Spectator by Seema Goswami: Once upon a dine

The books that got me hooked on reading were the ones by Enid Blyton, more specifically the Malory Towers series, set in an idyllic boarding house where Darrell Rivers and her band of intrepid friends had the most marvellous adventures. But what I loved most about these books were the scenes that described food: the midnight feasts that the girls sneaked off to, the ginger beer (Ginger beer? What was that about?) they guzzled on days out with their parents. Some of the food items they consumed were little more than words to me — but they were words that transported me to a world far away from mine, introducing me to tastes that I could only conjure up in my imagination.