“That morning Pippi was busy making pepparkakor–a kind of Swedish cookie. She had made an enormous amount of dough and rolled it out on the kitchen floor.
“Because,” said Pippi to her little monkey, “what earthly use is a baking board when one plans to make at least five hundred cookies?”
And there she lay on the floor, cutting out cookie hearts for dear life.”
“One way is to put cookies in it. Then it becomes a delightful Jar with Cookies. Another way is not to put cookies in it. Then it becomes a Jar without Cookies. That certainly isn’t quite so delightful, but still that’s good too.”
“At that time Pippi was usually grooming her horse or dressing Mr. Nilsson in his little suit. Or else she was taking her morning exercises, which meant turning forty-three somersaults in a row. Then she would sit down on the kitchen table and, utterly happy, drink a large cup of coffee and eat a piece of bread and cheese.”
“In a little while Pippi had the coffee ready. She had made buns the day before. She came and stood under the oak and began to toss up coffee cups. Tommy and Annika caught them. Only sometimes it was the oak that caught them, and so two cups were broken. Pippi ran in to get new ones. Next it was the buns’ turn, and for a while the air was full of flying buns. At least they didn’t break. At last Pippi climbed up with the coffeepot in one hand. She had cream in a little bottle in her pocket, and sugar in a little box.”
“First!” cried Pippi and was up by the table in two skips. She heaped as many cakes as she could onto a plate, threw five lumps of sugar into a coffee cup, emptied half the cream pitcher into her cup, and was back in her chair with her loot even before the ladies had reached the table.
Pippi stretched her legs out in front of her and placed the plate of cakes between her toes. Then she merrily clunked cakes in her coffee cup and stuffed so many in her mouth at once that she couldn’t have uttered a word no matter how hard she tried. In the twinkling of an eye she had finished all the cakes on the plate. She got up, struck the plate as if were a tambourine, and went up to the table to see if there were any cakes left. The ladies looked disapprovingly at her, but that didn’t bother her. Chatting gaily, she walked around the table, snatching a cake here and a cake there.”
“On the table stood a large cream pie, decorated in the center with a piece of red candy. Pippi stood with her hands behind her back and looked at it. Suddenly she bent down and snatched the candy with her teeth. But she dived down a little too hastily, and when she came up again her whole face was covered with whipped cream.”
“It was a warm and beautiful day toward the end of August. A pear tree that grew close to the fence stretched its branches so low down that the children could sit and pick the best little red-gold pears without any trouble at all. They munched and ate and spit pear cores out onto the road.”
“Meanwhile they had come out into the kitchen, and Pippi cried,
Now we’re going to make a pancake, Now there’s going to be a pancake. Now we’re going to fry a pancake.
Then she took three eggs and threw them up in the air. One fell down on her head and broke so that the yolk ran into her eyes, but the others she caught skillfully in a bowl, where they smashed to pieces.
When the pancake was brown on one side she tossed it halfway up to the ceiling, so that it turned right around in the air, and then she caught it on the griddle again. And when it was ready she threw it straight across the kitchen right onto a plate that stood on the table.
“Eat!” she cried. “Eat before it gets cold!” And Tommy and Annika ate and thought it a very good pancake.”
“That was exactly what they were, though they hardly dared to say so. Pippi went to the pantry and took out bread and cheese and butter, ham and cold roast and milk; and they sat around the kitchen table–Bloom and Thunder-Karlsson and Pippi–and ate until they were almost four-cornered.”
“When Mr. Nilsson had emptied his cup he turned it upside down and put it on his head. When Pippi saw that, she did the same, but as she had not drunk quite all her chocolate a little stream ran down her forehead and over her nose. She caught it with her tongue and lapped it all up.”
“But what do they do in school?” asked one little boy.
“Eat caramels,” said Pippi decidedly. “There is a long pipe that goes from a caramel factory nearby directly into the schoolroom, and caramels keep shooting out of it all day long so the children have all they can do to eat them up.”
“They looked, and they squealed with delight when they saw all the good things Pippi had spread on the bare rock. There were good sandwiches with meatballs and ham, a whole pile of sugared pancakes, several little brown sausages, and three pineapple puddings.”
[Image via]
“And there she lay on the floor, cutting out cookie hearts for dear life.”
#same
THE CREAM PIE. I remember DESPERATELY wanting that cream pie when I was a kid,
WHY does bread and cheese sound like so much better a meal when in old books
I don’t know…it’s pretty good IRL, too
One of my favorites.
Go to comfort food. Melt some cheese on some bread and bam, instant comfort.
