Growing up on a staple of Enid Blyton’s books, I now believe that she was a silent influencer of how my interest in food developed.
Guest post by Bindu Gopal Rao
Growing up in the 1980’s in Hyderabad, when there was no Internet or even television for a large part of my initial schooling years, my most favorite pastime was reading books and one author who I devoured (no pun intended) was Enid Blyton. I was lucky that a library was hop, skip, and jump away and a librarian who faithfully stocked up the list of books I wanted and ensured that a book was never too far away. For someone who grew up on her novels as a child, it was her description of food in her quintessential style that has stayed with me always.
Naturally a series that I read completely was Famous Five and I enjoyed how she described their picnic baskets having “tomato sandwiches, lemonade, tinned sardines, melt-in-the-mouth shortbread, lettuces, radishes, Nestlé milk, ginger beer, tins of pineapple chunks, squares of chocolate.” In fact, I would always read her when I was eating (probably not a good habit) but I think it was what triggered my love affair with food.
Being from a simple South Indian family, none of what she described was what I ate and that piqued my imagination early on. Hooked on to her writing, I read her other series on Malory Towers and St Clare’s which were Blyton’s chronicles of her stint at boarding school and yet again it was her description of match time tea and jammy buns and midnight feasts that remain a distinct memory.
And despite seeming alien, the food always made a connect as probably at the end of the day it was always about simple, local food that was available and accessible. So, whether it was hot, new-made scones, strawberry jam, bread and butter, ginger buns, shortbread biscuits, chocolate sponge with cream filling, potatoes baked in their jackets or hard-boiled eggs with a screw of salt, it always managed to feel like it was within reach.
The best part was all the food she described was always farm-fresh and home-baked. She even made vegetables seem glamorous and lust worthy whether it was lettuce, tomatoes, onions, radishes, mustard, and carrots that made their way into salads and sandwiches. Sample this, “lashings of hard-boiled eggs and tureen of potatoes with melted butter, scattered with parsley. Bottles of home-made salad cream and cream cheese. Three big plates of well buttered slices of bread, put out apricot jam, raspberry, and strawberry, and a selection of home-made buns.” She always mentioned “ice creams, lemonade, orangeade, lime juice, grapefruit juice and ginger beer in village shops.”
And while I managed to eat most of the food she described much later, it was the scones I had in a layover at Paris airport with clotted cream that brought the hidden food memories back in a rush. I also started baking extensively during the pandemic induced lockdowns and the key philosophy was always to use simple ingredients, available at home as Blyton would have approved. And soon enough, I had baked bread starting from a simple one to variants like finger millet and whole wheat, focaccia, and garlic bread too. Even my cakes became experimental, and I moved from chocolate cakes to fruit cakes – strawberry and mango, seasonal fruits that were chopped and added to the cake batter.
And somewhere on this journey, I have Blyton to thank for the making the memories of food seem so magical then. And if there is one lesson that I learnt must be that food does not have to be complex, what matters is cooking using what you have in your kitchen larder and see the happiness unfold. And if you need inspiration, just grab an Enid Blyton, it is bound to take out the blues out of your life!
