How to use this Page

Have you ever tried vinarterta? How about gugelhupf? Whether these are familiar or completely foreign to you, this list of sweets are a must for everyone with a sweet tooth. All the sweets, cakes, desserts, and treats on this list come from The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, so give them a go and try one, some, or all!

The post The 12 sweets you need to know about (and try) appeared first on OUPblog.

Who’s Who (and its sister publication, Who Was Who) has traditionally included entries for the cream of British society, and in this festive season, the Who’s Who team have come up with a theoretical dinner party where key people from all areas of life, alive and dead, could come together to solve the world’s problems.

Where else could you find a table where Roald Dahl, Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs, Clare Balding, Dame Judi Dench, Michael Palin, Caitlin Moran, and Richard Ayoade might rub shoulders, looked after with tender care by Rick Stein and renowned bon viveur Oliver Reed, and hosted at Blenheim Palace by the Duke of Marlborough?

In a classic game of six (or in this case seven) degrees of separation, can you spot the links between Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, Dominic Mohan, Mary Berry, Leon McCawley, Ronald Searle, Christine Lagarde, Ivor Novello, right back round to Martin Luther King?

Who’s Who is the essential directory of the noteworthy and influential in every area of public life, published worldwide, and written by the entrants themselves. Who’s Who 2013  includes autobiographical information on over 33,000 influential people from all walks of life. The 165th edition includes a foreword by Arianna Huffington on ways technology is rapidly transforming the media.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Christmas pudding photograph by esp_imaging via iStockphoto. 

The post Who’s Who dinner party quiz appeared first on OUPblog.

Following yesterday’s recipe for roast goose by Mrs Beeton, here’s that classic Christmas dinner portrayed by Charles Dickens in the famous scene from A Christmas Carol. Here Ebeneezer Scrooge watches with the Ghost of Christmas Present as the Cratchit family sits down to roast goose and Christmas pudding.

‘And how did little Tim behave?’ asked Mrs Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.

‘As good as gold,’ said Bob, ‘and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.’

Bob’s voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.

His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his brother and sister to his stool before the fire; and while Bob, turning up his cuffs — as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby — compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter, and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course — and in truth it was something very like it in that house. Mrs Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone — too nervous to bear witness — to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose — and supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered — flushed by smiling proudly — with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

‘A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!’ Which all the family re-echoed.

‘God bless us every one!’ said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. The Oxford World’s Classics edition, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, reprints the story alongside Dickens’s four other Christmas Books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Reproduced from a c.1870s photographer frontispiece to Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. By Frederick Barnard (1846-1896). Digital image from LIFE. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The post Christmas dinner with the Cratchits appeared first on OUPblog.

Admit it. Some of you have been waiting, maybe even decades, for someone—anyone—to ask. I know. It’s almost embarrassing to be the first, like being the new kid in school when the teacher calls on you explain boogers.

Why me, you may be asking. Do we really want to talk about this publicly? I mean, doesn’t everyone know what tapioca is? After all, our moms have been feeding it to us since we were old enough to squeegee a little bolus of the stuff down our gullet. So, how could we not know? Well, as it turns out there’s an awful lot an awful lot of us may not know about tapioca—until now. So, sit back and relax. It might be a lumpy ride. You can thank me later for smoothing things out for you.

You might not have noticed it but there are all sorts of brand names now marketing tapioca products. The best known form is, of course, tapioca pudding—you know, the stuff that resembles vanilla pudding with little bumpy things that look a little like frog eggs minus the black dots. In fact, it’s the little lumps that give tapioca its distinctive character—at least in pudding. Otherwise, it would just be, well, pudding.

So, what is it that makes tapioca what it is? Let’s start with the obvious. And what better way to research the contents of tapioca than reading the ingredients on a product label. The main stuff seems fairly non-descript and plain, what with the non-fat milk, water and corn starch. Pretty much half our food supply has those ingredients. Adding a little coconut oil, cream and several complex chemical compounds still doesn’t make it distinctively different from any other thick, smooth, sweet, puddingy substance currently on the market.

