The one where Charlotte and Gertie eat candy in bed.
Listen to the episode
Join Merav and Batya as they delve into all things All-of-A-Kind Family. This episode features a deep dive into candy, cookies and crackers, and the origin of the cracker barrel as a center for gaming!
We’ll also talk about what the heck a “snap” cookie is.
Our chapter in summary
When Mama’s younger brother comes for dinner, the girls face the happy dilemma: how will we spend the extra penny from Uncle Hyman? Charlotte and Gertie decide to spend theirs on candy. They visit the local candy shop and the grocery store, and then make a mischievous plan to eat their goodies in bed under Mama’s watchful eye. Will they be caught?
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Show Notes:
Welcome to our guest, Heidi Rabinowitz from the Book of Life Podcast
Heidi has been the Director of the Feldman Children’s Library at Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida since 1998. She has served as a member and chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award committee and a member of the Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award committee. Heidi was a founding member of the PJ Library book selection committee. She has reviewed Jewish literature for School Library Journal, the Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter, and the Jewish Book Council.
Heidi co-created (with Marie Cloutier) the Jewish Book Carnival, a monthly roundup of Jewish literary links from across the blogosphere, and also co-created (with Susan Kusel) the Facebook discussion group, Jewish Kidlit Mavens and the mock award blog, The Sydney Taylor Shmooze. For further information, please see Heidi’s LinkedIn profile.
The history of the cracker barrel, not the Cracker Barrel
Cracker barrels were for holding dry goods that did not yet have a plastic sleeve or cellophane package to keep them neatly contained. Often the cracker barrel held the broken ends of packages that had split. People found they liked the mixed crackers and a phenomenon was born. Cracker barrels also often had game boards on their tops to encourage people to linger in the shop and attract more customers. The restaurant and store chain is named for the phenomenon. As it fell out of fashion, so too did a lot of other of-the-time storage items. There’s a song about it in The Music Man.
Let’s talk about the candy
There’s some great histories written about candy from this period that we looked at while doing our research. It was fun trying to figure out what Charlotte and Gertie were eating and what it was likely to be made from, and what it actually looked like.
Rejected candy types
Since Charlotte and Gertie want to play games with their food, they disqualify a bunch of the existing and otherwise delightful candies, including: “Indian” bars, which are similar to our modern peanut chews, licorice drops, red cherry hearts, “chicken corn” which appears to be candy corn, multicolor jellybeans, lemon drops, caramels, and chocolate pennies.
The winning candy type? Chocolate babies
We talked a little bit on the show about children and eating anthropomorphized sweets, including animals, and candy that looks like people. Chocolate babies have, as you might imagine, a somewhat racist history, and they have changed shape several times as well as undergoing a few name changes. Chocolate babies apparently have a consistency similar to candy corn, which suits Charlotte and Gertie’s purposes. Go ahead and take a look at this little article that has some nice comments about the Betsy-Tacy books, as well as All-of-a-Kind Family.
What’s a skullcap?
Mr. Basch is depicted with a long beard, and as speaking Yiddish. He’s one of the first non-family members to be depicted as explicitly Jewish and displaying outwards signs of that Jewishness, including covering his head with a kippah or yarmulke, translated here as a skullcap. A small hat-like head-covering that covers the top of the head, usually to the width of three fingers or wider. Some traditions shape it into a squarer hat shape with sides.
What’s Yiddish?
Yiddish is a long-standing Jewish language that is largely spoken by Jews of Ashkenazi descent. It makes use of Hebrew, German, Polish, and a number of other languages. Dialects of Yiddish shift depending on where they’re sourced, and while formal versions of the language have been codified, sub-dialects continue to flourish.
The snap cookie
Today we’re familiar with ginger snaps, but there used to be a bunch of different “snap” cookies in more common circulation, including lemon snaps and chocolate snaps. These are still available today including in pie-crust format. There are also vanilla snaps, and you can make brandy snaps at home, but they are definitely a different sort of treat from the others.
Mama’s psychology of sleep
Instead of the sort of staggered bedtimes we might expect for girls ranging in age from 4 to 12, Mama institutes one bedtime for all of her girls, possibly knowing that having different girls going to bed in one room will be disruptive to the others, so everyone is bedded down early, leaving Mama with that most important factor, time to herself and time with her husband. This gives Mama time to knit, catch up on her reading and hatch more games for her growing girls.
Imaginary houses and the construct of memory
Ella and Sarah are playing a game where they furnish an imaginary house, keeping the idea of the room in their heads as a diversion. This allows them to play together, but it’s also probably sharpening their memories, similar to the system devised by Giordano Bruno, which allows the superimposition of memories onto an imagined place.
Papa’s red handkerchief
Perhaps just a cute detail, or maybe Sydney Taylor alluding to the red diaper baby era of social communism in the 1950s. Taylor came up through socialist youth groups and certainly would have been conversant with the politics of the day. Alternately, it could be a red herring (or handkerchief) and this might have been true to life, and could have been based on a cloth lot Papa had in the shop and cut up for handkerchiefs.
Other books we mentioned
We read and re-read the All-of-a-Kind Family books in parallel with many other books, including Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban, Gregory the Terrible Eater by Mitchell Sharmat, Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Camel with the Winkled Knees by Johnny Gruelle, The Family with Two Front Doors by Anna Ciddor, A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall, The Secret Country books by Pamela Dean, and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith