German-language children’s books | Cotsen Children’s Library

Mrs. Quimby brings in the piece de resistance, ablaze with candles and festooned with swags and rosettes of frosting.

The perfect birthday cake in children’s books may appear in the last chapter of Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona (1955). Beezus, who has just turned ten, is sitting in the living room reading one of her presents, breathing in the vanilla scent of birthday cake in the oven. The moment could not possibly last with Ramona underfoot. That afternoon the four-year-old menace succeeds in sabotaging not one, but two birthday cakes. The day is saved when Aunt Bee picks up a fancy decorated cake from the best bakery in town to replace the eggy homemade yellow layer cake.

Whether or not we consider ourselves foodies, we are a lot more sophisticated about foodways than Beezus was in the 1950s. She probably took it for granted that birthdays had always been celebrated at a family party with a fancy cake for dessert. But the traditions surrounding birthdays are not all that well documented. When Ramin Ganeshram’s controversial picture book A Birthday Cake for George Washington was recalled in January 2016, I made a beeline for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets to read up on the aubjuect of festive cakes. I came away with the impression that the there is still a great deal to be learned about them, especially the birthday cake. On a hunch that children’s books will be a valuable source of information on the history of birthday cakes, I’ve begun saving in a folder descriptions, stories, and illustrations of cakes and celebrations, a few of which I’ll highlight here..

Here’s a picture of a mid-nineteenth-century celebration of a young girl’s birthday. Mamma in her spotless apron is about to set the cake down on the table, loaded with glasses, carafes of wine, and other delicacies. The large, well-lit, elaborately furnished room is large enough for allow the guests to converse among themselves or to dance to the music provided by a obliging friend at the piano.

From The House that Jack Built: Amusement for Children at Home. London: J. Fairburn, ca. 1850. (Cotsen 46778)

Modern birthday parties put different pressures on mothers. They may turn one book for planning the entertainments and to a manual for creating unforgettable cakes for the birthday boy or girl. The goal is an edible sculpture that should elicit “OOOOOs” and “AAAAAHHHHs” at its unveiling, not barely audible groans of “delicious” at the first forkful. These elaborate cakes take so much effort to make that it would be criminal to carve them up into slices and plate. These are objects to admire, not gobble up, because they are expressions of unconditional mother love and frustrated artistic urges. Child psychologists are probably already arguing against making little people go these places on their birthdays. Perhaps in addition to the highly gendered confection a second, less fancy cake that no one needs feel guilty consuming is provided.

A galleon cake with inedible sails made of chocolate buttercream frosting over chocolate ice cream manned by pirates too respectable to sail with Long John Silver or Johnny Depp. From Sue Aldridge’s Children’s Party Cakes. London: New Holland, 1998. (Cotsen unprocessed)

A so-called enchanted forest cake summons up the fairy tale woods of Grimm. Many other cakes of this type are riffs on children’s classics or popular culture. From Debbie Brown, Enchanted Cakes for Children. London: Merehurst, 2001. (Cotsen unprocessed)

There are picture books about birthdays by women authors that send up this female urge to decorate stupendous cakes. In Rosemary Wells’ Bunny Cakes, Ruby tries to make her little brother Max help her make their grandmother a birthday cake with raspberry fluff frosting bedizened with candles, silver stars, sugar hearts, and buttercream roses. Max is not exactly cooperative, having a brilliant idea of his own, which is, of course, a gross parody of Ruby’s. Being a good sport, Grandmother appreciates both mightily. Following Max’s cake, is this similar, but much more artistic birthday cake of worms and fruit made by a boy hedgehog.

From Rosemary Wells, Bunny Cakes. New York: Scholastic, 1998, c.1997. (Cotsen unprocessed)

From Ana Walther, Borstel als Detektiv. Illustrated by Gerhard Rappus. Berlin: Verlage Junge Welt, 1990. (Cotsen 96609)

Is this all modern decadence? Not likely. The elaborate modern birthday cake may be the descendant of the great plumb cakes (i.e. fruitcakes) prepared for Twelfth-Night parties. Here is a late eighteenth-century engraving of a splendid one illustrating the title page of a collection of songs to be sung at holiday festivities. The top of the cake is decorated with figures of all the characters listed on the title page and the sides are covered with ribbon swags, sprigs of leaves and other things which I guess are made of spun sugar. Notice that the cake is so large it has to be placed on a small table with finger holes in the legs so it is easy to transport from the kitchen to the drawing room.

