InLiterature

It was an agreeable idea, easily carried out, and when the white cloth was spread upon the grass, with hot tea and buttered toast and crumpets, a delightfully hungry meal was eaten, and several birds on domestic errands paused to inquire what was going on and were led into investigating crumbs with great activity. Nut and Shell whisked up trees with pieces of cake and Soot took the entire half of a buttered crumpet into a corner and pecked at and examined and turned it over and made hoarse remarks about it until he decided to swallow it all joyfully in one gulp.

-Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

There is something about biting into a hot crumpet fresh off the stove, pools of butter melting into every hole, that never ceases to remind me of how satisfying this whole thing is. The books, the recipes, the rabbit holes. All of it.

Recreating historical recipes tends to take me on a journey every single time. I always come out the other side having learned something new. The kitchen becomes my teacher in a way that no recipe book quite can.

Here’s what I mean. In a world of plastic-wrapped crumpets and bulk mixes (and I won’t knock either, they have their place!), the skills it takes to make what would once have been commonplace baked goods are slowly being lost. Simple things. Things that generations before us made without thinking twice, without a recipe, without a YouTube tutorial. That knowledge lived in hands and instinct, not on paper.

And when knowledge isn’t written down, it doesn’t always survive.

When I was developing the Secret Garden crumpet recipe for Once Upon a Cookbook, the skills that would have been common knowledge simply weren’t mentioned. So what I couldn’t learn from research, I had to learn through error. Chewy crumpets. Burnt crumpets. Crumpets that were frankly unidentifiable. Many batches before I finally bit into one that was right.

Maybe that’s part of the satisfaction. It’s not just about getting it right. It’s about understanding what it took to develop a skill that was quietly disappearing, and bringing it back into your own kitchen.

I’ll be honest — I’m not going to recommend that process for everyone. Learning through failure is one of the fastest ways to truly understand something, but it’s also the most frustrating. (Which is exactly why the crumpet recipe is in the cookbook, so you don’t have to start where I did!)

But there’s something worth preserving in that. Not just for ourselves, but for the people coming into our kitchens behind us. The sooner we start — not just watching, but actually getting hands into the dough, smelling the ingredients, learning how a batter should feel — the more of that knowledge survives.

That was never far from my mind when I was writing Once Upon a Cookbook. This was never meant to be a children’s cookbook. It was always meant to be a cookbook that captured the recipes from the worlds of these classic stories — so we could recreate those scenes, like an afternoon tea in The Secret Garden — and then made sure the next generation knew they were invited to the table too. The Chefs in the Making notes throughout the book are there for exactly that reason. It’s something Mattie from A Daily Picture Book asked me about in part two of our interview the other week (you can read that here).

Because here’s the thing I keep forgetting until I’m reminded. I forgot how something so simple can taste so extraordinary when it’s fresh. Crumpets are almost always eaten retoasted. But straight from the pan, still steaming, butter pooling — nothing tastes better. It’s a completely different experience to anything you’d buy in the shops.

If you’re wanting to recreate your own Secret Garden afternoon tea, the crumpets are your starting point. Team them up with hot tea, buttered toast, and pieces of cake to complete the whole scene. I lean into a caraway seed cake — you can find the most up-to-date version in Once Upon a Cookbook, but an older version of that recipe also lives here on the site as part of my Hobbit content.