Ana is reading her way through The Secret Garden right now.

[conuly]

I made the choice to read it to them (still doing that, a bit more slowly than Ana) even though it's a. classist b. a bit full of casual racism and c. full of dialect, because I figure that, as it's a classic of children's literature, they're probably going to be exposed to it sooner or later and I might as well be there to tone it down.

Also, it gave me an excuse to look up Yorkshire dialects on Youtube, and that's always fun.

I'm kinda annoyed by this because if she hadn't been reading The Secret Garden I would've thrust A Tale of Time City into her hands. I've just re-found the book on my shelf.

Gosh, I love that book. If you'll only read one fantastical story about British evacuees during the Second World War, make it this one. Narnia, Schmarnia. I wake up nights drooling over thoughts of Sam's butter pie. If only somebody could recreate that so I could eat it in real life. TVTropes compares it to lava cake, but those are generally chocolate, aren't they? Butter pie is, um, buttery.

...

I admit it, this is a not-so-veiled request for baking help. H E L P ! If anybody has any idea where to start there, I'll be eternally grateful. I'm sure it'd be just the thing for a sick Ana.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

Butter tarts:
http://papersky.livejournal.com/58540.html

[conuly]

Nope, these are more gooey on the inside.

[conuly]

Though sugar pie, which that is, is delish.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I've never seen anything wrong with people learning that classism and racism have existed, or that to some extent that they exist now. Bad things happen, in both reality and fiction. A book may present them as normal, and the fact that it does so is useful information. That doesn't mean you accept all facts and attitudes in the book as Right - you never do that, with any source of information!

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of Butter Pie before, but Wikipedia (among other places) tells me that it's a Lancashire dish intended for meat-free Fridays.
This looks easy enough:
http://lancashire.greatbritishlife.co.uk/article/lancashire-recipes--butter-pie-35515/
and others I've found are very similar.

[conuly]

It's not the same thing. Theirs is hot on the inside, cold - almost like ice cream - on the inside, and gooey.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Hot on the inside, or cold on the inside? I'm assuming one or the other is a typo.

[conuly]

Cold on the outside!

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK. The reverse Baked Alaska trick. I've never done this myself, but it was one of the "magic" things done when microwaves first became popular. You have a filling that's very liquid and sugary on the inside, so it absorbs microwave energy much more than the outside - the version I've heard of involved jam, and if you stabbed it, you might get a spurt of boiling jam, while the icecream on the outside stayed solid.
Sorry, I don't have a recipe, and it'll depend on your microwave anyway, but that's the idea.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I just posted a link to a butter pie recipe for you, and apparently it's been marked as spam for some reason????

[conuly]

LJ automatically marks as spam any comments with links.

[erisiansaint]

I looked up butter tarts last week, (I got to try them at the local British bakery) and the pastry is a very short shortcrust pastry and the filling was eggs, butter, brown sugar, vanilla and golden raisins.

Yorkshire Pudding is a lot easier and they're delicious: a cup of flour, 2 large eggs, half a cup of water, half a cup of milk and a pinch of salt.

Preheat the oven to 425.
Mix the flour and salt. Add in the milk, then beat the eggs and add those. Mix. Add water. Mix until large, coin-sized bubbles appear. Put butter or bacon grease into the bottom of a muffin tin, and then stick it into the oven until the grease is melted. Take it out, fill each cup about halfway with your batter, put it back in. Bake for 15 minutes, turn the oven down to 375, and bake for another half hour. WHen you take it out, stick a knife in the hollow of each pudding, (there'll be a depression in each one, they puff up over the muffin tins, like popovers,) to release the steam.

Each one will be mostly hollow inside and make a great vehicle for taco meat or roast beef and gravy or butter & jam or stewed up vegetables. (In Yorkshire, they developed them to eat before the real Sunday meal of roast beef, and instead of muffin tins, they'd make them in one big pan. They'd eat them with gravy before the main portion of the meal, so they wouldn't fill up on the more expensive meat.)

And btw, keep James Herriot books in mind, for later years. (I read them around 12 or 13.) They're filled with food and animals, being the adventures of a Scottish veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Oh yum; that sounds so good! Gotta love Yorkshire pudding!

[marveen.livejournal.com]

This. I've had butter pie (in high school on a trip to Victoria, BC) and ti reminded me of chess pie with raisins.

I also agree that racism, classism, etc. are part of history and nothing is gained by shielding children from it. (Explain that Things Don't Work That Way Anymore re: racism and that classism is still a problem, it just expresses differently.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

ROFL, I read The Secret Garden in 7th Grade, and as a result I wrote all my notes for Science class in Yorkshire dialect, or my best attempt at it from having read the book. My Science teacher was bemused when he found out about this, and I had no reasonable explanation - it just seemed like the thing to do at the time, y'know? I was enamoured of the book and the dialect; I had to write the Science notes; why not make life more interesting by combining the two? They were MY notes, tha ken, an' nowt no business o' his.

Meh, classism, racism: welcome to Victorian Britain, right? I love it that Martha sets Mary straight from the start: "a great girl like thee canna dress thyself?!" - the servants in Yorkshire are not very servile; in fact they seem to be a pretty forthright lot. There's a reason for that, though the book doesn't get into it: as isolated as Yorkshire is, one can't be sacking good help for being 'uppity', because then whom will one hire in their place? Especially since everyone in the local village is related to everyone else, and by long, fiercely-held tradition they're both fanatically loyal and pretty-much equally uppity. Better free speech in the kitchen than watery pudding and overdone beef in the dining room, eh?

The main point of the book is that the two sickly, beastly, spoiled-rotten, unloved and unloveable orphans of unbelievable privilege become healthy, happy, reasonably courteous children through the kindness and aid of the young servants, and through fresh air, exercise, simple wholesome food and caring for the garden. The book is set in an era where what we now call 'classism' was the unquestioned norm, but the story itself calls class assumptions into question. Who'll have more real liberty in her life as a grown woman, Mary or Martha? (Ignoring the fact that that would have been just in time for WWI, which changed everything.)

Your girls are probably too young for it, but did you ever see the movie 'The Others'? There's an interesting Halloweeny contrast with 'The Secret Garden'.

I really think Pippi Longstocking had the final word on the Servant Problem: "SHE NEVER SWEPT UNDER THE BEDS!"

[alessandriana.livejournal.com]

I have always wanted butter pie... *sigh*