Category Archives: 20th century

Little Red Riding Hood Retold by Beatrix Potter and Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury

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Beatrix Potter understood very well the power of hunger.  The fox and wolf she cast as villains in her two versions of Little Red Riding Hood are wily rascals whose bellies ache.  While they may be cleverer than their prey, it is not a foregone conclusion that they will get what they want.

The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck (1908) was clearly inspired by the familiar fairy tale.  The heroine, dressed in a blue bonnet and pink patterned shawl meets a friendly gentleman with black prick ears and sandy-colored whiskers while she looks for a safe nesting place. She confides in him her secret plan to hatch eggs outside the farm and he graciously offers a convenient space cozy with feathers where she can sit on them afternoons. Luckily she also confesses where she has been going to Kep the collie dog, who immediately sees through foxy gentleman’s courtesies, recruits the fox-hound puppies as allies, and saves her silly neck—but not the eggs.

Four years later Potter retold Perrault, this time following the text very closely, adding only the woodcutters from Grimm and an original work song.   She started planning the illustrations, because photographs of a model dressed in a cape and sketches of the girl and wolf meeting on the path survive. Perhaps she set it aside during the production of The Tale of Mr. Tod (1912) with its disagreeable characters the badger Tommy Brock and the fox, barely recognizable as Jemima’s gentleman.  After Potter decided against inserting this story into The Fairy Caravan (1929), the manuscript lay unpublished until Leslie Linder transcribed it in A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter (1971).  In 2019 Warne issued it with splendid illustrations by Helen Oxenbury that are perfectly in tune with Potter’s words.

Oxenbury, like Potter, doesn’t shy away from frightening elements in the story, believing that “Children like a little darkness.”  Drawing the wolf she found a very attractive assignment, feeling like an actor landing a juicy part of nasty customer after playing a series of ordinary characters.  The first picture of him shows the belt of his plus-fours pulled so tight after a three-days’ fast that there are pleats all the waist. He is watching behind a fence the movements of woodmen, whose presence prevent him from going home when Red Riding Hood unexpectedly pulls the gate open.  Not daring to attack her, he strikes up a conversation.  No wiser than Jemima, she answers his questions without realizing she has just shown him how easily she might be caught.  He proposes they take different ways to granny’s and see who gets there first. He runs all the way there, sneaks through the garden to the door,  gains entrance under false pretenses and gets right down to what he came for.  Decisive, energetic, and thorough, that’s a starving carnivore.

Far quieter are the pictures where the main figure is Red Riding Hood. Oxenbury is alive to humous elements in Potter’s text, but keeps her illustrations a little sharp underneath the prettiness, as in the one where Red Riding Hood’s mother and gran fuss over the little girl: “Her mother was fair silly about her and her granny was sillier still.” Red Riding Hood’s walk through the fields and forest to her grandmother’s capture the beauties of an English summer day, the light, the leafy trees, the long grasses, and nodding flowers. When the little girl dawdles along the way, gathering a posy for her granny, picking nuts and strawberries, time seems to stop.  The next opening, where the sun is so low that she looks behind her nervously as it someone might be following her, even though she has seen no one since she left her mother’s house except for the wolf, is a reminder that the story will play out as it must. Even when Red Riding Hood sees her “granny” sit up in bed, inspecting her as coldly as the fox did Jemima, she can’t put two and two together.  So she continues to sit beside him in her grandmother’s clothes, asking questions about the surprising change in her appearance–arms and ears, which have sprouted coarse, bristly hairs, eyes, which look jaundiced, and big, strong, sharp white teeth.  Well, that is the end of her.

Oxenbury had the last laugh when she sets up a plausible final confrontation between the woodmen and the wolf, now so bloated from gorging that his unbuttoned trousers are pulled up to his arm pits.  He has just heard the woodmen’s shouts in the distance as they pursue him.  Beating them to his door seems a long shot when his ankles are so swollen above his two-tone Oxfords.  And that’s there the illustrator leaves it, offering comfort for the sensitive and rough justice for bloody-minded.  Even though she didn’t write it, Potter would have appreciated this marvelous ending.

Neither version of Little Red Riding Hood would be so satisfying if Potter had changed the natural dynamics between the predators and the prey  because the implicit violence might be too much for her readers.   But even city kids know that real foxes and dogs will and do eat other animals, so why not ducks and their eggs?  Kep rescued Jemima because it was his job as the farm dog, but some children may grasp that the chance to destroy his enemy the fox was probably just as strong motive.  Many children see that the wolf was not looking for a little girl to eat, but when one crossed his path and talked to him, she became fair game.  Of course, there will always be extremely sensitive children who are better shielded from stories like this until they can handle them, if and when the time comes. In the best twice-told tales, the story teller keeps alive in the reader a scrap of hope that somehow this time the victim will escape. The predators here would have to change their natures and stop hunting for that to happen.  Potter and Oxenbury quietly demonstrate why that this cannot be, but suggest that stranger things do occasionally happen.

