Dishing Up Cookbooks for Kids
This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on August 17, 2006 Sign up now!
by Judith Rosen, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 8/17/2006
This fall publishers are counting on busy parents to not only ask their kids to set the table, but to help them prepare the whole meal. Based on anecdotal evidence that kids as young as age five are watching the Food Network, many children are ready to take on the challenge of cooking dinner. Kids regularly turn up at adult—and children’s—book signings for Food Network host Emeril Lagasse, whose third children’s cookbook will be published in October—Emeril’s There’s a Chef in My World: Recipes That Take You Places (HarperCollins). And young foodies have helped make Rachael Ray’s Cooking Rocks: Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals for Kids (Lake Isle, 2004) the bestselling children’s cookbook at Koen-Levy.
“Kids are cooking,” says Antonia Markiet, senior executive editor of children’s books at HarperCollins. “They are a really key part of Emeril’s audience.” And they get their parents to buy. Emeril’s earlier children’s cookbooks have had healthy sales: Emeril’s There’s a Chef in My Soup: Recipe for the Kid in Everyone (2002) sold between 200,000 and 250,000 copies; Emeril’s There’s a Chef in My Family: Recipes to Get Everybody Cooking (2004) sold 300,000.
Although most children’s cookbooks are written by adults, two of the bigger titles this fall are either written by or with the assistance of children. Rozanne Gold, for example relies heavily on young sous-chefs to test the recipes that went into Kids Cook 1-2-3: Recipes for Young Chefs Using Only 3 Ingredients (Bloomsbury, Oct.), illustrated by Sara Pinto. According to Bloomsbury USA associate publisher Victoria Wells Arms, Gold found her head sous-chef dressed in chef whites and surrounded by books at a Manhattan cookbook store. Others were the children of friends, and even illustrator Pinto’s two young children helped out. The kids comments are woven into the text, like Danielle on Warm Banana Tart: “This recipe will make you feel like a pro.”
As one of the few people in publishing to have trained and worked as a cook, Arms says that the book resonates for her because it’s not hot dogs and ice cream like so many of the proposals she sees, and it uses the same formula Gold has perfected for her adult books: deceptively simple recipes with three ingredients (not counting water). Arms recommends that booksellers try A Simple Roast Chicken, one of her personal favorites.
For Dinah Paul, owner of A Likely Story in Alexandria, Va., who ran a cooking camp this summer for children ages three to six, part of the appeal of Gold’s book is that it’s “kid-centric.” She says, “We don’t carry a ton of cookbooks. We really like simple ones, like Kids Cook 1-2-3.”
Although Lisa Dugan, children’s book buyer at Koen-Levy, likes the idea of Kids Cook 1-2-3, the area she’s most excited about is teen cooking. “Most children’s cookbooks have been for small children, to make things with their mothers. Now publishers are publishing to fill this niche. I’m a fan of San Stern’s Cooking Up a Storm: The Teen Survival Cookbook (Candlewick, July). What I like is that there’s no gimmick or cartoon illustrations. It’s a real cookbook with stuff that looks like it would be good to eat.”
Dugan is not the only one to respond to the idea of a real kid cook, who goes to school, plays sports and never turns off his or her iPod. As a result of publicity that British teenager Stern, now 16, did in New York earlier this month, including a Today Show appearance, Candlewick has gone back to press for a second printing. But even before that Candlewick began positioning Stern as a successor to “Naked Chef” Jamie Oliver and contracted for three more books. The second, Real Food, Real Fast, will be published next year.
Other children’s cookbook highlights for the fall include Food Network host Sandra Lee’s Semi Homemade Cooking with Kids (Meredith, Nov.), a favorite of Teresa Pagano, buyer at Barnes & Noble; FamilyFun Cooking with Kids (Disney, Sept.), compiled by Deanna F. Cook, which contains recipes from FamilyFun magazine; and The Fear Factor Cookbook (Price Stern Sloan, Aug.) with recipes by Bev Bennett for the likes of Sea Slug Smoothies and Rat Stew, and text by Siobhan Ciminera.
A number of cookbooks have taken children’s literature as their starting point, like Georgeanne Brennan’s Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook (Random House, Oct.) with illustrations by Dr. Seuss; P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins in the Kitchen: A Cookery Book with a Story (Harcourt, Oct.) with illustrations by Mary Shepard; and Jane Yolen’s Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook for Young Readers and Eaters (Crocodile Books/Interlink, Sept.) with recipes by Heidi E.Y. Stemple.
“Children’s cookbooks have been an area of constant growth since 2001,” says B&N’s Pagano. With so many publishers bringing out cookbooks this fall, 2006 will likely continue the trend.
