On Kaffee und Kuchen, Midnight Feasts, and the Food of British School Stories

Kaffee und Brotchen fur meine Fruhstuck

I've loved British school-stories since I was in elementary school when I discovered a couple volumes of Enid Blyton's St Clare's series in one of the pocket libraries of my grandmother's house in Paranaque. For a child stuck in the mundane world of a sectarian day-school in the Philippines, it made a fascinating escape into another world and in another time. 

For one thing, the British school-stories I read in my childhood were written in a completely different era from the one I was born in and grew up in. The first of the St Clare's books was published in 1941 - the Second World War was in its earliest phase and the book The Twins of St Clare's provided much-needed distraction for youngsters who lived their childhood with the spectre of ruin and loss flying directly overhead. 

For another, the scholastic experience was totally different from the Catholic school routine of the Philippines in the late 20th century. The dressing bell would ring at around six in the morning; prayers at whichever denominational chapel would follow. Breakfast, where the headmistress would make announcements while the girls and their teachers tucked into the first meal of the day, would be followed by classroom lessons. Dinner would be at midday followed by games [sports] practise, then tea (the last meal of the day), and preparation till bedtime. This was definitely not the lessons, recess, more lessons, luncheon, and more lessons routine we did in the Eighties' and Nineties'.

A nice example of sausages and mash from Draft Gastropub

Food in the World of Enid Blyton

Thirdly, of course, was the food. In Blyton's world, girls began the day with a hearty collation of oat porridge, buttered toast, scrambled eggs, and milky tea. At noon, the girls would have dinner, their most substantial meal of the day. Dinner was also when most schools entertained visitors, particularly schools they competed against in sports like hockey, tennis, cricket, and lacrosse. 

The first form were excited. The girls from the day-school were coming to lunch and they had to entertain them. Dinner was to be sausages and mashed potatoes, with treacle pudding to follow, a very favourite meal.  - from The Twins at St Clare's

With sport or handwork (think Work Education in the Philippine context circa the late Eighties'; handicrafts and gardening, mostly) in the afternoons, tea needed to be a substantial affair to satisfy teen-aged appetites. Diet food as we know it today never figured in Blyton's imagination; girls were fed mugs of warm milk or cocoa (likely manufactured by Bournville, the company that eventually became Cadbury), thickly-cut bread spread with butter, jam, or potted meat. The two latter spreads were usually kept in stock by the school kitchen, but girls who received weekly care packages from home would share their pots of jam, jelly, and curd with the rest of their class. 

Tea fare would further be supplemented by any cakes or biscuits sent to or brought by the girls in their tuck-baskets, so it wasn't quite a scanty meal. Girls from wealthier families could also share delicacies like anchovy paste (Fifth Formers at St Clare's) or fresh fruit in season like cherries (Claudine at St Clare's.) That was usually the last meal of the day, but young appetites being hearty, there would always be the temptation at least once a term to hold a midnight feast.

Tuck-boxes probably aren't as lavish as this one from Mubarak's of London, but you get the picture...

Midnight feasts were something that really fascinated me as a kid. Being in a day school meant that we all went home at the end of the day. Even on retreats, we were expected to be asleep by midnight and teachers or student auxiliaries would make the rounds of the retreat house dorms to see if we were all asleep.

Such was also the case at St Clare's and Blyton's other school setting Malory Towers, but the high-spirited (and hungry) girls managed to find a way to bend, even break, the rules for a spot of late-night nosh.

“Let’s have a midnight feast! We once had one at Redroofs, before we were head-girls. I don’t know why food tastes so much nicer in the middle of the night than in the daytime, but it does!" - from The Twins at St Clare's

The girls would buy extra food from nearby village stores as their respective contributions to the communal spread. It was usually made up of both sweet and savoury things - often in hair-raising,even sick-making combinations. Consider the things that have featured in most of Blyton's school stories from 1941 to 1951:

• Sardines in tomato sauce;
• Bars or boxes of chocolate;
• Cakes (the big ones, not niminy-piminy fairy cakes) ranging from humble gingerbread and Victoria sponges to rich chocolate cakes and elaborately iced confections resplendent with marzipan and sugar roses;
• Ginger beer;
• Raised pork pies;
• Tinned goods like pineapple chunks, prawns, and even evaporated milk;
• Slices of bread and butter purloined from the school tea table;
• Sweets of all sorts, including boiled sweets [hard candies] and chocolate-coated peppermint creams; and
• Fizzy lemonade.

