it for the basic, non-sophisticated dish it is and so he states that "When it came to offering the dreaded grapefruit to everyone else, I would throw my head in the air and flay my nostrils" (44). This shows his distaste for the dish and his dramatic nature as a child. Nigel writes this episode with a sarcastic tone to portray how now as an adult he can identify how comedic his behaviour was and to highlight the ridiculousness of the adults snobbery. Despite, Nigel's obvious disgust for cheese and pineapple I think it makes for good party food for children, especially with the porcupine design! Being a well known chef now I'm sure he still would be horrified by my recommendation but there's nothing wrong with simple, easy to make food, particularly if you're a busy parent and any kid would probably prefer a funny looking porcupine to caviar at a party.
Image from Google: Nigel and his mother
Nigel also presents an example of children cooking in his memoir such as how I've shown you Milly-Molly-Mandy's attempt at cooking for her party in a previous post. Nigel makes it clear that he was a child with a love of food and so it makes sense that he would like to cook. He writes of his memories cooking with his mother, "Every few weeks my mother and I would make jam tarts;" (15) as much as he criticises his mother's attempts at cooking in his writing he also shows how cooking with his mother actually brings them together. When making jam tarts he states "Mother didn't like cooking. She did this for me," (15) suggesting she does it because she loves him and knows it will make him happy. This suggests how cooking together can create fond memories for a parent and child.When Nigel's mother dies, his father's and his life become very different significantly because there is a lack of cooking. So when Nigel's father meets his next wife, Joan, their life becomes filled with food again as she is a good cook, in fact much better than Nigel's mother. As a teenager Nigel starts cookery lessons at school, in his first lesson he makes a perfect Victoria Sponge which he cannot wait to show his father as "who for all his disinterest couldn't fail to congratulate me [/him]," (182) when it came to good food being made. Joan is not impressed by this and starts to make more and more food herself for Nigel's father on Nigel's cookery lesson days making it like a competition between the two of them. So here cookery and food becomes a way of control, of who has the upper hand with Nigel's father.
Despite this negative connotation with cookery, we should emphasise the positive side to it with cooking bringing families together. Letting kids join in in the kitchen can be messy but is fun and great for bonding. It's good to have memories of cooking with your parents and especially for something like a party where kids can feel proud to say they helped Mummy make the birthday cake or Porcupines (that is if you fancy using the recipe in this post!). Slater, Nigel. Toast. London: Fourth Estate, 2010.
"There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it" (90).
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was written in 1865, before "Flora's Story" (1874); so you would think the book would emphasise similar constraints on children as shown by Rossetti in my previous post. However, Lewis Carroll presents a fantasy world where Alice may remain a child forever and her Victorian world with it's strict rules is turned upside. So the book appears to reject the didactisim and moralism which dominated Victorian literature for children.
The tea party presented in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is another form of party, other than a birthday, which I have been discussing recently in my posts. A tea party is a prime place for manners and etiquette to be examined, just like how the children's behaviour at Flora's birthday can be analysed. Margaret Visser states the dining table is "a constraining and controlling device, a place where children eat under the surveillance of adults" (Daniel, 48) which means that a table at a tea or dinner party is the perfect place for adults to instil manners into a child. In Wonderland there is the question of who the adults are at the tea party, the Hatter and March Hare, appear to be so but do not necessarily behave in an appropriate way for adults in Victorian society.
Image from Google
The party is a parody of the formal British custom of afternoon tea where the characters behave very strangely such as the Hatter dipping his watch in his tea and pouring hot tea on a guest's nose to wake him up! The characters' absurd and unusual behaviour reminds the reader of 'good' behaviour in the real world compared to that in Wonderland, which is shown throughout the book. For instance, at the table the Dormouse has fallen asleep and the Hatter and March Hare are "resting their elbows on it," (90) which is an example of impoliteness and bad manners that Victorians would not have advocated. Furthermore, Alice herself breaks the rules of etiquette and acts assertively which subverts the Victorian conventions of what the girl child should be like, as shown in my Flora's Birthday post. For example, she asserts her own power and also ignores polite etiquette by joining the table although she has not been asked:
"The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. 'No room! No room!' they cried out when they saw Alice coming. 'There's plenty of room!' said Alice indignantly, and sat down in a large armchair at one end of the table" (90).
She also talks back to the March Hare:
"'Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
Alice looked around the table, but there was nothing but tea. 'I don't see any wine,' she remarked.
'There isn't any,' said the March Hare.
'Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it,' said Alice angrily" (91).
This again shows how all at once, Alice breaks the convention of polite manners of not talking back to a grown up yet also asserts her own independence by speaking out. Thus, this suggests she is acting as an equal to the supposed adult characters which was unlike how Victorians saw children in relation to adults, to them childhood was very much a stage of life before one reached adulthood. Here the March Hare also breaks the rules of etiquette by offering something that is not available which would be seen as impolite. The March Hare and other characters go on to display more actions of bad manners throughout the tea party such as the Hatter who says to Alice, 'Your hair wants cutting' (91) which she declares is rude as 'You shouldn't make personal remarks' (91). This shows she knows how to behave properly and so is deliberately subverting the rules of her society in this world where they do not seem to exist. As well, this suggests she takes on a parental role of reproaching the Hatter for bad manners. This behaviour from the adult characters shows how they do not conform to manners and etiquette usually seen at a tea party either.
The tea party is also unconventional as there is pretty much nothing else on the table except TEA. I know it is a tea party but traditionally afternoon tea would consist of miniature sandwiches, scones and perhaps some fancy cakes, (it certainly does at Harrods anyway!). So the lack of food makes the tea party unusual too. However, this may be to show how the focus is more on the subversion of manners and etiquette.
Here's the tea party scene in the 1999 film adaptation.
As I mentioned above, afternoon tea is a popular thing to do at Harrods, but don't get me wrong it's not my local or anything - I'm a student after all. But Harrods would probably be the ultimate place to have the 'poshest' tea in London in our modern world and where manners would still be highly regarded.
However, having afternoon tea or tea parties is also a custom that has become more popular recently as a trendy thing to do without the upper class associations to it - more for the stylish cupcakes on offer and quirky tea sets and cake stands to show off.
So with the 'posh' sigma attached to tea parties, children aren't necessarily associated with this type of party unless they are very well behaved. But why not go with the trends and throw a less conventional but more quirky tea party with a Alice in Wonderland theme for kids!
Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1993.
Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature. London: Routledge, 2006.
Easter is another time for party food other than birthdays. Families often come together on the Easter Sunday and celebrate the day with a meal. Easter is a fun day for children with all the chocolate they get and is probably the second best holiday to their birthday! When I was young I remember we would always have an cake decorated with little fluffy yellow chicks sitting on top of the icing and my Mum would organise an Easter egg hunt for me.
Here's a quick and easy recipe to make Easter nest cakes which kids can help along with.
Makes 30
Ingredients
1 normal-size box of Shredded Wheat (16 large biscuits or 500g bitesize biscuits) - I only used 12 as the chocolate didn't look like it would cover any more shredded wheat!
400g milk chocolate, supermarket own-brand is fine
2 100g bags of Mini Eggs
Cake cases
Method
1. Crush the Shredded Wheat biscuits into a bowl using your hands or a food mixer. (I used my hands here and got very bored crushing so much shredded wheat! Maybe kids might find it more fun mucking around shredding the stuff, so definitely a job for a little one!)
2. Break the chocolate into pieces and melt in a microwave on a low heat, stirring every 30 seconds
3. Pour the melted chocolate into the bowl and mix with crushed Shredded Wheat
4. When mixed and all the Shredded Wheat is covered with chocolate, spoon the mixture into cake cases and press down in the middle of each to create a place for the eggs
5. Press two or three Mini Eggs into each nest.
6. Leave to set for at least 2 hours or less if refridgerated. (My mixture set very quickly just sitting out in the kitchen as it's so cold at the moment!)
Simple but yummy Easter treats to make, these are so quick to rustle up that you can't not make them!
They're my favourite to make at Easter and I remember we always used to make them at Primary school to bring home to your Mum, along with a hand made Easter card.
As my Mum still works at the school I used to go to, I asked her if she was making them this year and she was very disappointed to say they were not!
Enjoy your Easter whether it's munching cakes, Easter eggs or tucking into a traditional Sunday Roast!
"... You'd better go in disguise; For ev'ry Bear that ever there was will gather there for certain, because today's the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic."
Picnics involve a type of out door party food with cakes, sandwiches, sausage rolls, scotch eggs and lots of tasty treats filling a picnic hamper. A picnic is a great chance for kids to enjoy playing outside whilst also enjoying food. However, in England the sun never shines very long for any 'al-fresco' party food to be appreciated very often!
