cultural cookbooks

Kids Cooking by the editors of Klutz Press may not seem like a very cultural cookbook but what better cookbook to describe the American culture. Kids Cooking isn’t really racially or class biased but this cookbook does an excellent job portraying the identity of children. Very often when children are younger they want to explore in the kitchen and feel like they are “big kids” who are able to help prepare significant parts of meals. The book Through the Kitchen Window tells many stories of young girls who grew up watching their mother or grandmother work in the kitchen and how they were able to help out with the small things that helped to create the bigger food item. Many of the stories in Through the Kitchen Window that include kids in the kitchen are often of immigrant families to the United States rather than families who have a more solid base in the United States so children’s cookbooks like Kids Cooking do a nice job of introducing American children to the kitchen. This is a book that allows parents and their children to work together and to learn from each other the intricacies of the kitchen. Learning how to keep a safe and clean kitchen and how to properly read recipes is one of the first things that this cookbook introduces and for many people who don’t have a kitchen background, this can be quite confusing. Learning how to make scrambled eggs and later muffins is a great way for kids to not only understand how to make the foods but to see how important each individual meal is to the entire American cuisine. Moving on to dancing tuna salad in an ice cream cone and five different ways to cook a potato, kids learn how many different foods are common in our society and they are simple enough that everyone can prepare them. Often cuisine and culture are associated with rigidly defined groups such as Indian, Armenian, or Jewish but there are also many cultural foods that can also be associated with ages of people and the amount of time that people have spent in the kitchen, such as kids or new chefs. Kids Cooking may be one of the simplest cookbooks in print but it makes an excellent point in introducing people in America to the basic homemade staples that are often forgotten and form the basis for our culture.