Engraved title for the score of Reginald Spofforth’s The Twelfth Cake. London: Longman & Broderip, ca. 1793. (Cotsen 154502)

What curious minds want to know is, when in the nineteenth century did the light layer cake supplant the heavy, rich, fruitcake covered with royal icing? A question for intense research!

Our donor Mr. Cotsen celebrated a birthday last weekend, so this post is dedicated to him… Happy birthday, Mr. C.!

The front board of Neues Pfefferkuchen-ABC fuer artige Kinder. Stuttgart: Lowes Verlag Ferdinand Carl, ca. 1907. (Cotsen 72959)

After a really aggravating day, there probably isn’t a teacher alive who hasn’t wished that the human mind absorbed knowledge like a sponge soaks up water. Crafty teachers devise strategies that just might make learning this or that easy. Supportive publishers have been known to design children’s books that look like rewards for cooperating. One of my favorites is shown above, with its binding that looks like a tasty big cookie topped with split almond halves. Its title? Die neue Pfefferkuchen-ABC, which can be loosely translated as The New Gingerbread ABC (“pfefferkuchen” being another name for “lebkuchen,” the German spiced honeycakes topped with chocolate icing traditional at Christmas time).

The plate for the letter B in Neues Pfefferkuchen-ABC. (Cotsen 72959)

Many cultures try to associate the sweet with mastery of the letters of the alphabet. For example, Alberto Manguel describes a medieval Jewish initiation rite in which the teacher wrote a passage from the Bible on a slate and read it aloud to his pupil. The boy repeated them and if he did it correctly, was allowed to eat the holy words once the slate was spread with honey as a reward (thanks to Lissa Paul for this anecdote).

The frontispiece to The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread: A Little Boy Who Lived Upon Learning. London: Printed for T. Carnan, 1782. (Cotsen 6721)

A time-honored way of encouraging literacy in early modern England was to offer letters or hornbooks made of gingerbread as an inducement to learn their ABCs more quickly. Above Gaffer Gingerbread invites children to spend their pocket money wisely on cakes that will “feed the Little Folks, who are good,/ At once with Learning and with Food.”

A mold for a cookie hornbook and a cast from it. The letters could easily be cut apart into little tiles for spelling practice. The letterforms suggest that the mold is probably not more than one hundred years old.

At home, the conscientious gaffer took charge of inspiring his own little reluctant learner Giles, which was not all that difficult. By profession a gingerbread baker, the gaffer made his son a special gilt-covered, spicy “book.”

While the gaffer’s presentation of a table of two-letter syllables was novel, the truth is that any primer then contained such a chart, which helped children take a critical first step in learning to recognize and sound out combinations of letters. The eighteenth-century references to gingerbread letters, alphabets and books I’ve found don’t offer any evidence that such a thing was actually available.

The “book” as pictured would have been quite unwieldly. It probably would have broken apart with normal handling–like nibbling a corner as a reward for learning a little bit. Size may not have been as much as a problem as we think, because the gingerbread kings and queens sold at fairs could be quite large and detailed, if the surviving molds are any indication. The real test was carving the letters deep enough in the mold so that they would emerge from the oven sharp and legible. Using a very stiff dough with no eggs or butter would have helped.

This is Giles holding a gingerbread hornbook that is not anywhere as large as the one his father made for him. Page [31] in Cotsen 6721.

Another curious discovery I made researching this post was that neither Cotsen’s 1779 nor 1782 edition of Giles Gingerbread has the diagram of the gingerbread syllabary. Both pamphlets are complete. Missing pages wouldn’t be all that surprising for one of the most famous Newberys: it was first published around 1765 by John Newbery, the stepfather of Carnan, the publisher of the Cotsen copy.

The syllabary is present in the earliest known edition of Giles Gingerbread circa 1766 in the British Library, which can be accessed via Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line. I’m guessing the copy in Norwich, which is dated to 1764, also does. Very few copies of any British edition of Giles Gingerbread survive, having been read (not eaten) to pieces, so it is difficult to determine when and why the syllabary was dropped. Digital copies of the American piracies from the 1760s and 1770s don’t have it either.

The diagram was probably just a bit of complicated typesetting that could be cut. It slowed down the story, to tell the truth. But it is amusing to imagine that children who had read Giles Gingerbread pestered their parents for a hornbook just like it and the beleaguered publisher removed the offending passage to keep peace with gingerbread and pastry bakers all over Great Britain! Don’t quote me on that–it’s pure fantasy.

An antique mold for a gingerbread hornbook that looks something like the one Giles is holding.

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Category Archives: German-language children’s books

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