Food and drinks are some of the easiest ways — and the most fun— to vicariously experience another culture. When you add a great book to the mix, you've got the makings of a perfect evening. In Food+Fiction, we recommend a delicious read and a related recipe so you can try the taste of different destinations in your own kitchen.

This post is part of our Food+Fiction series.

Bring a little magic into your day with a snack that’s squishy, buttery, crunchy, sweet, a bit weird, and all-together irresistible.

The food in New Zealand is a reflection of its multicultural population. There are the British-influenced dishes you’d expect from the colonial past, like fish and chips, lamb chops, and meat pies — but there’s also international cuisine with an Asian influence (pad thai, chicken tikka masala, sushi), all manner of packaged candy, canned spaghetti (!), and the rainbow-hued snack called fairy bread.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s a dad from New Zealand to explain:

The wonder that is fairy bread is composed of three simple but essential ingredients: squishy white bread, softened butter, and the colored sprinkles known as hundreds and thousands in New Zealand and Australia. If you are wondering what the fuss is all about (as we did), let this Reddit comment supply the answer:

The origins of fairy bread are mired in the dark shadows of dispute. According to some food historians, the first mention of the candy-coated snack was in a write-up about children’s birthday party in The Hobart Mercury newspaper in the 1920s. But another legend places in much later, in 1934, when the Sydney Morning Herald published ‘A Christmas Dinner with Toddlers’ and recommended parents give their kids a ‘slice of fairy bread with sponge cake and the usual drink of milk.’ It’s also plausible that fairy bread is a variation of hagelslag from the Netherlands, which uses chocolate sprinkles instead of rainbow-colored round ones.

We, of course, prefer the literary origin story. In his 1885 anthology A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson included a poem called Fairy Bread:

• Come up her, O dusty feet!
• Here is fairy bread to eat.
• Here in my retiring room
• Children, you may dine
• On the golden smell of broom
• And the shade of pine;
• And when you have eaten well,
• Fairy stories hear and tell.

Whatever the true story might be, fairy bread is now the definitive birthday party food for kids in New Zealand.

In our recommended book The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, our hero Charley has the magical ability to bring characters from books into the real world. As delightful as it might seem to take tea with David Copperfield or ask Heathcliff where he was all those years, there’s also a dark side to this power.

Although the story has a shadow side, fairy bread seems like just the thing to celebrate these classic fictional characters as they emerge from the pages of their books into the city of Wellington, New Zealand.

We suggest you brew a cup of tea — or what the heck?! pour a glass of Prosecco — and whip up some fairy bread to snack on while you read this or any of the other books we recommended in our podcast episode New Zealand: Kiwis, Majestic Scenery, and Māori Mythology.

New Zealand Fairy Bread

Makes 24. Prep 10 minutes. Bake 20 minutes.

When I first came to Wellington to study law, I came because it was the cultural and creative capital of the country. It was where laws were made, and where art was made. It was where governments rose and fell in the House of Parliament named the Beehive, where lively discussions sparked over coffee in quirky cafés, where students drank to flashing strobe lights in the small hours of the morning… I was eighteen and ambitious, and I wanted to build a life in the city. I didn’t need, or expect, to fall in love with it. — H.G. Parry

This literary fantasy (464 pages) was published in July of 2019 by Redhook. The book takes you to Wellington, New Zealand. Melissa read The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep and loved it; it wouldn't be on our site if she didn't recommend it.

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Top image courtesy of Delphine Ducaruge/Unsplash.