Barbara Pym Cookbook

November 3, 1988
A treat for devotees of Pym, this literary cookbook assembled by the author's sister and cookbook author Wyatt offers a modest selection of recipes, adapted for the American kitchen, for foods mentioned in Pym's novels. Others, such as ``a bowl of groats, fragrant as a cornfield and intriguingly surfaced with little pock marks,'' were Pym's favorites. All are accompanied by prose morsels taken from the author's corpus. Plain English food is served in abundance: steak and kidney pie, potted ham, sausage rolls. Curiosities like toad-in-the-hole seem included mainly for amusement. Overly familiar ethnic recipes reflect Pym's fascination with Greece and Italy. The culinary strength of the collection rests in its ``sweets.'' Americans taken with the English tea ritual will find the fairy cakes, Sultana scones and rock buns delightful, while the treacle tart and gooseberry pie will appeal to confirmed Anglophiles. Respectfully yet whimsically presented, the recipes come to seem a genuine, if minor, part of Pym's oeuvre , where the ``small things of life,'' cooking among them, are reckoned ``often so much bigger than the great things.''