Turkish Delight & Treasure Hunts by Jane Brocket

There is even a recipe from one of my daughter’s favourites, The Little White Horse, ‘Marmaduke Scarlet’s Saffron Cake’. The molasses pies and Debby’s jumbles are in there, along with Amy March’s pickled limes, Edmund’s Turkish Delight, Marilla’s raspberry cordial, The Swallows’ squashed-fly biscuits and a veritable banquet of other gorgeous confections.

Jane Brocket’s marvellous book is jam-roly-poly-packed with recipes that will allow you to realise the realities of these previously page-bound delicacies. I remember reading in a fascinated half-repulsion of the sardines pressed into gingercake and cans of condensed milk munched after lights out by Enid Blyton’s schoolgirls wondering at the unknown delights of ‘molasses pies – baked in saucers – each with a brown top and crisp, candified edge, which tasted like toffee and lemon-peel, and all sorts of good things mixed up together’ packed by Aunt Izzy for the Carr children and Cecy as a special treat in their first ‘Paradise’ picnic basket of the spring and ‘Debby’s Jumbles’ at the top of the Carr sisters’ Christmas box at the awful ‘Nunnery’ and imagining the blue jellies of ‘The Land of Birthdays’ at the top of ‘The Faraway Tree’ long before such things were readily available online from the USA. Many obvious examples come to mind like the realm of pure sugary madness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory(which actually doesn’t have enough chocolate-based treats in it for me!) or the almost endless contents of Ratty’s picnic basket in The Wind in the Willows but we all have our own specific memories. I am sure you can remember longing to join in the same midnight-feast or picnic, Christmas dinner or birthday cake the characters were tucking into as you read.

I was so excited when I found this book which, unlike Kate Young’s blog, deals exclusively in sharing the secrets of the edible nostalgia of children’s books. This opened a whole new realm of possibilities for me as I discovered that the piece was just one post in Kate Young’s The Little Library Cafe and that I could also find recipes for treats as fantastic as Mr Wonka’s Whipplescrumptious Fudgemallow Delight and Christmas Pavlova from the wonderful Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild.Īs ever, I am late to the party again but on this occasion it’s only because I was having a whale of a time at another, rather similar, party amongst the pages of Jane Brocket’s Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer: A golden treasury of classic treats. A few days ago my husband sent me a link for an article on The Guardian website entitled ‘Food in books: breakfast rolls from The School at the Chalet’.

Turkish Delight & Treasure Hunts by Jane Brocket