is a What’s Cooking instructor and a recipe contributor to What’s Cooking Weekly, our online menu planning service for families. This New York Times article praises her new cookbook, The Toddler Cafe – We are so proud to have her on our team!
AT a time when 2-year-olds take cooking classes, trick-or-treaters turn up in chef’s whites and a personalized child’s size spatula costs $20, it is no surprise that the children’s cookbook genre is enjoying a new life.
Not that it had much of a life before.
Children’s cookbooks have long been among the tiniest of literary niches. Rarely taken seriously or invited to the adult cookbook party, they usually end up stuck on the bottom shelf of the children’s activity section in the bookstore. With a couple of notable exceptions in the 1980s and 1990s, children’s cookbooks have made little impact, either in sales or attention.
But that is changing, as parents who have a keen interest in cooking encourage their young children to spend time in the kitchen and new titles take a more sophisticated approach to children’s food. Although no one tracks overall sales of cookbooks aimed at children, some retailers say that sales have shot up. Readers too young to drive don’t yet have their own “Joy of Cooking,” but publishers are looking everywhere for it. And a number of cooking celebrities have joined in, too.
“It’s not like the books didn’t exist five years ago, but they were very introductory, very dessert driven, or very one-size-fits-all,” said Melanie Rhodes, a children’s book buyer for Borders, where sales of children’s cookbooks have jumped by a third in the past year. “What we’re seeing now are publishers who are a little more tuned into the real food audience.”
In the last few years, the children’s cookbook market has moved beyond all-encompassing tomes from Betty Crocker or Better Homes and Gardens. Increasingly customized by age, books now teach toddlers to make lettuce wraps and older children to make entire meals. Some predict that cookbooks for teenagers will be the next break-out category.
The subject matter has been expanding, too. Nursery-school staples like macaroni and cheese, cupcakes and eggs on a raft are still going strong. But the new cookbooks reflect a trend toward better nutrition and health and toward ethnic dishes like sushi or bibimbop. Local and sustainable food are having their moments, too.
If there is a flaw in all this expansion, it’s that some cookbook authors have swung from the simple to the complex.
“We’re seeing some books that are trying to do too much,” said Gillian Engberg, an editor who specializes in books for young people at Booklist, the journal of the American Library Association. She said that some books contain so much information about nutrition or gardening that they might try the already limited patience of young cooks.
But she isn’t too critical of overly ambitious books, because they represent a return to the kitchen. “We are seeing more of these because people are growing more knowledgeable about food,” she said. “Cooking together represents a pause, a chance for families to come together.”
There are also less cozy motives, like money. Children’s cooking gear sells well, as Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table have discovered. Television cooking shows seem to have a magic hold over children, and children’s cooking Web sites continue to pop up. All of that has book editors looking for the genre’s pot of gold. But a breakaway hit remains elusive.
“It’s an area publishers aren’t steady on the ground with yet,” said Bill LeBlond, the editorial director for food and wine at Chronicle Books. “We all have the sense that the audience is out there, but we just can’t figure it out.”
Chronicle recently published “Kitchen Playdates” by Lauren Bank Deen and “The Toddler Café” by Jennifer Carden, which hopes to inspire toddlers to eat more adventurously by teaching them to crimp the edges of an empanada. Mr. LeBlond also has high hopes for “Cook It in a Cup!” by Julia Myall, which came out in March and is packaged with silicone rubber baking cups.
Celebrity chefs have been prodigious writers of adult cookbooks, and this year two Food Network stars have leapt into the children’s market.
Rachael Ray this month released “Yum-o, The Family Cookbook” (Clarkson Potter). The recipes are written for adults and experienced teenagers, but each one outlines special tasks designed specifically for “itty bitties,” like breaking spaghetti for soup or flaking tuna for a salad.
The initial print run of the book was 500,000 copies, less than half that of her last book. But the figure is huge by children’s cookbook standards, where 20,000 is considered a strong first effort. Royalties will go to her Yum-o organization, which is aimed at helping families eat more healthily.
