I don’t know why it is that children’s books manage to talk about food so much more toothsomely than books for adults, but it is a plain fact that they do. This may be because children are innocent of the misery that goes into planning a dinner party for six people with mutually exclusive dietary tolerances, or the daily grind of trying to feed several equally intolerant tiny humans who loved the soup yesterday that they won’t touch today, not to mention the unique horror of assembling ingredients in an economic environment that claims your lack of home ownership is due to your extravagance with avocados. It may be because we, the adults, are not having any fun, fun being the prerogative of children and the occasional mythically lavish barbecue or clambake. (No one has ever invited me to a clambake, nor a crawfish boil, nor the kind of barbecue where they roast a whole pig; the one time I was invited to a wedding with a whole pig on the menu, the bride and groom were the kind of enthusiastic wide-eyed people who thought you could start digging the pit two hours before dinnertime.)

Actually, I don’t think it has to do with innocence at all. In children’s books, the context in which delicious things are eaten is understood instantly to be a significant contributor to the pleasure at hand. This is true whether it’s the succulent ham-and-egg pie left by a thoughtful neighbor in Danny the Champion of the World one hungry afternoon, or one of the great lavish summer feasts that made the Redwall books worth reading and which every child of my generation would probably have done murder to attend. (Some of the dishes at those fabled feasts are horrifying upon a moment’s consideration – turnip and beetroot pie? – but the words “strawberry cordial” and “summercream pudding” will cause many a millennial eye to glaze in a dangerously Proustian manner. What is summercream? It doesn’t matter; we wanted it.)

The actual foodstuffs have a magic quality, but that quality is inextricable from the setting of the story. It is not merely that we long to taste Turkish Delight (and, indeed, the number of people who recall their first actual taste of the stuff with profound disappointment are legion); it is that we want to be in the land of endless snow, freezing on a reindeer-drawn sleigh, being warmed down to our toes with a foaming hot drink in a jeweled goblet and then eating a beribboned box of delicious candy all by ourselves. The pleasure of a Redwall feast is the glory of the whole; what we want is to stuff ourselves sick with greengage dumplings in the orchard with a bunch of giggling baby squirrels. Greengage dumplings alone, eaten at the table, sound rather lumpy and pale in comparison.

Certain food writers do seem to understand this difference; many of them, unfortunately, are long since dead, and therefore can’t be relied upon to contribute to the contemporary canon. Writers like Bemelmans and MFK Fisher manage to memorialize the moment of eating, especially the moments where something fairly ordinary (little roast chickens, a bunch of hothouse grapes) seems to turn strangely glimmering and superfine. They, like most children’s authors, know that it is not sufficient to simply pile up a lot of descriptive words like “luscious” and “zingy” and hope that the reader will be transported on the wings of adjectives; they grasp the essential fact, which is that what makes a dish or a meal memorable is, in equal parts, the why and the when of its eating, not only the what. The disappointment of my first taste of Turkish Delight was not only that it was cloyingly sticky, it was that I did not in any way feel as if I was in Narnia while eating it. I wanted to be transported, but I was not. If it had been snowing at the time, quite possibly I would have felt better about the whole thing.

What children’s books do is make you want to be there. They are evocative, not descriptive.

“Perhaps something hot to drink?” said the Queen. “Should you like that?”

“Yes please, your Majesty,” said Edmund, whose teeth were chattering.

The Queen took from somewhere among her wrappings a very small bottle which looked as if it were made of copper. Then, holding out her arm, she let one drop fall from it onto the snow beside the sledge. Edmund saw the drop for a second in mid-air, shining like a diamond. But the moment it touched the snow there was a hissing sound and there stood a jeweled cup full of something that steamed. The dwarf immediately took this and handed it to Edmund with a bow and a smile; not a very nice smile. Edmund felt much better as he began to sip the hot drink. It was something he had never tasted before, very sweet and foamy and creamy, and it warmed him right down to his toes.

“It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating,” said the Queen presently. “What would you like best to eat?”

“Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty,” said Edmund.

The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle onto the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. He was quite warm now, and very comfortable.

Adult writing about food, on the other hand, generally tends these days to be descriptive rather than evocative. When I read food bloggers waxing lyrical over the importance of this doughnut recipe to their family Easter, I do not have the least desire to be transported into what sounds to me like the strained photo on a Christmas postcard glimpsed on someone else’s fridge. The prose in celebrity-chef cookbooks reads to me like haute couture applied to vegetables. Novels rarely mention food at all, although there seems to be a vogue for describing people preparing food as they talk about something else, as if it was very important to the author that you don’t forget they have hands.

