"Cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast..."

Out of all the books I have read and collected throughout my life, I find that the ones that I am constantly drawn back to, the ones I get most excited about, are all the books I used to read as a child. Books that, when opened, would thrust me into magical worlds full of sorcerers and minotaurs, monsters and fairies, adventures and mischief and much more. These stories thrilled me as a child and continue to delight me now, and a big part of the reason for this continued return to the bookshelves of my ten year old self is, I believe,  the food that these stories entwine within their pages. There is something primal with our relationship with food, something, so inherently basic, that even descriptions of food on the page, can cause us to recreate that food so exactly within our minds that we can taste it. This recreation transforms the act of reading into a physical act, acting on desire, want, inducing hunger, this strengthens our experiance of the story that we are reading, creating memories that will forever be attached to the food described. To this day, I can't walk past Turkish Delight without recalling the hours I spent as a child trying to force my way through the back of my wardrobe. Gingerbread reminds me of breadcrumbs and, to my mind, chocolate is never quite good enough anymore, purely through lack of oompa-loompa involvement. Throughout the course of this blog I want to explore the connection between children's literature and food. Each post will tackle a different topic, magical food, feasts, chocolate etc, and as I try and work my way through the stories that include them, I might even try out a few recipes along the way...