Caroline is the editor-in-chief of Literary Mama, the associate director of The Sustainable Arts Foundation, and co-editor of The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage as well as Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
One of my favorite preschool activities is “Dictation:” an adult sits with a piece of paper and a pencil, and asks the assembled kids a question: What do your parents do for work? What do you like to eat for breakfast? How do you get to school? The responses are unpredictable, creative, and often bear little relation to the family’s reality as the parents understand it (one oppressed child apparently has to walk 63 miles to school every morning. You’d think the family would at least consider the bus.)
Not long ago, one of the moms did dictation with a twist; she’d brought in pictures of food and helped the kids create their own cookbooks. They did the gluing and talking, she did most of the writing. Here is Eli’s:
There’s something rather elemental about it, its focus on producing the ingredients, the waiting patiently for cabbage, the optimism about the honey. But my favorite aspect might just be the unwritten notion that if you eat that salad (and why wouldn’t you really? it’s just vegetables you like!), then someone will offer you a couple big milkshakes. That’s my kind of cookbook.
The first cookbook I remember using as a kid is the square, green and pink Peanuts (as in the comic strip) cookbook, a batter-splattered copy of which I still keep on my kitchen bookshelf. It drew me in with its goofy cartoons, and the recipes led me to the kitchen. I made Lucy’s Lemon Squares so often that the pages stick together, and nothing beats a Red Baron Root Beer Float on a hot day.
At some point in my childhood, I decided to copy some of my favorite recipes into a notebook, and I have it still — a small, black, three-ring binder — with the recipes all carefully typed up: crazy cake, oatmeal cookies, granola (3 different versions, all my mom’s), baking powder biscuits, hot fudge sauce, chocolate waffles, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate crinkle cookies (you can see I haven’t really changed over the years). I use it still, since even though I make some of these things regularly, I don’t trust myself to cook even the most familiar food without the recipe open for occasional reference.
The first children’s cookbook I bought for my future children, when I was still a childless graduate student, was Marjorie Winslow’s Mudpies and Other Recipes. I had to search used bookstores to find this relic of my childhood (the original lived in my grandparents’ house, and I don’t know what’s become of it), but it’s worth tracking down for its charming line drawings, its fanciful recipes (like Dandelion Puffs) and its timeless and timely message: “What does matter is that you select the best ingredients available, set a fine table, and serve with style.”
The first cookbook I bought for my own kids was probably Mollie Katzen’s Pretend Soup, which is a terrific book for even the very youngest children because each recipe is offered in two versions: one all text, one all pictures. By the time I bought it, before Ben could even talk, he had started to demonstrate a real interest in cooking and cookbooks, and so the cookbooks started pouring in. Some make great early readers; the illustrations (whether line drawings or photographs) are always clear; the meaning is easy to deduce from the pictures; there are lots of numbers and steps and interesting formatting details.
By now, the boys have so many cookbooks I have lost count, and they enjoy reading them so much that the books don’t stay in the kitchen, but migrate from kitchen to bedroom to the car for reading on the way to and from school. When Ben and Eli first started sharing a bedroom, almost three years ago now, the cookbook du jour was Fanny at Chez Panisse, and Ben would read his little brother a recipe every evening; I can still hear Eli’s plaintive voice asking for “the story part, please, Ben, not the vinaigrette recipe.”
The current favorite cookbook, Vegetarian Sushi, is not one aimed at children at all, but Ben studies it carefully and when we have our weekly sushi nights, he pulls it out and makes pickled ginger roses to garnish our plates, and makes sure the sesame seeds and plastic wrap are handy so that he can make his an inside out roll:
Now, just like I did as a kid (and kind of like I’m doing with this blog) Ben is starting to transfer his favorite recipes from the various cookbooks he uses to his own binder. Recently he typed up his avocado roll recipe (really more a process):
He even, understanding the power of illustrations to draw one into a book, produced a helpful sushi chart:
Life has kept me too busy lately to do much interesting cooking, but I’ll continue to poach from both Ben’s and now Eli’s early cookbook efforts and share some more of their recipes, because learning your way around a cookbook is an important part of learning to eat.
The New Englander in me is still shocked to see strawberries at the farmer’s market in March, but I get over that quickly, feel grateful for this early hit of summer, and buy quarts of them. This week, I knew I wanted to make a pie to celebrate Pi Day (March 14 = 3/14 = 3.14 for those of you not living with a very mathematically-minded eight year-old) but also knew, what with our preschool auction, the time change, and other events in our typically busy weekend, that I wouldn’t want to spend much time rolling out dough or babysitting a pie in the oven. So, I pulled the Joy of Cooking off the shelf and found this incredibly easy and delicious pie. It’s really only as good as the berries you use, so make sure they are fully ripe.
First, make a crust for a 9″ pie. I used a graham cracker crumb crust:
1 1/2 c crumbs
6 T melted butter
a dash of salt
Combine well and press into a pie pan. Freeze for 20 minutes before filling.
Now make the pie filling:
6 c berries: rinse, pat dry, hull, and slice in half or quarters, depending on their size (you want them bite sized)
set aside 4 cups of berries; puree the remaining 2 cups of berries in a blender
combine in medium sauce pan
1 c sugar
1/4 c corn starch
1/8 t salt
whisk in 1/2 c water
stir in the pureed berries
2 T fresh lemon juice
2 T butter, cut into small chunks
Bring the mixture to a simmer over medium heat, stirring constantly, and cook for one minute. Pour half the reserved berries into the crust, then spoon half of the hot berry mixture over them. Gently shake the pie pan or use a spatula to coat the berries evenly. Cover with the remaining berries, then spoon the rest of the berry mixture over them, shaking the pan again gently or using a spatula to evenly distribute the berries.
