Then there was dumb Mrs. Goose — the 1950s creation of Miriam Clark Potter — who was always getting confused. In "The Hatbox Cake," she made a cake for a holiday fair, put it into a hatbox, and then accidentally threw the hatbox onto a shelf in her closet, mashing the cake into a sort of pudding "all swoozed together." Drying her goosey tears, she went ahead and served it with ice cream, and of course all her animal friends loved it.

A couple of years passed, and I started reading (to myself, mainly) "Little House" books and "The Chronicles of Narnia". Here too I drooled over the food. I realize now that Laura Ingalls Wilder, like most pioneer kids, spent much of her childhood longing for mealtimes, and that C. S. Lewis wrote the "Narnia" books during the height of food rationing in England. Their appetites found their way into the stories, and I longed to taste every dish they described.

Short of eating a book itself, eating the food in its pages is the only way you can literally turn the story into part of you. Think of the six buns poor, starving Sara Crewe buys in "A Little Princess" — and then gives five of them away to a beggar child.