Ms. Ray said she wanted to write for children because of their enthusiasm. She said that at book signings, “the kids tell me over and over again that they’re the ones who are changing the eating habits of the whole family.”
Paula Deen of the Food Network is getting in on the game, too, with “Paula Deen’s My First Cookbook” (Simon & Shuster) scheduled for October, with an initial press run of 400,000.
Translating the mass appeal of Food Network personalities to children remains a gamble. The chef Emeril Lagasse waded into children’s cookbooks in 2002 with “Emeril’s There’s a Chef in My Soup!” (HarperCollins). Even though that book sold 181,000 copies (excluding sales at Wal-Mart and warehouse stores) according to Nielson BookScan, within the publishing business, its sales were seen as a disappointment.
No one knows if the book was ahead of its time, if it was too ambitious at 242 pages, or if its author didn’t appeal to children in print the way he does on television.
Jennifer Griffin, a former book editor who is now a literary agent, said the field is not as promising as some think. She sees plenty of proposals for children’s cookbooks (it seems every chef with a child wants to write one, she says), but very few that she thinks can succeed. Children, she said, don’t want a dumbed-down version of an adult book. They want to do what the adults in their lives are doing in the kitchen.
This echoes the opinion of Mollie Katzen, who has written three books aimed at young cooks. Cookbooks, Ms. Katzen said, should recognize that children of different ages have different physical abilities and learning stages. For example, books for preschoolers often include cookie dough, which is too stiff for most to mix themselves.
With the help of a teacher, Ms. Katzen in 1994 wrote “Pretend Soup” (Ten Speed) specifically for preschoolers. Many cookbook critics and teachers still regard it as the gold standard for children’s cookbooks.
It presents each recipe in two ways: a narrative format for adults and, for children, her step-by-step illustrations that are stylistic sisters to the images Ms. Katzen drew for her adult hit, “Moosewood Cookbook” (Ten Speed, 1977).
The children’s material is presented in a calm, focused and simple way that she said set her books apart from the frenetic tone, wacky wording and busy pages of many children’s cookbooks.
“Adults have this sentimental idea that cooking with children is one big slapstick event with spaghetti sauce on the ceiling,” she said. “I try to respect that kids can have an absolutely honest relationship with food. It doesn’t need to be from Mars or shaped like a bunny.”
Ms. Katzen, who followed “Pretend Soup” with “Salad People” almost a decade later, said the advancement in the skill level of her test subjects in that time was notable.
People in the publishing business believe the interest in cooking among children will spawn a new, larger market when they become teenagers.
“Those folks can actually use knives and be around hot stoves, and they are now interested enough in the whole culture of cooking,” Mr. LeBlond said.
Another bright spot is peer-to-peer cooking, increasingly a part of instructional cooking on the Web. Isabella Gerasole, 12, and her sister and Olivia, 10, are a good example. They are pictured at Spatulatta (spatulatta.com), a homey Web site that presents cooking videos produced by their neighbor, a documentary filmmaker. Their “Spatulatta Cookbook” (Scholastic Reference, 2007) has sold 65,000 copies and is likely to be reprinted, said their mother, Heidi Umbhau, a media trainer who often appears in the cooking videos. (Their father, Vince Gerasole, is a Chicago television restaurant critic.)
“I think it’s more effective when children tell other kids to do something, because when an adult tells you something, it’s instinctual to not listen to them,” Isabella said. “And it shows children they can do whatever they want: so if this kid’s doing this, then I can do it.”
The right book at the right developmental stage, Ms. Engberg said, can have a profound effect on a child’s attitude toward food.
“That a puddle becomes a cake is a fairy tale,” she said, “and that can set off a sense of wonder about cooking that can turn into a lifelong love.”
I was nearly brought to tears by the enthusiasm of our friends, family and classmates when I told them about the Great American Bake Sale. What began as an attempt at getting a few families to help hungry children by baking together has turned into a series of three separate Bake Sale events…one of which will be a celebration in the park with a band comprised of parents! The details of our events are below – hopefully they will inspire you to take some steps to help hungry kids across America, too!