Refrigerate the pie at least 4 hours to set. It’s best served the day it’s made, with whipped cream or a dollop of Greek yogurt.
Among the many cookbooks Ben owns, he’s currently drawn most to the beautifully photographed Cooking with Kids. It’s not quite as charming as Mollie Katzen’s Pretend Soup, nor as fun to read as Alice Waters’ Fanny at Chez Panisse, but it’s got a nice mix of simple (chocolate bananas) and more complicated recipes (cinnamon meringues) and I like that, unlike in some kids’ cookbooks, the recipes for pie start with a recipe for pie crust. Plus, it looks great, and there’s nothing better to draw a kid into a new cookbook than gorgeous pictures of food.
Ben has dogeared more than half the recipes but on a recent rainy day, it was Eli who felt like baking with me, and we couldn’t resist trying this recipe, named for a Doris Grant, who apparently invented the bread by accident. What accident? She forgot to proof the yeast, or knead the bread, or do any of the things one normally does to bread dough? It’s not explained, and while I was dubious, the unconventional method produced a perfectly nice loaf of bread.
the baker
Butter one large or two small loaf pans (the recipe calls for a single 16x5x4″ pan, which is much bigger than mine so I used two 8×4″ pans)
Combine in a large bowl:
5 c whole wheat flour
1 t salt
1 envelope (2 1/2 t) active dry yeast
Stir together in a glass measuring cup:
1 T honey
2 1/2 c lukewarm water
Make a well in the dry ingredients, and pour in the liquid. Stir well for a couple minutes until you have a nice dough. dough
Put the dough in the prepared bread pan(s), smoothing the top a bit with a spatula.
you can see I'm not terribly precise about dividing the dough...
Let rise in a warm spot for 30-40 minutes, until the dough has risen to within about an inch of the top of the pan. While the bread is rising, heat the oven to 400.
Bake for 35-40 minutes. Test for doneness by turning the loaf out of the pan and tapping the bottom: if it sounds hollow, like a drum, the loaf is done; if not, return the loaf to the pan and bake another 5-10 minutes.
This is the hardest part: let cool before slicing.
A recipe Ben wrote when he was 5 (we didn't make it)
I love Pete Wells’ Cooking with Dexter column, and this week’s installment spoke to me particularly. Wells, apparently, is a perfectionist, and his occasional cooking missteps make him storm and stomp – unless his five year-old son is around. Then, because like any parent Wells likes to model more constructive behavior, he checks his temper and tries to let the mistakes slide off his back.
The article resonated with me not so much because I’m like Wells but because my son Ben is like Dexter – a boy who will erase a mistake so hard that he wears a hole in the paper — and the note Dexter wrote to himself after a painting went awry breaks my heart: “Step 1: Do your best! Step 2: Try again.”
But Dexter goes for it in the kitchen, and so did Ben at the same age. Wells writes, “When Dexter is at the stove, neither failure nor success surprises him. Watch him bake: he freestyles like a snowboarder.” And amazingly, it works. He wings it, and most of the time it turns out okay.
Ben’s never entirely freestyled – he loves the mathematical precision of baking’s measurements too much to abandon them entirely – but when he was five and a daily reader of cookbooks (he asked for cookbooks as his bedtime stories) he absorbed them so thoroughly he started to write his own. Here’s another recipe Ben wrote when he was five (with my comments in brackets):
Whole-Wheat Bread
You’ll Need
¾ c + ½ c whole-wheat flour
½ c warm water
1/3 c cornmeal
1 package (1/4 ounce) dry yeast
3 tablespoons + ½ teaspoon granulated sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
2 tablespoons + ¼ teaspoons wheat germ
¼ teaspoon baking powder
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter [I talked Ben down from a full cup of butter, so we used 1/2 cup, melted]
Equipment
Measuring cups & spoons
Bread pan
Cooling rack
Preheat oven to 375 F.
Measure the flour, cornmeal & butter into the bread pan
Add the yeast and salt
Now add the water, sugar, baking soda & baking powder
Add the wheat germ
Bake up to ½ hour [it took exactly half an hour. This surprised me almost more than how good the bread tasted]
Note: This bread will taste good with some raspberry jam (page 77) [a reference to the jam recipe still to come in his hypothetical cookbook]
We ultimately halved the recipe (which delighted my fraction-loving boy) so a full recipe might need to bake longer than half an hour. Bake until the top is browned and a tester comes out clean. And it tastes alright, kind of like an especially crunchy soda bread.
(I wrote more about this baking experiment here).
Now that he’s eight, Ben is less inclined to freestyle and more likely to follow recipes to the letter. He made his own birthday cake this year, choosing to follow a recipe in a kids’ cookbook that I don’t much like. I resisted the impulse to alter the recipe as he went, though, in favor of his getting direct experience with the recipes and letting him judge for himself. And really, although I could quibble about a few things, the cake tasted fine and — more importantly – the boy made his own cake!
Ultimately, I hope, there’ll come a day when both my kids achieve a good balance in the kitchen: sometimes using cookbooks as inspiration for something new, sometimes following their recipes to the letter, always getting plenty of experience so that they can find ways to salvage the experiments that go awry, without deflating like a couple of soufflés.