Get yourself a warm baguette and either some chevre or some boursin sometime! And actually my local cheese shop has a pretty awesome “farmhouse feta” mix with sundried tomato and black olives, in olive oil.
Or warm baguette and brie. That’s my go-to.
Bread and cheese makes up a good 25% of my meals – it is the best.
I still regularly eat bread+cheese+fruit for lunch, it is amazing
I like to toast bread with parmesan on top, so the cheese gets all burnt (in a toaster oven).
I’ve actually been eating toast drizzled with balsamic vinegar with some cheese melted onto it frequently lately, it just sounds more complete and easier when Pippy Longstocking does it
Depends heavily on kind of bread and/or cheese. Pepper jack on 12-grain doesn’t really do it for me.
Definitely what I’m having for dinner tonight. (Was a bit sick all weekend and still playing it safe food choice-wise.) As others have said, I think it depends largely on the types of both bread and cheese. If you’re thinking pre-made sliced white bread and American cheese, then it isn’t great, but old books make it sound better because they would have had real cheese and fresh bread.
Do all the food from The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Gouge! It was written in 1947, when food rationing was still happening, and the food descriptions are pure wish-fulfillment.
This is one of my favourite children’s books, partly for this very reason! Milk and sugar cookies and what not!
LOVED this book. Loved Linnets and Valerians, too!
EZRA AND HIS WOODEN LEG!
Linnets and Valerians! I loved this book and have re-read it so many times! I wanted to live in a huge house and have mysteries and odd neighbors and get to bow to bees when I was growing up.
I knew there was a reason I was drawn to your party. Slay on!
That makes so much sense. Thanks for that insight!
God, it’s a joy. The little biscuits studded with sugar in the box in her beautiful, beautiful bedroom!
THOSE BISCUITS.
Or all the food in the “Farmer Boy” book from the Little House on the Prairie series. I actually stopped reading the books at that point in the series because the sheer amount that family ate in a day made me queasy….
The food in “Farmer Boy” was my favorite thing about that book. Everything just sounded so good to me. I haven’t read those in forever though. *adds to re-read list*
I don’t wanna make you queasy, but Jia Tolentino did this on The Hairpin! http://thehairpin.com/2013/07/farmers-bo/
DOUGHNUTS
It made me queasy when I was a kid, but I don’t mind food porn now. 😉
I’m doing the Whole30 diet in solidarity with my wife. I cannot eat anything that Pippi eats.
This makes me sad. 🙁
I am Whole30-ing right now, too. SOLIDARITY.
Me too, friend. Me tooooo. (Slumps on floor in healthy, yet eternally unsatisfied, heap).
So I just looked at the site out of curiosity, and one item strikes me as interesting:
Do not try to re-create baked goods, junk foods, or treats* with “approved” ingredients. Continuing to eat your old, unhealthy foods made with Whole30 ingredients is totally missing the point, and will tank your results faster than you can say “Paleo Pop-Tarts.” Remember, these are the same foods that got you into health-trouble in the first place—and a pancake is still a pancake, regardless of the ingredients.
What? The acceptable foods are “meat, seafood, eggs, tons of vegetables, some fruit, and plenty of good fats from fruits, oils, nuts and seeds.”
If you can make anything pancake-like out of that, first of all you are a wizard, but secondly, “a pancake is still a pancake regardless of the ingredients?” No, by definition, a pancake is a food item made with certain ingredients.
*Headache*
It is the SILLIEST diet I have seen (and I’ve seen many of them) for the purposes of weight loss, but it dials down to moderately silly if you’re trying to deal with diabetes or food allergies/sensitivities.
Still, I don’t want to live a life devoid of pancakes.
I can make something pancake-like out of that! If you beat 1 banana:2 eggs and cook it like a pancake, you can make these pretty all right recognizably pancake-like things: http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-2-ingredient…
Only I always put maple syrup on them…
You can make some surprisingly okay-ish cakes and breads out of nut flour, eggs, and dates for sweetening. I only know because I needed to be on a similar diet for a few years for medical reasons. After awhile on an extremely limited diet, you get kind of desperate for anything that seems a little more decadent or different. Or at least I did.
Come to think of it, Pippi maybe would have been a calmer person if she didn’t drink coffee at age, what? 10?
I was reading this and thinking the same thing, basically–maybe none of the hijinks would have happened if she wasn’t hopped up on caffeine.
Might have been self-medicating for the ADD?
When one of my nephews was diagnosed with ADHD (as they called it in the 70s) his mum didn’t like what the meds did.
She reasoned that since they were giving him speed (in effect) to slow him down, that caffiene would slow down a kid too. So she served him coffee with breakfast to start his day.
