Spotty Powder and other Splendiferous Secrets Read online

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Happy birthday, Puffin!

  Did you know that in 1940 the very first Puffin story book (about a man with broomstick arms called Worzel Gummidge) was published? That’s 70 years ago! Since then the little Puffin logo has become one of the most recognized book brands in the world and Puffin has established its place in the hearts of millions.

  And in 2010 we are celebrating 70 spectacular years of Puffin and its books! Pocket Money Puffins is a brand-new collection from your favourite authors at a pocket-money price – in a perfect pocket size. We hope you enjoy these exciting stories and we hope you’ll join us in celebrating the very best books for children. We may be 70 years old (sounds ancient, doesn’t it?) but Puffin has never been so lively and fun.

  There really IS a Puffin book for everyone

  – discover yours today.

  Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales of Norwegian parents. He was educated in England and went on to work for the Shell Oil Company in Africa, becoming an RAF fighter pilot when the Second World War began. He wrote his first children’s story, James and the Giant Peach, in 1961 and every one of his subsequent books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Magic Finger, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Matilda, The Twits, The BFG and The Witches, has become a much-loved bestseller all over the world. Roald Dahl died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four.

  Books by Roald Dahl

  The BFG

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

  Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

  Danny the Champion of the World

  The Enormous Crocodile

  Esio Trot

  Fantastic Mr Fox

  George’s Marvellous Medicine

  The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me

  James and the Giant Peach

  The Magic Finger

  Matilda

  Rhyme Stew

  The Twits

  The Witches

  Roald Dahl

  Illustrated by

  Quentin Blake

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  puffinbooks.com

  Extracts taken from: The Roald Dahl Diary 1992 first published 1991; Charlie’s Secret Chocolate Box first published 1997; D is for Dahl first published 2004; The Dahlmanac first published 2006; Dahlmanac 2 first published 2007; More About Boy first published 2008 – all published in Puffin Books; Roald Dahl’s Cookbook published by Penguin Books 1996.

  ‘Spotty Powder’ first published in Puffin Post Vol.7, No.1, 1973; ‘Strawberry-flavoured Chocolate-coated Fudge’ and ‘Butterscotch’ from Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes published by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1994.

  This edition first published 2010

  Text and archive photographs copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 2010

  Illustrations copyright © Quentin Blake, 2010

  All rights reserved. The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196563-5

  This was his advice from The Minpins: ‘Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most likely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.’

  Augustus Gloop was originally named Augustus Pottle?

  Willy Wonka’s Oompa-Loompas were going to be called Whipple-Scrumpets?

  Cocoa pods are as big as rugby balls.

  Roald Dahl wanted to get rid of history teachers and have chocolate teachers instead.

  These are just some of the splendiferous secrets you’ll discover in this delicious little treasure trove of Roald Dahl fun facts and surprises. You’ll also meet Quentin Blake, find out how to make strawberry-flavoured chocolate-coated fudge (YUM!), sneak a peek at Roald Dahl’s school reports and much, much more.

  Contents

  How Roald Dahl started writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

  Roald Dahl’s Year

  Roald Dahl’s January

  The Missing Children

  Chocolate!

  Roald Dahl’s February

  The Whipple-Scrumpets

  Mr Wonka’s Chocolate Factory Recipes

  Roald Dahl’s Favourite Things

  Roald Dahl’s March

  Meet Quentin Blake

  What Roald Dahl thought of Quentin Blake

  Ideas Books

  Roald Dahl’s April

  Roald Dahl’s School Reports

  Roald Dahl’s May

  Roald’s Family Holidays

  Roald Dahl’s June

  A Missing Chapter

  Spotty Powder

  Roald Dahl’s July

  What Roald Dahl thought about chocolate

  Weird and wonderful Roald Dahl facts

  He once had a tame magpie.

