How Ramona Quimby Does Breakfast

Sometimes, no one can tell a story better than a child. The Ramona books, written by Beverly Cleary and published from 1955 to 1999, detail a middle-class American family’s life seen through the eyes of the youngest daughter Ramona. As the action is described from the point of the young girl, so too is so the food. Since Ramona is 10 years old or younger throughout the series, Cleary can describe food in its most simple and unaffected nature—Ramona sticks her spoon into her oatmeal to watch the milk pool around the utensil, she pokes a hole in her orange and sucks out the juice—a motif that brought me much joy when I read the books growing up.

Beverly Cleary is celebrating her 102nd birthday today, and I'd like to assume her time living though the soul of young Ramona is what’s kept her so lively. In honor of Cleary’s birthday (which was also proclaimed National Drop Everything and Read Day) I took it as a hint and revisited some of my favorite breakfast-related scenes from the Ramona series.

In Ramona Quimby, Age 8, Ramona attempts to crack a hard-boiled egg on her head (as was tradition among the other kids in her class) only to find, in a very slimy way, that the egg was actually raw. Later in the book, when Ramona and her sister Beezus are cooking cornbread for their parents and they can’t find cornmeal or buttermilk, they substitute with Cream of Wheat and banana-flavored yogurt.

“Ramona successfully broke the egg and tossed the shell onto the counter. ‘Now I need buttermilk.’ Beezus broke the news. There was no buttermilk in the refrigerator. ‘What’ll I do?’ whispered Ramona in a panic. ‘Here. Use this.’ Beezus thrust the carton of banana yogurt at her sister. ‘Yogurt is sort of sour, so it might work.’ ” —Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981)

The Quimby family hosts a New Year’s Day brunch in Ramona and Her Mother—Ramona “secretly felt the family had cheated because they had eaten their real breakfast earlier”—where they feast on muffins, sausage, scrambled eggs, and best of all, a large Jello salad. Later on in the book, the Quimbys come home one night to find that the Crock Pot had not been turned on. Even though the still-cold dinner causes Mr. and Mrs. Quimby to have a spat, it also meant that the family could have breakfast for dinner: pancakes, bacon, and carrot salad.

“There were a number of ways of cracking eggs. The most popular, and the real reason for bringing an egg to school was knocking the egg against one’s head. There were two ways of doing so, by a lot of timid raps or by one big whack… [Ramona] took a firm hold on her egg, waited until everyone at her table was watching, and wack—she found herself with a handful of crumbled shell and something cool and slimy running down her face." —Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981)

Ramona encourages her dad to quit smoking (she hears smoking turns lungs black and worries repeatedly about this happening to Mr. Quimby) in Ramona and Her Father. He hands Ramona a graham cracker and a glass of milk while he makes instant coffee, and she watches him struggle to not have a cigarette with his coffee, a ritual she’s watched many times.

“Ramona considered all these worries ridiculous, so she ignored them. She leaned back in her chain, closed her eyes, and thought of a big bowl of whipped cream, on a table in the park Surrounded by birthday presents. With the sun shining through the fir trees.” —Ramona’s World (1999)

In Ramona’s World, Ramona proves to be the hero we’ve always known her to be when she asks her mother for a big bowl of whipped cream instead of a birthday cake. Her parents and sister warn her of the calories, cholesterol, and potentially acne-inducing qualities, but Ramona doesn’t care. In the end, she settles for a chocolate cake frosted with whipped cream, so that she can blow out candles, but the moment is no less special.