The Top Ten Most Disappointing Edibles and Potables of Children’s Literature

The votes are in. I asked Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for the foods they were most disappointed by after reading about them in books as kids.

People had opinions. Many. Many. Opinions. Apparently once you’ve been burned by an author’s literary seduction when it comes to describing, say, fried apple/onion sandwiches, you don’t forgive easily.

After culling through the shockingly abundant opinions (they’re still coming in but I had to draw the line somewhere) I present to you the official Top 10 of most misleading foodstuffs and libations of the children’s book world, where ten is the best and one is the worst. With room for Honorable Mentions as well:

#10 – Raspberry Cordial

Susan S. Yoon – “Raspberry Cordial from Anne of Green Gables! It sounded so fancy but alas it was just raspberry juice.”

---

#9 – Honey

Jordan J. Scavone – “Honey from Pooh Bear, I mean I like Honey, but it’s nothing like in the book/show.”

Anon – “Does honey (and honeycomb) count even though I’d had it already? The combination of Winnie the Pooh and Berenstain Bears made it seem like the height of flavor. I kept retrying it thinking it would finally taste as good as it looked in those picture books.”

---

#8 – Marmalade

Destinee Sutton – “My daughter was excited to try orange marmalade after reading/watching Paddington, but she really didn’t like it. Pieces of the peel! Gross! She prefers strawberry jam a la Frances.”

Jen de Oliveira – “Paddington made marmalade sandwiches sound delightful … I thought it would taste like honey, but no! Sometimes I find myself wanting to buy a jar of marmalade again and I have to remind myself about those bitter chunks of orange peel in it.”

---

#7 – Liverwurst Sandwiches

Betty G. Yee – “In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry famously fixed herself a cream cheese and liverwurst sandwich. To this day i have no idea what it might taste like but when i asked for it at a deli restaurant the waiter turned a bit green and steered me to something else.”

Jennifer Ochoa – “Many Judy Blume mentions of liverwurst on rye with mustard….NOT DELICIOUS!!!”

Barney Saltzberg – “Great question. After reading Cricket in Times Square I had to try liverwurst. First and last time.”

---

#6 – Chocolate Babies

Deborah Lakritz – “Chocolate babies and ginger snap crackers from All of a Kind Family.”

Marjorie Ingall – “The amazing descriptions of food in All of a Kind family are mostly LIES. Hot chickpeas are not delicious just because they’re served in a friggin paper cone! (And I had chocolate babies once — mediocre gummy chocolate.)”

---

#5 – Dairy Products ala Heidi

Beth Carpenter-McGuire – “I was certain that milk straight from the cow would be as wonderful as Heidi described, but that’s a big nope for me.”

Tameka Fryer Brown – “When I read Heidi and they made that cheese from goat’s milk, it sounded like it would be the best cheese on the planet.

Like…it’s good but….”

---

#4 – Tomato Sandwiches

Diana Peterfreund: “Harriet’s tomato sandwiches, which I thought were gross AF as a child, then a few years ago I learned how southerners made them (no idea how Harriet got the recipe, TBH) and found them delightful.”

Rebecca Van Slyke – “Of course, if you hated tomatoes growing up, that’s probably not so surprising. But HARRIET loved them so much, I thought there MUST have been some magical transformative power in putting them between two slices of bread…”

---

#3 – Marzipan

Christine Taylor-Buttler – “Marzipan. Still traumatized from spending my allowance on beautiful candies that were not as delight consumed.”

---

#2 – Egg Cream

Chris Tebbetts: “Not terrible, just….more like a culinary paper tiger.”

Sarah S. Brannen: “They sound much better than chocolate milk with seltzer in it.”

Matt Bird: “I will back up everybody saying egg creams from Harriet the Spy. It sounds like an eggnog milkshake, which I loved, but available all year round, which would be amazing. Then I finally get to try one and it’s seltzer water with chocolate syrup?? No egg?? No cream?? How on earth did it get that name??”

---

#1- Turkish Delight

When I posted my question about misleading literary foods I took Turkish Delight out of the running since I knew that a lot of Americans would state their rage at discovering it wasn’t half as tasty as it looked. But people would not be denied proclaiming their betrayal. At the same time, TD defenders arrived en masse to take up arms and support the concoction. Here are some of my favorite comments on both sides of the aisle:

Peter Pearson: “I really wanted to like Turkish Delight. The first time I thought it tasted like gelatinous perfume, but then I thought, ‘Maybe I just got a bad batch?’ So I tried it again a few years later at a renowned confectioner. Same thing. After a decade of resampling and resampling, I finally admitted that C.S. Lewis and I will never agree on what it would take to sell out your family.”

Paula Willey: “I think there’s a big difference between the squishy jelly kind of Turkish Delight and the rolled nougat and nut type”

Cindy Olson – “I feel like I have to mention that I like Aspic (the Shrinking of Treehorn) as well as Turkish delight. I must be the rare person who enjoys weird jellied things.”

Rukhsana Khan – “I had Turkish delight in a shop outside Istanbul and it was to die for! SO many flavors!!! Each one amazing. Thing is it has to be fresh and it has to be authentic.”

Rachel Gorham – “Turkish Delight was absolutely what I was going to say as soon as I read the first sentence. I expected something between brownie bites and toffee. I tried it in my late 20s and it was absolutely 100% so disgusting. I’m still mad.”

Anastasia Higginbotham – “Oriental Grocery on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn across the street from Sahadi’s has the Turkish Delight that seduces children into Narnia. Never tasted it ike that before. If you’re ever coming to NYC, let me know, I’ll try and get you some, freshly cut and sugar powdered – and soft! It blew me away to enjoy it there so much.”

---

Special Mentions

Other foods that got us down:

Suzanne Sutton – “Ambrosia. Clearly what I was served was NOT what the Olympians were chowing down on. *shudders in Southern dessert salad*”

Brian Lies – “Acorns. (In My Side of the Mountain). I gathered several pounds from a street in Cambridge, MA, shelled and lightly crushed them, then tried to leach the tannins out with a steady wash of water. They were wickedly astringent, and I can’t imagine the labor involved in prepping enough acorn flour to keep one’s self alive.”

Cynthia Richey: “I did the same thing when I was in 3rd grade—pounded them, rinsed with water, and then gathered my younger siblings and we all tried some, but we all spit it out! It was awful!”

Elizabeth Law: “Poi. I had this book called Ko of Menehune Land when I was a little girl (we lived in Hawaii). Ko could not WAIT for delicious Poi and a lot of the stories were about him trying to get it. When I finally tasted it as a teenager, when we were back in Hawaii, it tasted like kindergarten paste.”

Cynthia Richey: “Poi was mine, too! I’d read about it in a book in 3rd grade & when my class had some to try I wanted to cry because it was so bad! Tasted like library paste!”

Betsy Fraser – “Bread and butter – lots of that in Anne of Green Gables. Not improved at all by crabapple preserve. The grandmother I had that made jelly from crabapples also offered us ice cream – “Spumoni!” every time we visited when I was little. Ice cream with dried fruit was invented by the devil.

Filed under: Uncategorized