Seemed to work.
She also enrolled him in every sports programme she could find, as did the mother of the other nephew with ADHD. One became a college sports administration professor and volleyball coach and the other was a semi-pro hockey player who later became a beer salesman.
So … maybe it was the coffee and maybe it was the 47 somersaults.
That morning Pippi was busy making pepparkakor–a kind of Swedish cookie.
I feel like whichever edition I read did not say “a kind of Swedish cookie”, but I have no idea what it did say instead. Now it will nag at me.
This needs to be a continuing feature. Children’s books always have such delightfully appetizing descriptions of meals and snacks. Even IRL gross stuff like Turkish Delight sounds amazing on the page. Fiction geared toward adults is generally bereft of good food writing–the kind that makes you want to rummage in the cupboards, as Jo March did after reading Pickwick Papers.
Seconded!
Can we talk about Ratty’s picnic? Who could possibly look down their noses at ‘cold tongue’ when it is brought forth from a ‘fat wicker luncheon basket’??? Never mind the cress sandwiches and ginger beer!
Wasn’t Anne Shirley who wanted to rummage post-Pickwick? I’m almost positive it was her, while she was at college!
Yup. In Anne of the Island, she is “treating herself” to Dickens after exams, and Philippa says that it always makes her want to rummage through the cupboard, and then Anne says she made a lemon pie.
Everything about this exchange has made me quietly but deeply happy. Encyclopedic knowledge of Anne of Green Gables is the key to everything.
Next, please let’s have everything Almanzo Wilder and family eat in Farmer Boy.
In one of my college English classes we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and my professor brought us all Turkish Delight on that day and it is weird stuff.
I only read one Pippi book as a child (something with a skink, maybe?) and now I wonder if it’s because all that chaos makes me deeply, deeply uneasy and anxious on a shockingly deep level. Like, maybe people don’t really like you, Pippi, they’re just afraid because you keep wrecking their stuff and lying about shit.
Linguistic issue here: I’ve grown up in Sweden in an English-speaking home. We always said pepparkakas. Because one is a pepparkaka and the plural of that is pepparkakor. But in English you plural with an s so obviously in English it’s pepparkakas. This has always bugged me a LOT. What do you furriners say when you eat only one pepparkaka??? Or is it that you cop out and say one cookie or biscuit and then only pepparkakor as a multiple noun or whatever it’s called? Also now I am bugged by them translating the cake into a cream pie, even though I concede that it’s the easiest word … but a pie should have a pastry crust and the gräddtårta does not aaaaahhhhhhhh
English also allows the original plural to be used. Thus, one datum, two data (Latin) , one moose, two moose (Algonquin), one criterion , two criteria (Greek).
And of course:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary”. James Nicholl
I am not a linguistic purist at all but I feel bound to point out that this is a modern borrowing and logically should be treated like ciabatta or pizza which get a plural s. Granted, you’d only eat the one, not a million like with pepparkakor. 😉 It just feels like nobody checked, you know?
I think the issue here is that you are expecting English to be logical.
I’m not sure! I think we know that pepparkakor is the plural but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anybody refer to just one. Were I to do so, I’d probably default to “cookie.”
gräddtårta …thank you for this! I must know more! Is it a type of strawberry shortcake? What’s inside? Please send samples. Boston Cream Pies are pretty cakey, so this could be called a pie, but I agree, it looks like a cake.
I don’t think most of us know enough Swedish to realize that’s a plural (many wouldn’t know what pepperkakor are). I vaguely knew because of krona/kronor, but I hadn’t applied it to the cookies. So it’s a non-issue due to ignorance! Most people use biscotti as a singular too. I guess the solution is always to eat more than one. P.S. Annika is the best.
Pippi Longstocking: leading her best life!
My feeling on the issue is to what extent the word has been assimilated into English. For the pepparkaka, not at all, obviously.
Of course, we still have our Latin and Greek plurals for some words, and as a New Zealander, it bugs me when people apply English plurals to Maori words that have become part of NZ Eng. But for words like "pizza", English away.
It is such a messy mongrel language, and I am so sorry to anyone who has to learn it.
omg you have goats. I love goats and I want one.
Do you have to breed them each year so that they keep producing milk or does it just carry over from one kid?
The food in "Farmer Boy" was my favorite thing about that book. Everything just sounded so good to me. I haven't read those in forever though. *adds to re-read list*
In one of my college English classes we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and my professor brought us all Turkish Delight on that day and it is weird stuff.
I remember there being a book in which they go to a tropical island and eat bananas and breadfruit? And being confused at the thought of fruit that was breadlike.