Maybe it’s the alliteration in the title that makes the trio of foods sound strangely appetizing upon first glance, or maybe it’s that I didn’t have to eat them morning after morning. But 86-year-old John Gallant’s stories of his impoverished childhood in rural Prince Edward Island quickly convinced me otherwise, as he makes perfectly clear his indifference toward his perpetual childhood breakfast.

In fact, Gallant makes most things perfectly clear in this charming and edifying little book. His storytelling is vivid and modest as he details – without embellishment – the years of hardship faced by his parents, grandparents, and six brothers and sisters living in a ruddy log house near the town of St. Charles. We get John’s story bit by bit, in an order only vaguely chronological, so that the whole finally comes to resemble the patchwork overalls Gallant wore to school over a shirt made from a Robin Hood flour sack – sad and strange, a rough-hewn reminder to be thankful for the smoothness in our lives.

Lovingly illustrated throughout by the author’s son, Gregory Gallant (the acclaimed graphic novelist and illustrator known as Seth), and lettered in a large, comic-bubble font, Bannock’s off-kilter appeal derives much from its casual presentation, which provides the ideal complement to the elder Gallant’s gently didactic, orally driven tone. Seth’s illustrations neatly combine cartoonish innocence with subtle menace, using dark, hard-edged shadows to lend his simple figures a sense of melancholy.

Above all, it is the author’s personality that imbues this book, despite its bleak specificity, with something approaching timelessness. In his introduction (which he puts into comic-strip format), Seth admits that these stories have lost something in their transfer to the page. And although I haven’t had the good fortune of hearing John Gallant tell his stories, I think I understand. Because in reading his accounts – of chopping through the ice to spear eels, rigging snares for rabbits, fashioning his own skates from old boots and wood and wire – I wish he were here, intoning, gesturing with his hands, showing me how it’s done.