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Know a kid who’s interested in food—eating, growing, or cooking it—or who you wish would be? With the holidays coming up, one of these food-related children’s books could be the perfect gift idea.

Unless otherwise noted, all titles were published this year. If I’ve missed something great, please add it in the comments!

Picture Books (Elementary Readers)

Cover image courtesy of Random House.

1. Perfect Soup, by Lisa Moser, illustrated by Ben Mantle (Random House). This engaging, colorful story about a mouse’s quest to find a carrot so he can make “the perfect soup” is a creative way to teach kids the classic maxim that it’s better to give than to receive—and that you don’t always have to follow recipes exactly.

2. Don’t Let Auntie Mabel Bless the Table, by Vanessa Brantley Newton (Blue Apple Books). Lively illustrations and simple rhymes celebrate a mixed-race family’s Sunday dinner by poking gentle fun at the relative whose “grace” drags on forever.

3. Three Scoops and a Fig, by Sara Laux Akin, illustrated by Susan Kathleen Hartung (Peachtree). A sweet story about a girl who wants to help prepare a feast for her visiting Nonno and Nonna, this gives young readers a taste of Italian words and foods.

4. Oscar and the Very Hungry Dragon, by Ute Krause (NorthSouth). With wonderfully wry lines like: “The dragon, who had only eaten princesses so far, was amazed when he tasted Oscar’s cooking,” this fairy tale offers a lesson about the power of shared meals to turn enemies into friends.

5. Wolf Pie, by Brenda Seabrooke, illustrated by Liz Callen (Clarion). An impish spin on the classic fairy tale about three little pigs and a hungry wolf, this early chapter book will delight kids who love jokes and wordplay.

6. You Are What You Eat, and Other Mealtime Hazards, by Serge Bloch (Sterling). Award-winning illustrator Serge Bloch plays with food idioms. His creative combination of photography and cartoon sketches will make young readers “pleased as punch.”

7. The Gigantic Sweet Potato, by Dianne de Las Casas, illustrated by Marita Gentry (Pelican Publishing). Adapted from a Russian folktale called The Giant Turnip, the cute cast of human and animal characters in this watercolor-illustrated version work together to harvest a huge sweet potato from Ma Farmer’s garden. Includes a recipe for sweet potato pie.

8. Too Pickley! by Jean Reidy, illustrated by Genevieve Leloup (Bloomsbury). From the very first line (“I AM HUNGRY!”), this book takes the voice and perspective of a pint-sized picky eater. The silly rhymes and bright, playful illustrations encourage kids to experience food with all their senses.

9. Little Mouse and the Big Cupcake, by Thomas Taylor, illustrated by Jill Barton (Boxer Books). When a little mouse discovers a tasty treat that’s even bigger than he is, he must learn the importance of sharing and appropriate portion sizes.

10. A Garden for Pig, by Kathryn K. Thurman, illustrated by Lindsay Ward (Kane Miller Books). This whimsically illustrated story about a pig who craves vegetables also includes tips for kids to plant their own organic gardens.

Chapter Books (Middle & Teen Readers)

1. Noodle Pie, by Ruth Starke (fiction, Kane Miller). This pre-teen novel follows an 11-year-old boy raised in Australia on a trip to Vietnam, where his father takes him to explore his roots. Food becomes his touchstone for learning about Vietnamese culture, and the book includes several recipes.

2. When Molly Was a Harvey Girl, by Frances M. Wood (fiction, Kane Miller). A historically based story about the hardships and adventures faced by an orphaned 13-year-old girl in the 19th-century Wild West. In her job as a New Mexico railroad station waitress, she serves up American classics like chicken salad and peach pie, but also forms friendships that introduce her to Mexican food.

3. Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom and Science, by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos (nonfiction, Clarion). A dense but engaging book that ties together many important and complex historical issues.

4. Candy Bomber: The Story of the Berlin Airlift’s “Chocolate Pilot,” by Michael O. Tunnell (nonfiction, Charlesbridge). This true story about an American pilot who started dropping candy for kids during the 1948 airlift in West Berlin teaches both World War II history and a deeper lesson about putting “principle before pleasure,” as its subject, Gail Halvorsen, writes in the preface.

5. The Omnivore’s Dilemma for Kids, by Michael Pollan (nonfiction, Dial, 2009). An easier-to-read, yet not oversimplified version of Pollan’s popular manifesto about sustainable eating, the young readers’ edition looks at the American food chain from four perspectives—Industrial, Industrial Organic, Local Sustainable, and Hunter-Gatherer—and offers plenty to chew on.

Cookbooks and Activity Books

1. The Children’s Baking Book, by Denise Smart (DK Publishing, 2009). Ages 7 to 12. With plenty of pictures, step-by-step instructions and a glossary, this book makes baking look both exciting and accessible to young novices.

2. My Lunch Box: 50 Recipes to Take to School, by Hilary Shevlin Karmilowicz (Chronicle Books, 2009). Ages 3 and up. This isn’t a book, technically—it’s a box full of recipe cards with colorfully illustrated ideas to get children excited about packing their own simple, healthy lunches.

3. Sam Stern’s Get Cooking, by Sam Stern (Candlewick). Teenage British cook Sam Stern aims this book at his “mates,” with simple recipes like My-Style Chicken Parmigiana (“a classic tomato sauce with the coolest chicken dish”) and Cheese and Potato Pizza, although he does sneak in more sophisticated dishes as well (Korma and Cucumber Salad; Chocolate Soufflé).

4. Kitchen Science Experiments: How Does Your Mold Garden Grow? by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, illustrated by Edward Miller (Sterling). Ages 9 to 12. Bright, curious young minds will enjoy experimenting with food to answer questions like “How do temperature and time affect the growth of microbes in milk?” and “What happens when you heat a marshmallow?” (Their parents might be slightly less grateful.)

5. I’m a Scientist: Kitchen, by Lisa Burke (DK Publishing). Ages 5 to 9. With sturdy, colorful pages and simple experiments such as mixing oil and water to understand density, this will whet kids’ appetite for science by encouraging them to play with their food.

Editor’s Note: For more holiday shopping ideas, check out our guide to crafty gifts made from recycled food packaging.

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving! To ease you back into the work week, we’ve got a short, sweet Inviting Writing story about eating at Grandma’s house. Today’s featured writer is Elizabeth Breuer, an OB-Gyn resident in Texas who blogs about both medicine and food at Dr. OB Cookie.

Grandma Joan
By Elizabeth Breuer

Whirls of exhaled cigarette smoke filled my grandmother’s kitchen. She always stood at the counter with her lit cigarette, a neatly folded New York Times and a glass of wine, from a gallon jug stored neatly under the sink, filled with ice cubes. She incessantly flipped from The Weather Channel to CNN on a small television that sat just beyond the table, silently beaming out bold closed captions of the daily occurrences.

Homemade oatmeal cookies, courtesy Flickr user prettyinprint

Her table was made gracefully. Atop a neat tablecloth perched an English porcelain bowl filled with fresh fruit—mostly grapes, though sometimes peaches or other local produce from the farm stand. While I sat the table sipping my orange juice, she would stand there puffing and thoroughly examining my life.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”  That was always the first question.

Oatmeal cookies and blueberry pies would frequently end up in front of me. If they weren’t baked that day, they were taken from the industrial-size freezer—pies woken from hibernation to thaw in the spring for hungry granddaughters. We would sit and chat and nibble, the morning turning into afternoon to evening. A simple dinner of potatoes, shrimp and broccoli would suddenly appear, lightly drizzled in a thin layer of butter and a crumble of pepper.

Then we would eat more pie, with a scoop of vanilla Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. My grandparents would drink a whole pot of coffee and stay up chatting as I wandered up the creaky stairs of the 200-year-old house. In the morning, back down the creaky stairs, I would pack up my car with my clean and folded laundry, a tin of cookies and an “emergency” sandwich, and haul myself back through the mountains to school.

My grandma died a month before I graduated from college. I’ll always cherish the weekends we spent together in New England in her kitchen. I think she’d be happy to know that I love to bake pies and cookies, that I’ve still never smoked a cigarette—and that I do have a boyfriend, who I am marrying.

Vintage nutmeg tin, courtesy of Flickr user

Forget turkey. The flavor I most associate with Thanksgiving, and the holiday season in general, is nutmeg. I like the sound of the word. I like the spice’s warm, woody scent. I like the way it adds complexity to both sweet and savory dishes. And, unlike many foods people now associate with the Thanksgiving meal—yeah, sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows, I’m talking to you—nutmeg was actually around in the Pilgrims’ day.

At the time of what is generally accepted as the first Thanksgiving—in Plymouth in 1621— nutmeg was one of the most popular spices among Europeans. For those who could afford the pricey seasoning, it was used as commonly as black pepper is today. Fashionable people carried around their own personal nutmeg graters. And it was highly coveted: as Giles Milton describes in Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: Or the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History, around the time the Mayflower was making its voyage across the Atlantic, nutmeg was at the center of an international conflict on the other side of the world. Holland and England fought over control of the spice-producing islands of Southeast Asia, including the tiny nutmeg-covered Run. Never heard of it? You may have heard of another small island that the English took control of as an eventual consequence of the struggle: Manhattan. Despite the latter territory’s lack of spices, I think the British got the better deal.

Nutmeg and its sister spice, mace, both come from the nutmeg tree, a tropical evergreen native to islands in the Indian Ocean. The name nutmeg is derived from Old French and means “musky nut.” The spice comes from the ground seed of the nutmeg fruit (which is itself edible and sometimes used in Malaysian and Indonesian cooking). Mace, which has a spicier flavor and aroma akin to a cross between nutmeg and cloves, comes from the red membrane that surrounds the seed.

Nutmeg’s value wasn’t just culinary; it was believed to have medicinal properties, including as protection against the bubonic plague that periodically wiped out large chunks of the population. And it had (and has) another, less frequent use: as a psychoactive drug. The hallucinatory effects of large quantities of nutmeg have been documented, including by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. But the high is reportedly unpleasant, causes a terrible hangover and takes an unusually long time to kick in (up to six hours after ingestion), which is probably why its popularity has been mostly confined to the prison population.

As for me, I’ll stick to sprinkling nutmeg in my pumpkin pie and eggnog—or on scrumptious-sounding holiday cocktails, like the ones in the latest issue of Saveur.

Courtesy of Flickr user Dustan Sept.

There’s usually at least one relative who asks prying questions, tells terrible jokes or talks too much about their latest doctor’s appointment at the Thanksgiving dinner table, isn’t there? When you need to change the subject or fill an awkward pause, just look to your plate for inspiration. A few suggestions, based on recent science news:

Please pass the…

1) Turkey: Have you heard the good news? Researchers are almost done sequencing the turkey genome, which could help breeders improve the quality of the birds’ meat for future Thanksgiving dinners. Also, did you know that turkeys were initially domesticated as a source of feathers rather than meat?

2) Rolls: Hey, speaking of flour…new archaeological evidence shows that humans were making flour from plants like cattails as long as 30,000 years ago!

3) Lima beans: These little rascals are smart. They can tell the difference between day and night, and play some sweet defense during daylight hours by secreting a nectar that attracts ants, whose presence repels hungry herbivores.

4) Yams: Did you know yams are a daily staple food for more than 60 million people in Africa? That’s why the Global Crop Diversity Trust wants to collect 3,000 yam samples to preserve biodiversity in the African “yam belt.”

5) Cranberry sauce: Cranberries could help fight cavities and gum disease. (They can also help prevent urinary tract infections, but that may be too gross for table talk.)

6) Chocolate cream pie: Cacao may be even older than we thought. Kinda like Great-Aunt Matilda…uh, never mind!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

We’ve received such wonderful stories from readers in response to our latest Inviting Writing theme about eating at Grandma’s house—thank you! This one, a richly detailed recollection of Southern-style family dinners in the 1950s and early 1960s, seems perfect for Thanksgiving week because it’s a veritable feast of description. The writer, Mary Markey, has a knack for preserving the past: she works at the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Granny’s House
By Mary Markey

Every year, my mother and I took the train from Illinois to spend the summer with our family in Georgia. The “Nancy Hanks” would pull into the little train station in Millen late in the evening, where we were met by an uncle and aunt or two and whichever of my cousins had begged the hardest to make the trip. Our trunk was loaded into the bed of the truck, the cousins and I clambered up after it, and we were off to Granny’s house in the country.

In the immense dark, her porch light glowed like a beacon. And there she was, wiping her hands on her homemade apron, come to the doorway to meet us. Small, round, and soft and rosy as a withered peach, Granny was the heart and soul of our family.

Granny's house, on a farm between Woodcliff and Rocky Ford, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Mary Markey.