Drum Cake for Independence Day from Betty Crocker’s Classic Cook Book for Boys and Girls (1957)

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“If you use your cook book often I can promise you real fun and lots of good things to eat,” Betty Crocker told her young readers.  And she was as good as her word.  The last chapter, “Rules,” which ought to have been first because it introduced the basics of kitchen safety, measuring, equipment, and vocabulary, came after the recipes.  The book led off instead with “Extra Special,”  cakes, cookies, candies, and beverages “good things to make for parties—for holidays—for your friends—and just for fun.”   Betty may have been a corporate construct, but she was no fool. She shrewdly figured more children would be lured into the kitchen to  stir up a batch of brownies than a pan of mac and cheese.  Her  beginners and their sweet-teeth learned right off the bat how to  grease and flour pans, use a spatula to scrape the last of the batter out of the mixing bowl, and test a cake for doneness  with straightforward recipes for chocolate sheet cake, cocoa fudge cake, and yellow layer cake.  Recipes and directions for frosting a cake followed, strategically placed to build confidence before introducing the delectable subsection of party cakes.

.The soldier with the marching side drum in Archibald Willard’s “The Spirit of ‘76” (1876) could have been the inspiration for this drum cake, which would bring the family Fourth of July picnic to a cracking conclusion.   It didn’t have to be made  from scratch: Betty Crocker’ mixes would save energy for the all-important job of decoration.   To imitate the zig-zag rope tensioning around the drum’s chocolate devil’s food shell, a pattern of peppermint sticks and maraschino cherries had to be pressed into the thick glossy coat of pure white fluffy icing.

Could eight- to twelve-year-olds, General Mills’ target audience, actually make this cake? Yes,  because a group of home testers,  eight girls and four boys identified on page 6, cooked every dish.  Tester Bette Anne explained that “We had to say if things were easy or hard and did they taste good.”  Veto power was in their hands. “ If we didn’t like it,” said tester Chris, “Betty Crocker didn’t put it in this book.”   The children’s comments were run above the lower margins and they designate the dishes they would make again, offered helpful hints, identified skills they wanted to polish, and even conceded the vegetable recipes were tasty.  The home testers were real kids who lived in Cranbury, New Jersey, but they would have been at home on Klickitat Street.  They made the book for many of the baby boomers who have hung on to their treasured dogeared, sticky copies.The editorial team that compiled Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls in the decade after World War II saw the kitchen as a space where budget-conscious meals were made with what was on hand.  Dinnertime came once a day, not once a year like taxes. As family members, kids were expected to help out with meal preparation, but they were also invited to be creative in the kitchen.  If a child wanted to surprise the family with a heart cake for Mother’s  or Valentine’s Day, a special shaped pan wasn’t necessary, with an 8-inch round and 8-inch square pan around.  Mother didn’t have to hover because the young baker could be trusted to have enough good sense to get the pans in and out of the hot oven and cut up the cooled cakes with a long sharp knife without accident.   It’s easy to point fingers at the outdated gender roles in the illustrations, like the exclusion of girls from the campfire cooking chapter or the insensitive representation of Indigenous and people of color in this cook book. Fifty-odd years out, I could not help but be struck at how refreshing it was  to see no signs of extravagant consumption signaling wealth and privilege— a batterie de cuisine, countertops full of appliances, a gastronomic library of print and on-line resources, shelves of ingredients from around the world—that so much of today’s more sophisticated home cooking depends upon upon.   Cakes made with butter taste better than ones made with hydrogenated shortening or from a mix, but Betty Crocker’s drum cake from 1957 is still within the means of more people than the birthday cake dreamed up for  a children’s birthday party in The Best of Gourmet (2005).I read and reread my well-thumbed copy of Betty Crocker  until I had perfect recall of all the color plates of the iconic party cakes.  I never made one of them. If the results were likely to fall short of the pictures, I was too intimidated to try.  Even if I hadn’t been daunted by the food styling, I  knew my health-conscious mother would nix the drum cake, because it required hard candy and maraschino cherries, full of sugar and red dye number 2.  She probably would have pointed out that the cake wouldn’t taste as good as it looked and I would have been reluctant to admit she was probably right.  Better to never bring up the subject than to concede the field later.   Or offer a face-saving explanation is that the cake construction gene skipped a generation.  My daughter or nieces down under would tackle a drum cake  in a heart’s beat as child’s play.   All I have to do is ask.