Enid Blyton and the art of escapism through food

English heritage authorities have declared Enid Blyton guilty of racism and xenophobia, which has got her defenders protesting. Another charge might be encouraging childhood obesity. All her books seem packed with luscious descriptions of high-calorie feasts, replete with cakes, scones, sandwiches, processed meats and “lashings of ginger-beer”.There is even a children’s cookbook, Allegra McEvedy’s 'Jolly Good Food', which takes us from breakfasts with The Naughtiest Girl in School (porridge, scrambled eggs), snacks with the Secret Seven (jam tarts, rock buns), picnics with the Famous Five (chicken salad), tea up the Faraway Tree (macaroons, pop cakes), suppers on The Secret Island (grilled trout, potato salad) and midnight feasts at Mallory Towers (sausages, hot chocolate). Indian readers often seem able to overlook Blyton’s problematic views, but get aggrieved about missing the food.Novelist Manil Suri longed for Blyton’s foods, particularly “the tongue sandwiches that no hamper seemed to be complete without”. When he asked his mother, she was horrified: “We’re Indian... we don’t eat tongue.” And since no one they knew had an oven, they couldn’t make cakes and scones either. 83887621This was partly bad timing. Dishes of that kind were made in India during the British Raj thanks to khansamas who were trained to work even with the minimal equipment available then, like metal boxes that served as ovens when placed on burning coals and with more coals shovelled on top. And (buffalo) tongue definitely is eaten in India and, in fact, is ideally made in the one device Suri’s family did have at their disposal: The pressure cooker, whose intense steamy heat can cook the tough muscle into melting tenderness.But Blyton’s food was also largely a fantasy when she wrote about it in Britain. She started writing in the 1920s with fairy tales and retellings of myths, but only after 1938-39 did she start the adventure, mystery and school stories she is best known for today.This coincided with the start of World War II, which influences her work in subtle ways. 83887604It is why there are so many spies and secret weapons, but also why so many of her books are about children discovering the countryside. When the war started, children were evacuated out of cities, and she wanted to help her readers make the best of their wartime countryside homes. She avoided direct mention of the war though, unlike writers like Richmal Crompton, whose William stories from the time have the war as backdrop.Blyton’s daughter later explained that “the whole ambience of the books was to remind children of what life had been like and to assure them that those times would come back again”. And so, while food in wartime Britain was strictly rationed, with sugar and butter very hard to get, Blyton served up a fantasy of food in plenty. Her books were deliberately designed for escapism, and it is why children still use them to escape, no matter when or where they read them, or what they actually have to eat.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3ji1F49