Food that sounds great in books but is disappointing in real life

[BlowDryRat]

As a child I was very into reading the Famous Five and begged my mum to buy me ginger beer. It was a disappointing experience. It tasted horrible!

Ditto cakes made with chestnut flour (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase) and the butterbeer at the Harry Potter studio tour.

@PeppermintTea2021.

Avocados in Peru were a revelations, cheap as chips and tasty enough to eat on their own.

Rice, different varieties taste different. I love basmati rice, it does have a taste.

Unpopular opinion: I love Turkish delight, especially Fry's. I don't blame Edmund at all.

Also agreed that palm oil should not be added to chocolate. I know it's cheaper than cocoa butter but the quality has gone down the pan.

In A Vicarage Childhood by Noel Streatfield, which is a memoir of her own childhood, there is a scene when the girls are invited to a birthday party. For some reason that I can't quite remember (is it during Lent or something?) the sisters are ordered by their father not to eat any cakes at the birthday tea. The youngest, naughtiest sister ignores it while the older ones agonise over whether they are allowed the white bread sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.

Someone can come along and tell me what I've got wrong here. But it was an evocative and quite sad little story.

@wildswim That's exactly how I remember it too but I had forgotten the book! Thanks for posting the title.

And yes, it is Lent. I think their father didn't want them to go the party but let them on condition that they didn't eat the party food.

My mum used to leave lent food to our own conscience.

I once made a jam omlette as the Peter Wimsey book Strong Poison made it sound so delicious. It was disgusting.

As a child, I was actually afraid to eat Turkish delight once I'd read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Being older, I remember us eating some of these, but had forgotten jam omelette. We used to have them now and again.
I think that a lot of the cuisine (if you can call it that) was about eating cheaply, with little waste, and from a limited number of ingredients. I do think it's a shame that we have lost these skills.

Surely jam omelette could almost be a pancake if you add a bit of flour and would be much nicer for it!

Surely the jam omelette must have been a souffle omelette? I can't imagine it would work with the ordinary kind.

In a Barbara Pym novel, the heroine is making her tea (i.e. main meal). It was a lamb chop, some peas, and a grilled tomato. That's it. It brought home to me the sheer quantity of what we eat. Even when I was young, cauliflower cheese was a meal, maybe with some peas.
I'm not nostalgic about all this (and I am fat) but it is interesting to see how our attitudes towards food have changed.

yes, I remember it as a souffle omelette

@110APiccadilly

I once made a jam omlette as the Peter Wimsey book Strong Poison made it sound so delicious. It was disgusting.

As a child, I was actually afraid to eat Turkish delight once I'd read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Yes, they also make sweet omelettes in one of the holiday books in Antonia Forest's Marlow series well, they all troop down to the Trennels kitchen and the insufferable Navy brother Giles makes a variety of different flavoured ones, ranging from cheese to rum to jam which sounded very weird to me, as I had only ever come across omelettes as savoury.

We loved bread and milk with sugar on it. Used to have at supper time.Lovely in bed.

I've had sweet omelettes, I'm trying to think where it was now....but I loved it with. WIth Jam. And I don't even like Jam that much. That's just come flooding back as a memory. In a great big sticky woosh.

Yes, they also make sweet omelettes in one of the holiday books in Antonia Forest's Marlow series well, they all troop down to the Trennels kitchen and the insufferable Navy brother Giles makes a variety of different flavoured ones, ranging from cheese to rum to jam which sounded very weird to me, as I had only ever come across omelettes as savoury.

I tried a sweet omelette on the basis of Ann's preference but I wasn't impressed. Mind you, I probably can't cook them the proper French way as Giles preened himself on doing!

A rum omelette sounds too foul to contemplate.

@cateycloggs

I can't remember the book, but the children made a fire and buried potatoes underneath it to cook. And they cooked some kind of meat either on the fire or buried under with the potatoes. The meat came out hard I think, and one the characters said it was good to have something to chew on sometimes. It could it have been Pippi Longstocking... though sounds more like an Enid Blyton... whatever book it was, I used to dream of eating potatoes cooked under a fire with some hard chewy meat on the side.

BaggMcCoys, sorry to go on some more and not from a book but as children we did this on Bonfire Night, always had a fire in the back garden and would bury the potatoes in the base so they would cook during the fireworks when we also had homemade toffee apples and treacle toffee which I remember as delicious probably because that was the only time we had them so a real treat. To eat outside , at night in the cold and dark to the flash and bang of the fireworks was so exciting.

We used to cook potatoes under a bonfire on Guy Fawkes nights. The outside tasted like bitter wood ash which distracted you slightly , but not enough, from the hard uncooked interior. I don’t understand why our parents didn’t start them off inside in the oven of the Rayburn and then transfer them to the bonfire when cooked.

Back to food in books, I liked school stories where the characters had tuck boxes filled with treats from home like Dundee cakes and quite frequently if I recall, tins of sardines. The cakes I can understand, but imagine the mess and lingering stink of tinned sardines, oil dripping everywhere, a tin to dispose of .......

I don’t suppose modern day boarding schools allow tuck boxes, or if they do they are filled with plain rice cakes and baby bel.

Whenever I would read about a “wonderful spread” produced from a knapsack in Famous Five books, I’d think: “ooh a delicious sumptuous banquet!” The “delicious meal” was usually along the lines of:
“Slices of bread and butter, an egg each, Aunt Fanny’s famous rock cakes, Mrs Kindly-Farmer’s home-baked plum loaf & lashings of ginger beer”.

But reading it again as an adult and actually thinking about what a meal of these things entails it’s rather disappointing. Even my 9yo comments on what an unbalanced meal it is and asks how the 5 could’ve stayed alive in a lighthouse for a week with fizzy pop as their only source of fluids.

@LApprentiSorcier

Yes, they also make sweet omelettes in one of the holiday books in Antonia Forest's Marlow series well, they all troop down to the Trennels kitchen and the insufferable Navy brother Giles makes a variety of different flavoured ones, ranging from cheese to rum to jam which sounded very weird to me, as I had only ever come across omelettes as savoury.

I tried a sweet omelette on the basis of Ann's preference but I wasn't impressed. Mind you, I probably can't cook them the proper French way as Giles preened himself on doing!

A rum omelette sounds too foul to contemplate.

Yes, it was in Run Away Home. Peter hated the rum omelette, so Giles ate it instead.

I was coming on to say any of Enid Blyton’s spreads!

Yes, it was in Run Away Home. Peter hated the rum omelette, so Giles ate it instead.

"Would you mind if I spread this delicious rum omelette with jam?"

So tactful.

A rum omelette eeeeooo!😵

Good grief, it's an ordinary French omelette with sugar in it, flamed with rum at the end!

app.ckbk.com/recipe/cook61886c09s001ss003sss002r004/rum-omelette

[quote Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]Good grief, it's an ordinary French omelette with sugar in it, flamed with rum at the end!

app.ckbk.com/recipe/cook61886c09s001ss003sss002r004/rum-omelette[/quote]
Bleurgh. I think I'll stick to cheese.

@Neap I’m glad you agree that Giles is insufferable - he is. I once caused some kind of furore on a fan group by calling him a tool in one of my posts. Thought I was about to bring on WW3.