Dreams of Plenty - or - What Do "The Little White Horse" and "Brideshead Revisited" Have in Common?

“Have no fear, young Mistress” came Marmaduke’s voice soothingly behind her. “There is enough. There is sufficient plum cake, saffron cake, cherry cake, iced fairy cakes, eclairs, gingerbread, meringues, syllabub, almond fingers, rock cakes, chocolate cakes, parkin, cream horns, Devonshire splits, Cornish pasty, jam sandwiches, lemon-curd sandwiches, cinnamon toast and honey toast to feed twenty and more.”

 Hungry? Elizabeth Goudge probably was when she wrote that in food-rationed, fuel-rationed, under siege England during WWII. At the same time as she was writing this longing dream of luxury food in “The Little White Horse”, Evelyn Waugh was sitting in a Devonshire hotel banging out “Brideshead Revisited”, probably on a diet enriched by a few extra black-market eggs and almost certainly drinking more claret and more cocktails, but longing in a similar vein for the days of champagne, white bread, plover’s eggs and lobster Newburg

Voluptuous descriptions of food and feasts aren’t limited to books written during the war. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was published in 1950 when sugar, sweets (candy, lollies), canned and dried fruits, many forms of meat and even that staple of British life, tea, were still rationed. This goes someway to towards explaining both Edmund’s selling-out for a large box of Turkish Delight and the occasional purple passage where Lewis rapsodises “ .. it was a wonderful tea. There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled for each of them (!) and then sardines on toast and then buttered toast and then toast with honey and then a sugar topped cake.”

Even books ostensibly set in reality, written during the period of food rationing are suffused with idealised visions of ever-available food. In Enid Blyton’s “Five Find-Outers”, for instance, written in the 40s and 50s, the Find-Outers are constantly swilling lemonade and swigging ginger-beer or popping into tea-shops, the proprietors of which proffer the desired plates laden with macaroons as they enter.

I can imagine that it was a form of wish-fulfillment for the authors, writing about sweet, non-available food, but I wonder what it was like to read these books as a child living in wartime or austerity. Was it torturous or were the descriptions simply too fantastic, too unreal and so a table laden with cake and jam-sandwiches was as much a fairy-tale as a unicorn and a tame lion?