But now for the big reveal. What makes tapioca tapioca is, believe it or not, tapioca. That is, tapioca is what it is, I suppose in the same way vanilla is vanilla. Most sources agree it comes from a starch-rich plant found in South America, Asia, India and several other places. It is most commonly known as cassava. And if you saw the young plants growing as you zip by on the highway, you might even think the leaves bear a uncanny resemblance to another well-known, although illegal plant—AKA weed.

Yes, strange but true. But I digress. With or without a clear description of its genetic make up, I’m convinced the miracle of tapioca is a discovery still waiting to happen—or more specifically, I have made the discovery. Drum roll, please. Tapioca combined one-to-one with none other than yogurt is pure ambrosia. That’s right. To all the pudding and yogurt peddlers out there, remember. You read it here first—call it “tapiogurt” or “yogioca” in all its fruit-on-the-bottom flavors. Either way, I’ve got dibs on the product concept and I’m ready to deal. In the meantime, pass the pudding.

As I see it, next Wednesday, Sept. 30, at noon EST, you have two choices:

1) You can twiddle. Twiddle your thumbs, twiddle your pencil, twiddle away your lunch hour reading 1,000 Dust Motes to Spy Before You Die

OR

2) You can twitter along with Cheryl Klein and me as we chat about OPERATION YES, the writing and editorial process, and which one of us has a marked obsession with pudding.

You can find us in the top secret chat room located under the hashtag #YESchat.

For more about these choices, see Cheryl's post Would you rather . . .? in which she deviously tries to cloud the pudding discussion with pie and cake.

If you have no idea what Twitter is, please see InkyGirl's post "Writer's Guide to Twitter." Hop on the Twitter wagon at Twitter.com, practice a little, and be ready to join us on Sept. 30.

PROGRAMMING NOTE:  For the #YESchat, I'll be tweeting from my @saralewisholmes account and Cheryl from @chavelaque.  Amusing, informative, and delicious posts will then be re-tweeted at a later time from my @operationyes account. Please feel free to twitter with me on either account beginning today or on any other day ending in Y.

Winston Churchill once called a waiter to his table during dessert and said, "Pray sir, take away this pudding. It has no theme."

Lately political pundits and bloggers are calling the McCain campaign a themeless pudding.

It’s such a great phrase that could apply to so much (of my) writing.

Now keeping with the theme of pudding (but not themeless pudding) here’s a link to a short video about Norman Lindsay, author and illustrator of The Magic Pudding.

The Rainforest Grew All Around by Susan K. Mitchell, illustrated by Connie McLennan

• Reading level: Ages 4-8
• Hardcover: 32 pages
• Publisher: Sylvan Dell Publishing (April 30, 2007)

“On the ground, there fell a seed…the fluffiest seed that you ever did see…”

From that fluffy seed grows a tall Kapok tree, and in that tree grows a cat, and near the cat there was a vine…sound familiar? The Rainforest Grew All Around is based on the children’s song, “The Green Grass Grew All Around.” Through this song, we get a glimpse of the rainforest’s eco-system and see how everything is interconnected. Readers are introduced to a variety of rainforest plants and animals including a jaguar, an emerald tree boa, a sloth, and many many more.

On the sidebars of each two-page spread, readers can learn more about the plant or animal featured in that spread’s song; for example, “Sloths hang upside down in the trees and move very slowly.” Connie McLennan’s illustrations are vivid and detailed, and children will delight in finding the hidden rainforest insects within the book.

With very light messaging, children will have fun and simultaneously learn to respect and appreciate the rainforest and all of its creatures. The back of the book has expansion activities “For Creative Minds” and even a recipe for rainforest cookies. In addition, Sylvan Dell has a comprehensive list of teaching activities and learning links on their website. I highly recommend this book for any school or home library.

Note: Susan K. Mitchell's newest book, Kersplatypus, is being released on February 10th. Look for my review soon.