Tea with Mr Tumnus

[Tiara3Star]

Long after I first read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the image of Lucy having tea with Mr Tumnus stayed on my mind. It was such a cozy little scene, "And really it was a wonderful tea." One day I decided to recreate it. I got out the book and noted what they ate, to make a shopping list. What I realized when I sat down to eat was that they were eating a lot of toast. Toast with sardines, toast with butter, toast with honey. Sure there's the nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and the tea itself, but I wondered, what's up with all the toast? I think I saw or heard an interview with CS Lewis in which he said he had been recalling wartime scarcities, and butter and good bread were some of the things he had missed.

I've always been puzzled by the sugar-topped cake. I don't remember what I bought for my tea, but what is a sugar topped cake? When I first read it I imagined a cake topped with white granulated sugar, or tinted granulated sugar, but if I've ever actually seen a cake like that, I couldn't find anything like it when I went shopping. Did Mr Lewis mean a cake topped with powdered sugar? A frosted cake? A cake with a hard sugar icing? I'd like opinions on this, please.

[Alan]

You are on the right track Tiara3Star.

Let me try to clear up some factors. Why all the toast ? You are right to view this aspect of the meal in light of rationing. Bread was limited and had to be made to last longer. As bread ages it goes a little hard. One of the ways to disguise the fact that bread is getting stale is to toast it. This was common practice for everyone both in wartime England and also in the postwar years. Most households had at least one good toasting fork by the fireplace for this very purpose right into the early sixties.

As for the sugar topped cake. Again this refers to wartime shortages. You are right to assume that it is a cake topped with granulated sugar. Sugar was one of the most precious commodities and very severely rationed. When making a cake ( it would have been a large round cake as these are the most economical cakes to make ) it was not possible to use the full quantity of either fresh eggs or sugar that a standard recipe would require so other ingredients like porridge oats were substituted. This made the cake a lot heavier than normal as it did not rise nearly as much, but it was very filling. To substitute for the lack of sugar in the mixture the precious supply of sugar was sprinkled lightly and evenly over the top. In the heat of the oven the sugar slowly caramelised giving a crisp sweet topping.

[A#minor]

[Stanley Anderson]

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[King Edmund]

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[King Edmund]

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[King Edmund]

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[King Edmund]

[*~Diamond in the Rough~*]

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