Aunts and uncles and more cousins were soon assembling on the porch. Transplanted early to the Midwest, where I was already a lonely outsider, here I was content to be taken back into the fold of a large, extroverted Southern family. I looked forward to a summer of many playmates and indulgent grownups.

Cuddled in with a few cousins in the spare room’s creaky iron bedstead, I smelled the deep, mysterious odors of Granny’s house—old wood, damp earth, wood smoke, cooking and the chamber pot that we had used before turning in. On the porch, the adults would stay up late talking as they rocked in chairs or on the glider. Their laughter was the last thing I heard as I drifted into sleep.

When we woke, the uncles were long gone to the fields, and the aunts were at work in the textile mills in town. My mother was in the kitchen, helping Granny prepare the noon dinner. We snatched a cold hoecake or leftover biscuit smeared with jelly and took off on our own adventures.

Granny’s house was a one-story frame building that had once housed a tenant farmer on my grandfather’s farm. The dining-room was light and airy, with windows on two sides curtained in the translucent plastic plisse curtains that the dime stores once sold to poor people, but the kitchen was a dark, close little room. In the even darker little pantry were Mason jars of home-canned food, plates of leftover breads and biscuits, and an occasional mouse.

My nose remembers these rooms best: open Granny’s big freezer, and you smelled frost and blackberries. The refrigerator held the sharp tang of the pitcher of iron-rich well water cooling there. The kitchen was saturated with years of cooking, a dark, rich scent of frying fat and spice overlaid with the delicious smells of whatever was being prepared for dinner that day.

Almost everything was raised by my family and if not fresh, had been frozen or canned by Granny and the aunts. Meat was the anchor of the noon meal, and there were three possibilities: chicken, pork, or fish. The fish, caught by my Aunt Sarah from the Ogeechee River, were delectable when dredged in flour or cornmeal and cooked in Granny’s heavy cast-iron skillet. (Did you know, the best part of a fried fresh fish is the tail, as crunchy as a potato chip?) My favorite dish was chicken and dumplings. Granny made the dumplings by hand, forming the dough into long, thick noodles to be stewed with the chicken until they were falling-apart tender.

There was bread, though nothing leavened with yeast. Instead, there were biscuits, rather flat and chewy, speckled brown and gold. We had cornbread at every meal, but it wasn’t “risen”; we had hoecakes, light and sweet with the flavor of fresh cornmeal, cooked quickly on a cast-iron griddle. There was always rice, cooked to perfection and topped with gravy or butter, as you preferred. If we were eating fish, we fried some hush puppies along with it, airy puffs of cornmeal and onion.

And the vegetables! Granny’s table had an infinite variety: fresh green beans, black-eyed peas, crowder peas, lima beans. Collard, mustard and turnip greens had been picked last fall and stored in the mammoth freezer. Okra was stewed with tomatoes, boiled with butter, fried to a crisp or just sautéed until it fell apart. Fresh tomatoes were served cold, sliced, and dusted with salt and pepper. There were yams, candied or simply baked and buttered. Green vegetables were cooked a long time with salt pork—no hard, unseasoned Yankee beans for us, please.

We washed it all down with heavily sweetened iced tea served in mismatched jelly glasses, or aluminum tumblers in jewel colors, or in that cliché of all down-home clichés, Mason jars.

Desserts were simple, probably because too much baking would heat up the house. There was an abundance of fresh fruit—peaches and watermelons were favorites, with or without store-bought ice cream. My aunt Camille would sometimes bring a spectacular caramel pecan cake with dense, sugary icing. Aunt Carmen was known for her sour cream pound cake. Granny often made a huge blackberry cobbler, served drenched in milk. I was torn between by love of its flavor and distaste for all those little seeds that got caught between my teeth.

As small children, we cousins ate at the kitchen table, watched over by the women. It was a day to remember when you were finally thought old enough to sit at the big table in the dining room, and since all of us were all within a year or two of each other, we graduated pretty much en masse. In adolescence, we cousins often preferred to perch in the living room to talk, pawing through Granny’s photo albums to laugh at our parents’ (and be embarrassed by our own) baby pictures. We returned to the big table more often as we moved through our teenage years, and one day, as a married woman in my twenties, I looked up from my fried chicken to see a kitchen table ringed with my cousins’ children. The cycle was completed.

(More from Millen after the jump…)

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