Despite this picnics are a common theme found in children's literature such as The Teddy Bear's Picnic by Jimmy Kennedy, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame andThe Famous Five series by Enid Blyton. These books show picnic food in a delicious way making it seem like food tastes better outside. Really we all know, the sandwiches often go soggy and that the weather or wasps always get in the way!
Jimmy Kennedy's picture book, The Teddy Bear'sPicnic(1987) also presents picnic food as a form of independence. The story was originally a song which I'm sure anyone can hum along to the words: "If you go down to the woods today you're sure of a big surprise..." (1)
and for this reason is a story of a picnic that particularly sticks in my head. Kennedy makes the bears anthropomorphic by humanising them as they appear to have a picnic by themselves. The images in the book show the teddies carrying all their food down with them to the woods, enjoying their feast of "marvellous things to eat," (7) and then playing child-like games such as hide and seek. After the teddies have had their picnic all by themselves and are exhausted the story ends with "their Mummies and Daddies," (24) taking them home to bed. The last page shows the children carrying the teddy bears home which gives away the secret of the story that the teddy bears aren't really real and it was just the children playing make-believe. I think the story suggests a picnic to be a form of independence for a child as being allowed to go on a picnic with your teddy bears and friends by yourself for the first time would be liberating. Nowadays a child would not be allowed further then their own garden but still The Teddy Bears Picnicpromotes the idea of being an adult and having the responsibility of providing a picnic for others (even if it's your teddies!) Interestingly the book does not actually say who has made the food, was it the children, their parents... or the teddies?
This mysteriously made food that is shown in the pictures is the traditional picnic food of sandwiches, sweets, sausage rolls, buns, jelly, biscuits, a pie, scones and a seed cake.
The seed cake is a traditional English cake that I happened to notice has popped up a few times in my literature course and here it is again. I saw it in Cranford (1853) by Elizabeth Gaskell and also in Mrs Beeton's Household Management (1861). So I thought I would share the recipe with you for some good old English food to have at a picnic...
A Very Good Seed-Cake (Page 342)
Ingredients - 1 lb. of butter, 6 eggs, 3/4 lb. sifted sugar, pounded mace and grated nutmeg to taste, 1 lb. of flour, 3/4 oz. of caraway seeds, 1 wineglassful of brandy (Not sure if the brandy is completely necessary for a child friendly version of this recipe!)
Mode - Beat the butter to a cream; dredge in the flour; add the sugar, mace, nutmeg, and caraway seeds, a mix these ingredients well together. Whisk the eggs, stir to them the brandy, and beat the cake again for 10 minutes. Put it into a tin lined with buttered paper, and bake it for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. This cake would be equally nice made with currants, and omitting the caraway seeds.
I'm not sure how appetising this cake sounds compared to some of the deliciously sweet party food I have shown you already but seeds can be nourishing for kids and if it's good enough for the teddy bears then why not try the challenge of attempting to follow Beeton's recipe!
Most of my posts before have been about celebrating a child’s
birthday with scrumptious food; however the Victorians had a different way of
looking at food in association with childhood and I'm afraid it's not as light hearted and fun as in some of contemporary books I have looked at! Prepare yourself to see childhood in a not so innocent way...
Victorian children's literature was very overtly didactic compared to what we see these days and they saw childhood in a completely different light - some Mum's would be horrified to discover the meanings behind the innocent looking tales the Victorians presented to their children! Children's literature was seen as a means of social regulation and so if children’s reading was kept under strict control it would ensure their impressionable young minds would not be corrupted. This was especially relevant for girls who were thought of in the ‘traditional’ view of women who were passive and occupied the domestic sphere of the home. Carolyn Daniel states that the ideal Victorian woman was “a creature
of disinterested love and nurture and the moral center of both home and
society. To conform to this ideal, women and girls had to downplay every aspect
of their physicality, including desire and appetite” (Daniel, 39). Thus, the
significance of food and girls’ appetites used in children’s literature at the
time hadthe implication of girls’ eating representing a sign of sexual desire.(In my mind I can see this fitting into our modern world where you get the chocolate bar adverts with the woman seductively eating a chocolate bar... making chocolate sexy and desirable!) Anyway, in the Victorian era openly didactic literature was used as a way to
enforce social gender roles on girls and control the female appetite and desires.
The Victorians also linked food to a child’s morality for
both boys and girls. They feared that food and fiction “considered to be bad
for them in terms of being too rich for the physical body, or in poor taste in
terms of being too fantastic for the rational mind,” (Daniel, 42) would cause excitement
leading to “immorality and irrationality” (Daniel, 42). Thus, their food and fiction
was closely monitored. (You could say we still monitor children's food today but for much less sinister purposes such as health reasons!)