Blyton describes one feast wherein the girls eat everything, coming up with some seriously unholy pairings in the annals of literary gastronomy:

They ate everything. Carlotta even ate sardines and pine-apple together. Alison tried prawns dipped in ginger-beer, which Pat and Isabel said were “simply super”, but they made her feel sick taken that way. However, the others didn’t mind, and mixed all the food together with surprising results. 

“Nobody would dream that sardines pressed into ginger-bread cake would taste so nice,” said Janet. “My brother told me that and I didn’t believe him. But it’s true.” - from Second Form at St Clare's

Small wonder then that Matron would dose those with sensitive bellies with castor oil the next day!

But both St Clare's and Malory Towers were not necessarily descriptive of the gastronomic culture of their era. They seemed more like aspirational fantasies - a taste of much-missed normalcy - in a Britain scorched by The Blitz of London and subjected to the rationing of necessary comestibles, the removal of children from urban areas to the countryside, and the need to keep an ear and eye out for air raids. Indeed, if you read both series, not the faintest shadow of war and its privations can be seen.

The distinction of presenting a realistic look at the life of the British schoolgirl in the decades running between the Twenties' and the Sixties' belongs to Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer's Chalet School books.

Food in the World of Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer

Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer is not a name that rings a bell among most of those who love school-stories. This is because, unlike Blyton's work, The Chalet School series has been out of print for a very long time. Fortunately, as these have passed into the public domain in recent years, they are books worth discovering, reading through, and savouring in more ways than one.

Not necessarily a fancy bread-twist or one of Grossmutter Marani's honey and nut cakes, but it will suffice

The first book published in 1925, The School at the Chalet, opens with a young woman in Cornwall named Madge Bettany who decides to haul up the stakes and set up a school in the Austrian Tirol to support herself and her sickly younger sister Joey while their brother Dick is serving in the British Forestry Service in India.

The end result is a more cosmopolitan school than either of the ones Blyton created. Here, British girls rubbed elbows with daughters of Austrian nobles and burghers, French academics, even those of journalists and authors of different nations. The establishment of a sanatorium on the neighbouring Sonnalpe also meant that the curriculum and regimen at the school was carefully monitored by medical professionals with an eye towards preventing or managing tuberculosis (which was, alas, prevalent at the time), or helping particularly frail girls improve and grow into adulthood.

Establishing a school in a different country also meant a change in terms of diet and the schedule of meals, something which some British girls found disconcerting:

Sitting at the table she shared with Mdlle Berné and Miss Norton the Head watched the girls as they sat down to the usual Continental breakfast of coffee, hot rolls, butter and jam. She had noted discontent over it the morning before, but in Tirol the school had followed the custom of the country and it had been decided to do the same here...

She saw two or three faces fall as the girls realized that there was to be no bacon, fish or eggs; but most of them held their tongues. Only Mary Wormald, youngest in the school and formerly an ornament of Dulverley High School, voiced her dissatisfaction.

“I don’t call this [breakfast,]” she grumbled, as she sweetened her coffee liberally. “Is this all we’re to have?” - from The Chalet School in the Oberland

In the first fourteen books of the series, the school is located in Tiernsee, Austria; hence, the school referred to breakfast, lunch, and dinner by their German terms: Frushstuck, Mittagessen, and Abendessen. Kaffee und Kuchen - literally coffee and cake - took the place of  afternoon tea and was, consequently, also more substantial. Aside from these four meals, girls were also given a glass of milk at mid-morning break.