  Roald’s Family Holidays

  Roald Dahl’s August

  More things that Roald Dahl liked

  Advice from Roald Dahl

  Roald Dahl’s September

  Roald Dahl’s

  Mr Wonka’s Chocolate Factory Recipes

  Roald Dahl’s October

  Charlie’s Quiz

  Roald Dahl’s November

  Roald Dahl’s Secret Writing Tips

  Roald Dahl’s December

  Charlie’s Chocolate Shop

  ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory took me a terrible long time to write. The first time I did it, I got everything wrong. I wrote a story about a little boy who was going round a chocolate factory and he accidentally fell into a big tub of melted chocolate and got sucked into the machine that made chocolate figures and he couldn’t get out. It was a splendid big chocolate figure, a chocolate boy the same size as him. And it was Easter time, and the figure was put in a shop window, and in the end a lady came in and bought it as an Easter present for her little girl, and carried it home. On Easter Day, the little girl opened the box with her present in it, and took it out and then she decided to eat some of it. She would start with the head, she thought. So she broke off the nose, and when she saw a real human nose sticking out underneath and two big bright human eyes staring at her through the eye-holes in the chocolate, she got a nasty shock. And so it went on.

  ‘But the story wasn’t good enough. I rewrote it, and rewrote it, an
d the little tentacles kept shooting out from my head, searching for new ideas, and at last one of them came back with Mr Willy Wonka and his marvellous chocolate factory and then came Charlie and his parents and grandparents and the Golden Tickets and the nasty children, Violet Beauregarde and Veruca Salt and all the rest of them.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I got so wrapped up in all those nasty children, and they made me giggle so much that I couldn’t stop inventing them. In the first full version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I had no less than ten horrid little boys and girls. That was too many. It became confusing. It wasn’t a good book. But I liked them all so much, I didn’t want to take any of them out.

  ‘One of them, who was taken out in the end, was a horrid little girl who was disgustingly rude to her parents and also thoroughly disobedient. Her name was Miranda Mary Piker …’

  Nature is full of secrets if you look hard enough. And Roald Dahl kept notes about the habits of butterflies and frogs, the colour and songs of birds, and the different flowers, plants and berries that blossomed in the countryside. Find out what Roald Dahl liked or disliked about every month of the year, including his favourite animals and birds. (And read about some of the hilarious pranks he got up to when he was a young boy too!)

  ‘For the last twelve months we have all been living in one year and now all of a sudden it is another. It is extraordinary how this tremendous change takes place in the space of a fraction of a second. As the clock approaches midnight on the thirty-first of December you are still in the old year, but then all at once, one millionth of a second after midnight, you are in the new. I have always found this sudden change from one year to another awfully hard to get used to, and all through the new January that follows I keep writing down the old year instead of the new one on letters and other bits of paper …

  ‘There is just one small bright spark shining through the gloom in my January garden. The first snowdrops are in flower.’

  As you now know, Roald Dahl wrote several versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and included lots of very naughty characters. In a very early draft of the story, as many as ten children are lucky Golden Ticket finders who each win a tour of Mr Wonka’s Chocolate Factory:

  Augustus Pottle who falls in the chocolate river Miranda Grope who also falls in after him Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck who climb in wagons running from the vanilla fudge mountain and end up in the Pounding and Cutting Room

  Violet Strabismus who turns purple after chewing the three course-meal gum

  Clarence Crump, Bertie Upside and Terence Roper who each cram a whole mouthful of warming candies and end up overheating

  Elvira Entwhistle who falls foul of the squirrels in the Nut Room

  And Charlie Bucket who gets stuck inside a chocolate statue and witnesses a burglary – and receives a very unusual reward …

  Roald Dahl soon decided there were too many naughty children in the story. So, somewhat reluctantly, he reduced the number of lucky Golden Ticket finders to seven, and gave all the children distinct characteristics:

  A nice boy

  (previously Augustus Pottle) A greedy boy

  A conceited boy (we never find out what happens to him)

  A television-crazy boy (he became Mike Teavee in the final version!)

  A girl who is allowed to HAVE anything she wants

  A girl who chews gum all day long

  A girl who is allowed to DO anything she wants

  And it is in this draft that Charlie’s grandparents are introduced for the first time, and tiny people called ‘Whipple-Scrumpets’ become Mr Wonka’s workforce, reciting poems as each child leaves.

  The Swiss eat more chocolate per person than any other nation in the world.

  Belgium is the third biggest producer of chocolate in the world.

  Just like Willy Wonka, many Belgian chocolate makers keep their recipes secret.

  Cocoa was discovered by the South American Indians over 3,000 years ago.

  The word ‘chocolate’ comes from chocolatl, the Aztec name for their chocolate drink.