Food can certainly be a wonderful way to make an imaginary world seem vivid and alive, but only if it makes you actually want to go there. When restaurant critics and most food writers describe a dish, I feel rather as if I was reading someone else’s personal erotica, and I have a tendency to want to edge gently away. For example, Ruth Reichl on Le Cirque: “The first course, sauteed foie gras with white peaches, is so good that the memory of it carries us through most of the meal. The sweet, soft fruit is a brilliant pairing with the rich meat. I like the next course, too, curried tuna tartar. Encircling the silky chopped fish, which has just the perfect touch of spice, is a lovely mosaic of radish slices.” To me this is the equivalent of overhearing someone describe last night’s dream in excruciating detail, or the kind of male writer who describes their heroine as having big green eyes and a perfect heart-shaped face; any minute now I’m going to hear about her pert nipples. 

I am aware that many people like this sort of thing. (After all, EL James’ internet erotica turned her into a millionaire.) But this is fantasy for adults, which is not really about how you would like the world to be so much as it is about how you would like your own life to be. This may not seem like an important distinction, but the longing to have a lot more money and a personal friendship with Alice Waters is categorically not the same as the childhood fantasy of a world where you can battle evil rodents and still be home in time for tea.

Delight, for adults, is not an inherent quality of the world; it is something you buy, like an ecovacation or blinis with caviar, and you earn access to it through either moral superiority or dutiful hard work. The childhood fantasy, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on you being richer, sexier, or more important. It depends solely upon the stubborn belief that the world itself is full of delight. Adults think they know better, and tend to dismiss this belief as naïve and childish. But this is odd, because children know perfectly well that adults can be brutal and life isn’t fair. The landscape of children’s stories is not all sunshine and roses, and the tasty moments are very often set against a backdrop of peril and villainy that must be navigated, with the treats embedded as a kind of refuge or restorative. The difference is simply that in children’s stories, a vivid and wonderful world really is possible, if only you know where to look. All the mouthwatering foods in children’s stories function as a kind of glimmering signpost or signal that you’re in the right place; Oz is just past the land where the lunchbox trees grow.

Stories for adults, on the other hand, tend to position good food in one of two ways: either it’s something you luck into via privilege and magnanimously tell everyone else about so they can at least taste the shadow of all those moules and truites and morilles, or else it’s something you achieve by the sweat of your brow, clever budgeting, and your unrelenting efforts to learn how to fry chicken like your grandma did. Gone is the sense of the picnic, the feast, the delicious simple supper as a fact of life as it might be lived; gone is the sense of eating something wonderful as an indicator that the universe, no matter how grim and full of danger, holds equally its marvels and delights.

In children’s stories, a picnic or a feast or even bread and jam are either rightfully yours by reason of your existing at all and serve merely to heighten an already-delightful freedom, or else they are your just reward for braving a frightening and threatening world. (CS Lewis tells us that Edmund is to be punished for his greed and disloyalty, but it’s hard not to feel as if the hot drink and the Turkish Delight are experiences worth betraying your sister for.) Adam Gopnik, remembering his first sense of Paris as glimpsed in the children’s book The Red Balloon, describes this quality exactly:

Curiously, [the Paris of the book] was neither a cozy nor a charming landscape. The Parisian grownups all treated Pascal, the boy, with a severity bordering on outright cruelty. His mother tosses the balloon right out of the Haussmannian apartment; the bus conductor shakes his head and finger and refuses to allow the balloon on the tram; the principal of the school locks him in a shed for bringing the balloon to class. The only genuine pleasure I recall that he finds in this unsmiling and rainy universe is when he leaves the balloon outside a tempting-looking bakery and goes in to buy a cake. The insouciance with which he does this – cake as a right, not a pleasure – impressed me a lot. A scowling gray universe relieved by pastry: this was my first impression of Paris, and of them all, it was not the farthest from the truth.