The descriptions Brent-Dyer gives of the food are mouth-watering, as if you were sitting at table yourself with the characters. She writes glowingly of kalbsbraten [roast veal], apfeltorte [a plush cake made with stewed apples], chicken noodle soup to warm students up in autumn, and French patisseries that would allow diners to walk up to a buffet of savouries and everything from eclairs to religieuses. Reading about it all makes one feel like they were taking a gastronomic tour of the Continent whilst attending a rather swish boarding school.

However, there is a marked change in the tone of Brent-Dyer's writing between 1940 which saw the release of The Chalet School in Exile and early 1952. The author did not sugar-coat her descriptions of the Nazi takeover of Austria - the repugnant Anschluss - in March 1938: the tone shifts from happy schooldays to sheer terror as the Jews in the neighbouring towns are either arrested or executed by mob rule, Catholic churches are desecrated, schools and hospitals are forcefully requisitioned by the new regime, and non-Germans are ordered to leave town or be incarcerated in concentration camps.

Between The Chalet School in Exile and the eighteenth book in the series - Gay from China at the Chalet School - released in 1944, the school moves first to Guernsey, then to Wales. As a way of protesting the war, it gives up the use of German as one of its languages of instruction, as well as the use of German terms for meals. Likewise, we see the way schools were drafted to boost the domestic food supply in Great Britain in the war years.

Gardening was included in the lessons, for, as Miss Wilson had pointed out, it might be a vital matter to the nation. So one day in the week, each form spent at least two hours learning all about soils, and fertilisers, and the habits of various plants. In wet weather, they were to go in for cold-house work, potting, and other important details. - from The Chalet School in Exile

Potatoes were, of course, on top of the list as they were a staple. Cabbages, leeks, and carrots were also grown in school plots, along with a profusion of berries. Even vegetables we would consider luxuries today like asparagus and artichokes made their way into the Chalet School diet as the girls grew them from shoots and crowns. Milk and eggs could be purchased from nearby farms, along with tinned goods that would keep bellies full in the event of an emergency, and cured meats like ham and bacon.

Brent-Dyer also describes how rationing led to substitutions that, while ersatz compared to the real thing, kept the girls and the rest of the nation fed. Powdered eggs rather than fresh were used for the scrambled eggs served for breakfast, while mock cream - a concoction of cornstarch, margarine, and milk powder - was used to fill teatime cakes. The use of sweet coupons for redeeming a household's ration of sugar, syrup, and candy are also mentioned, along with how rural British households resorted to primitive means of keeping milk, eggs, and butter cool as electricity was not so common.

Apfel Kuchen (yeasted apple cake) mit schlag...to my own recipe

In late 1952, Shocks for the Chalet School, the 25th book in the series, heralded the school's return to Mitteleuropa, but to the Swiss Oberland rather than the Austrian Tirol which was, at the time, occupied by the Russians. The shift in setting and the end of the Second World War also meant a return to sumptuous descriptions of the region's food and drink as enjoyed by the girls during their meals on campus or whenever they went out for expeditions to Zurich, Berne, and Lausanne.

Until the series itself ended with Prefects of the Chalet School in 1970, readers were treated not only to adventurous tales of school life in the Alps, but also a look into what the girls ate. Along with the milky coffee that was the school's staple drink since its founding in Tirol, one could read about pastries frosted with mountains of freshly whipped cream, flaky and buttery gipfeln [Swiss croissants] served with lashings of luscious black cherry jam, and refreshing drinks compounded from fruit syrups made at home with a family's own produce. 

Indeed, to read Brent-Dyer's series in its entirety is to enjoy a feast for the senses in more ways than one - and - for me, at least - much better food for young minds than the romantic or fanciful rubbish being published these days.

Where to Read Them

While Blyton's St Clare's and Malory Towers books remain in print, along with filler tales by modern-day author Pamela Cox, these are abridged and lack the soul of the original books. However, as the originals have passed into public domain, you can download them as digital files for Kindle or PDF reader via Faded Page.

Faded Page also has more than half of the Chalet School series, and you can download them from here.