  The scientific name for cocoa means ‘food of the gods’.

  Cocoa beans were considered so valuable, the Aztecs used them as money – ten beans would buy a rabbit!

  Originally, chocolate was used just as a drink. The Spaniards took cocoa to Europe from Mexico in the sixteenth century. They kept the recipe for drinking-chocolate secret for nearly 100 years!

  In 1606, an Italian took the recipe to Italy, and chocolate drinking became popular throughout Europe.

  There was a royal chocolate maker at the court of Louis XIV.

  At first, chocolate was only for the rich. They drank it in ‘chocolate houses’, which were like smart cafes.

  The first chocolate factory in America was set up in 1765.

  Cocoa powder is made from dried beans that are roasted and ground.

  It takes a year’s crop of cocoa beans from one tree to make just one tin of cocoa!

  Cocoa pods are as big as rugby balls. They contain about thirty beans.

  Factories can produce over five million bars of chocolate a day.

  ‘Only once have I discovered a new molehill in our orchard in the month of February. I love seeing molehills because they tell me that only a few inches below the surface some charming and harmless little fellow is living his own private busy life scurrying up and down his tunnels hunting for food …

  ‘Do you know anything about moles? They are remarkable animals. They are shy and gentle and their fur coats are softer than velvet. They are so shy that you will seldom see one on the surface … The molehills that you see are not of course their houses. They are simply piles of loose soil that a mole has pushed up out of the way because, after all, if you are digging an underground tunnel you have to put the excavated soil somewhere.

  ‘His food consists of worms, leather-jackets, centipedes and beetle grubs, and the fantastic thing is that he actually has to eat one half of his own body weight of these tiny delicacies every single day in order to stay alive! No wonder he’s a busy fellow. Just imagine how much food you would have to eat to consume half your own body weight! Fifty hamburgers, one hundred loaves of bread and a bucketful of Mars Bars and the rest of it each and every day. It makes one quite ill to think about it!’

  Have a look at an early version of the Whipple-Scrumpets’ song about greedy Augustus Gloop, and compare it to the one that actually appears in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, sung by the Oompa-Loompas. Can you spot the differences?

  The Whipple-Scrumpets … began dancing about and clapping their hands and singing:

  Augustus Gloop! Augustus Gloop!

  The great big greedy nincompoop!

  How long could we allow this beast

  To gorge and guzzle, feed and feast

  On everything he wanted to?

  Great Scott! It simply wouldn’t do!

  And so, you see, the time was ripe

  To send him shooting up the pipe;

  He had to go. It had to be.

  And very soon he’s going to see

  Inside the room to which he’s gone

  Some funny things are going on.

  But don’t, dear children, be alarmed.

  Augustus Gloop will not be harmed,

  Although, of course, we must admit

  He will be altered quite a bit.

  For instance, all those lumps of fat

  Will disappear just like that!

  He’ll shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink,

  His skin will be no longer pink,

  He’ll be so smooth and square and small

  He will not know himself at all.

  Farewell, Augustus Gloop, farewell!

  For soon you’ll be a caramel!’

  ‘They’re teasing,’ Mr Wonka said, shaking a finger at the singing Whipple-Scrumpets. ‘You mustn’t believe a word they say.’

  Strawberry-flavoured

  Chocolate-coated Fudge

  You wil
l need:

  20 × 25 cm shallow baking tin

  Greaseproof paper

  Large saucepan

  Sugar thermometer

  Cutters

  450 g caster sugar

  100 g unsalted butter

  175 ml evaporated milk

  A few generous drops of pink food-colouring

  A generous ½ tsp (2.5 ml) of strawberry food-flavouring

  100 g melted chocolate for dipping

  Makes enough for ten greedy children

  How to make:

  Line the tin with buttered greaseproof paper.

  Put all the ingredients except the flavouring and colouring into a large heavy-bottomed saucepan and place over a low heat.

  Stir occasionally. Once the sugar has dissolved, gently boil the mixture and now stir all the time (to prevent sticking and burning on the bottom of the pan).

  Place the sugar thermometer into the saucepan and boil the mixture to a soft ball (118°C). This takes about five minutes.

  Take the pan off the heat, stir until the bubbles subside and then add the flavouring and the colouring.

  Beat rapidly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens and becomes granular, approximately three minutes.