Quite possibly Paris retains its magic for many people precisely because it is, somehow, still like it is in books, and this includes the food. You can wander into almost any shop and buy superlative croissants and fresh bread and hot chocolate and even a terrine du lapin for a very small sum. You can picnic on the edge of a fountain with a bottle of wine and a roast chicken for the rough equivalent cost of a McDonald’s hamburger. The stones glow, the water splashes, the bread is warm; it’s like you’ve stepped right into Madeline. This gives the very pleasing feeling that the world of children’s stories is a place that you can get to after all, and adulthood be damned.

There are other ways to get there, and it’s worth looking for them when you can. The trick is to find the opportunity. In The Great Mouse Detective, for example, our tiny heroes are served cheese crumpets by the fire by the pleasant, bustling Mrs. Judson. (Mrs. Judson is the sort of person in books that many children desperately wish had been part of their own upbringing, even if one’s own parents were perfectly satisfactory. I have never actually met anyone remotely like Mrs. Judson and her pleasant, bustling ilk; they, like the crumpets, are a delicious fantasy to entice you into the world of the story.)

Many people have shared the observation that these crumpets are clearly not crumpets at all; crumpets are flat things with little holes in them for soaking up butter, and they are made with a griddle or frying pan, whereas Mrs. Judson’s creations are manifestly muffin-shaped. I do not point this out in order to be didactic, but to merely to emphasize what seems to me to be an important fact: the words cheese crumpets are infinitely more evocative, to an American child at least, of the fabled delights of British teatime. “Teatime” is a magic word to whole generations of American children, most of whom think that sitting by the fire with a tray of assorted cakes every afternoon beats the hell out of coming home to graham crackers and homework. Anyway, muffins are dull. Crumpets sound delightful, especially if you have never actually had one.

For most children, eating cheese crumpets by Basil’s cozy hearth is an image of the world as it should be, but rarely is. As an adult, it is much easier to actually have this kind of experience, but thanks to various social pressures we usually forget to try. This is a shame, because it is not generally expensive; all it really requires is your determination to give it (and yourself) your full attention and the better part of your imagination.

My husband & I recently rewatched The Great Mouse Detective (when one’s soul has a chill, which is easy in this chilling era, revisiting pleasurable children’s stories is the spiritual equivalent of a hot water bottle), and it occurred to us that we now possess a handsome wood-burning stove. As it was a rainy winter night, we proposed to try and reproduce at least a fleeting glimpse of the delights to be had in Basil’s sitting room. Fortunately there exists a blog whose author had also noted the extreme uncrumpetness of the cheese crumpets, and provided two recipes: one for the literal reality of cheese crumpets – an acknowledged disappointment – and one for the spiritual reality, which is basically shaped like a muffin but is made primarily of cheese. It looks exactly right, and it tastes just the way we had imagined. (This is a kind of satisfaction that one rarely encounters as an adult, as anyone who has tried to literally fulfil a sexual fantasy has probably discovered.)

However, it is not quite enough to simply bake these muffins and stuff one in your mouth to be transported wholly into a less dull and ordinary world. The experience of Mrs. Judson’s cheese crumpets is inextricable from eating them before the fire while a storm beats on the dark and rain-slashed windows. The point is to do what Basil and his companions do, which is take pleasure and refuge in a cup of tea. If you give yourself the muffins but not the lazy indolence of enjoying them companionably on a cold night, you will sorely disappoint your childhood self, who wanted not warm carbohydrates but a moment in which plodding, gray, ordinary time melted away into something much better.  (As a side note, if you haven’t got a fire, a hot water bottle and a quilt will do.)

As it happens, in the film Basil drags everyone off before they have time to properly enjoy themselves. He can afford to do this because he has that sitting room to put his feet up in all the time; he, unlike the rest of us, lives there. But if we can’t live there, we can at least visit now and then. The door is not as hard to find as we might think. Anyway, we owe it to Mrs. Judson. Someone should eat those crumpets while they’re hot.

MRS JUDSON’S CHEESE CRUMPETS

Ingredients:

• ¼ cup butter
• 1 ½ cups flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 ½ tablespoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 3 cups grated cheese (the absolute best is a mixture of sharp cheddar and smoked gouda)
• 1 cup milk and 1 egg, both preferably at room temperature

Preheat oven to 375°F. Melt butter. In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, then mix in cheese. In another bowl, stir together the egg, milk, and melted butter. Pour liquid ingredients into dry ingredients, mix thoroughly, and pour into greased muffin tins. Bake for 20 minutes or so until golden brown. Serve warm.

(This recipe, slightly modified, is from Cartoon Cuisine.)