Beth’s Reviews > St Clare's Collection 1: Books 1-3 > Status Update

Oh, the school books by Enid Blyton. I am afraid to reread them but I did love those so when I was a kid... And the midnight feasts, the food (if not revised?) would be so boring to us now, but oh but the idea of it...

Hi Hirondelle! I read through some portion of the wikipedia article about Blyton, and it was mentioned that revisions have been made over the years to scrub out things like spanking, and modernize some terms. Not something I'm qualified to comment on, either from the standpoint of what is appropriate for modern children to read, or what content might have been changed in this collection specifically.

I read the midnight feast portion of the first St. Clare's book at lunch today, and the foods seemed like they were appropriate to the 1940s: ginger beer in capped bottles, a couple of cakes, condensed milk in a can, sardines on buttered bread, a meat pie, and some biscuits one of the girls had left over, are what I can remember.

That is the menu I remember, and how weird it seemed to me back then (I quite like tinned sardines now, but it was an adult thing!). I know the books were revised (so was Agatha Christie which I can kind of understand and so was Ursula K. LeGuin which I do not understand at all), and I wondered if they had changed the food to more immediate food.

I like food and cooking, and I always notice what characters are eating and it's interesting to me when reading older fiction to spot trends (older could be circa 2000s lol, all the dried tomato) or just think a bit of what foodstuffs were available and what people ate. I read Swallows and Amazons (even older) and was shocked at how boring and "poor" their diet was, but of course it made sense.