A Taste for Books

“Then old Mrs. Rabbit took a basket and her umbrella and went through the wood to the baker’s. She bought a loaf of bread and five currant buns.”

This is a line from one of my favorite books, “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and I can’t help but quote it to myself, or to anyone who cares to listen, every time I bake a batch of sourdough rye currant buns.

During my very brief career as a high school English teacher, I was advised by a veteran teacher that any assigned project would gain students’ cooperation and maybe even excitement so long as food was involved.

That bit of advice comes back to me as I sort through the nearly-empty bedrooms of my grown children and an attic of clutter that includes boxes and bags of children’s books. The great number of food-themed books is suddenly before me – “The Gingerbread Boy,” “Stone Soup,” “Jamie O’Rourke and The Big Potato,” “Rain Makes Applesauce” – to name a few. The entire “Strega Nona” series by Tomie dePaola seems to be based on the love of pasta and bread – and the term “never ending pasta pot” and the baking of an Italian panettone at Christmastime have become both a friendly phrase and an annual tradition in our house because of his books. Some book purchases were made after my children were grown, such as the complete collection of Winnie the Pooh tales – whose enduring quest can be boiled down to two things: honey and friendship. That veteran teacher was right – children (of all ages) have a natural affinity for food.

As a parent, I particularly enjoyed quoting a guilt-instilling passage from my personal favorite, “The Little Red Hen.” This is about a hardworking hen who lives with others who enjoy the fruits of her efforts but none of the hard work. This is what she says, a quote I have memorized from repeated usage: “’All by myself I planted the wheat, I cut the wheat, I took the wheat to the mill to be ground into flour. All by myself I gathered the sticks, I built the fire, I mixed the cake. And all by myself I am going to eat it!’ And so she did, to the very last crumb.”

All children are prone to eating too much of a good thing – as is Peter Rabbit who got carried away in Mr. McGregor’s garden by all the tempting radishes, lettuce, French beans . . . “And feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley.” At nighttime, he was put to bed by his mother and given a tablespoon of chamomile tea – “But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.”  I enjoyed quoting this when one child felt sick (or had tonsils out) and couldn't eat dinner.

“Children are the best readers of genuine literature,” says Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of my favorite writers of both children’s and adult literatures -- categories he frequently blurs or ignores according to his publisher. Singer continues, “The child is still the independent reader who relies on nothing but his own taste (my italics).  Names and authorities mean nothing to him. Long after literature for adults has gone to pieces, books for children will constitute the last vestige of storytelling, logic, faith in the family, in God, and in real humanism . . . "

My children are technically grown, and these tattered childhood books have one by one been moved from the attic and bedrooms to my own personal library – and some, to their rightful place in the kitchen. I have never stopped loving them. I find myself quoting those timeless classics much as a scholar might quote Blake or Keats – if only to myself as I bake the traditional panettone or the occasional batch of currant buns, always to be enjoyed alongside a cup of tea.