An example of a text that shows the Victorian attitudes to childhood
and food is Speaking Likenesses by Christina Rossetti which consists of three interwoven tales.
The first is "Flora’s Story" about her birthday party. At the beginning she is depicted
as the perfect, angelic child as she sleeps on the morning of her birthday: “her
cheeks were plump and, her light hair was all tumbled, her little red lips were
held together as if to kiss someone.” However, this all changes when the party comes around. The
party is a disaster after the children quarrel over a “sugar-plum box,” turn
their noses up at the party food, have a boisterous game of blindman’s buff,
make each other cry and end up grumbling at each other. Flora also acts ‘superior’ as the birthday girl
showing off her new doll and ends up “cross and miserable”.
Eventually Flora wanders off and enters a dream sequence
where a birthday feast is taking place. However, she is not allowed to eat any of
the food as the “birthday Queen” refuses to let her as she states “it’s my birthday, and
everything is mine.” Despite this, all the other guests eat “greedily”. Flora
notices that the children have odd appearances, one boy has “prickly quills
like a porcupine,” another is covered in “hooks like fishhooks” and one girl “exuded
a sticky fluid” whilst another was “slimy”. These monstrous appearances
could be seen as allegories for the bad behaviour of the children at Flora’s
party. The monstrosity of the children is furthered by their consumption
of the food where they stuff “with no limit”:
“Cold turkey,
lobster salad, stewed mushrooms, raspberry tart, cream cheese, a bumper of
champagne, a meringue, a strawberry ice, sugared pine apples, some greengages”
The food is
described as appetising and appealing yet Flora does “not take so much as a
fork,” showing how she epitomises the good child of the Victorian era who shows
control and good manners. In contrast to her, the birthday Queen is shown as the
girl with an uncontrolled appetite as she,
“consumed with her own mouth and of
sweet alone one quart of strawberry ice, three pine apples, two melons, a score
of meringues, and about four dozen sticks of angelica.”
This excess of
eating shown through the listing, counting and size of the portions suggests she has a voracious appetite and emphasises the size of her mouth which
has sexual connotations linking to Victorian concerns of female appetite
being associated with sexual desire. Flora does not participate in the feasting
showing that although desire to eat all the appetising food is created, she does
not succumb to this as it is seen as immoral behaviour. So by the end of the
story Flora has learnt a lesson that gluttony is a sin and that the female appetite must be controlled as suggested by the narrator:
“And I think if
she lives to be nine years old and give another birthday party, she is likely
on that occasion to be even less like the birthday Queen of her troubled dream
than was the Flora of eight years old: who, with dear friends and playmates and
pretty presents, yet scarcely knew how to bear a few trifling disappointments,
or how to be obliging and good-humoured under slight annoyances.”
Overall, "Flora’s Story" shows how a birthday party was used in children's literature of the Victorian era to present attitudes
of the timeand enforce these on children through the narrative as children were seen as creatures vulnerable to corruption. So count yourself lucky that you didn't grow up in the Victorian age and can eat as much as you like on your birthday without it making you corrupt!
Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature. London: Routledge, 2006.
I recently saw Matilda The Musicalat the Cambridge theatre
and was particularly interested in how they presented the food on stage after
writing my post about Bruce Bogtrotter’s Cake.
As I suspected the cake was not real, like in most theatre
productions but what really caught my attention was how they presented the
eating of the cake.
The theatre adaptation changes the scene and in the musical
Trunchball does not know it is Bruce that has eaten her cake but only finds out
through a ginormous burp he lets out whilst she is in the middle of accusing a
different character. The "disgustingly chocolatey" burp is described as floating
round the class room reaching each child’s nose and then finally Trunchball’s,
who then realises who the cake thief is. The description of the burp and the
character’s animated expressions of disgust shows the revolting side of food,
how it is consumed and what bodily effects it can have which is not always
shown in adult literature but can often be found in children’s books like Roald
Dahl’s. In children’s stories it seems more acceptable as the description is
funny for children as there’s something about the revolting that makes children
squirm and giggle, which it certainly did at the Cambridge theatre! This shows how writer's connect food and the disgusting with entertainment, especially for child audiences.
If you want to see how this scene is acted for yourself, I
recommend going to see it at the Cambridge theatre but you could also watch the
scene in the film adaptation.
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