Sten Grendon, Suzanna Hamilton, Sophie Neville & Simon West in 1973, eating apples to fend off scurvy
Food was undoubtedly of considerable importance to Arthur Ransome. He certainly enjoyed describing what explorers and pirates ate when camping. I thought it would be fun to look at typical meals eaten on Wild Cat Island or when sailing.
I have drawn up this list of the food featured in Swallows and Amazons, but I am sure you can add to it. Please use the comments box below where all ideas and contributions are gratefully received.
Breakfast ~ Tea, milk from Dixon’s farm and sugar, bread, butter, marmalade and eggs. Then of course Mrs Dixon arrives with a bucket of porridge after a storm.
Elevenses ~ Bananas, apples, molasses (toffees) and chocolate
Lunch ~ Pemmican and peas with Grog (ginger beer or lemonade) to drink
Tea ~ Seed cake, bun loaf with tea or grog to drink, perch fried in butter or pemmican and potato cakes. Susan is clearly one for buttered eggs and in the book Mother arrives with Baby Vicky’s birthday cake.
In the original film we bought iced buns in Rio, had pork pies to munch on in Swallow, and ate our way through that fabulous pirate feast on Captain Flint’s houseboat, when Jim Turner miraculously produced eclairs and ‘ices’ along with a decorated fruit cake.
I wished the original film had a bunch of bananas hung from a tree in the camp. Gooseberry tart would have been wonderful. (There’s a recipe for this in The Guardian.)
Other books in the series mention Cook’s black cake, Missee Lee’s Oxford Marmalade, Garibaldi biscuits, Force breakfast cereal, bacon, tinned milk, Christmas pudding soaked in methylated spirits, the Death and Glories’ smoke eels, Jackie’s trout, a duck’s egg, ship’s biscuits, fudge, tinned fruit, pears, oranges, blackberry and banana mash, canon balls, tins of sardines, cold roast chicken, hams and Edam cheese, along with other delicacies which Ransome must have relished. He also liked to shock, burdening Dorothea with skinning rabbits and prescribing bacon rinds as a cure for sea-sickness.
Jill Goulder writes, ‘They certainly had coffee at breakfast when living at home (e.g. Cdr Walker in Secret Walker, “ragging John about taking a compass bearing of the coffeepot from the cruet”), but always I think tea when camping.’
There is food mentioned in the books that never gets eaten. Captain Flint says, “Nothing like a good Malay curry when salamanders are fainting from the heat.” in ‘Missee Lee’. Nancy and Peggy hated tapioca. Alec Duncan of The Arthur Ransome Group pointed out, ‘There’s the hotpot mentioned by Mrs Blackett in ‘Winter Holiday’ that melted its way through the ice leaving only a wisp of steam and a hole in the ice. This happened years before, during a previous freezing of the lake.’
I’ve been collecting photos of wonderful designs for cakes celebrating the series of ‘Swallows and Amazons’ books here.
These days you can enjoy a ‘Swallows and Amazons’ afternoon tea at Langdale Chase on Windermere, the hotel where we held the wrap party when we finished filming the original movie in the summer of 1973.
When I was invited to give a talk on ‘The Making of Swallows and Amazons’ at the Royal Thames Yacht Club in London, a Swallows and Amazons Menu was laid on:
To read about the ice creams and food we actually ate when making the film of Swallows & Amazons in 1973, please click here.
There is more in The Making of Swallows and Amazons available from Waterstones and all the usual online outlets, and now available on Aaudible.
