Food is delicious. The buttery avocados. The sweet mangos. Mixed with cream cheese and salmon, and you have yourself a delicious poke bowl. Food is a fact of life, a necessary one at that. There are millions of combinations (yet somehow dinner is always so difficult). God could have given us a boring planet with flavorless food, but instead he gave us color. Sweet and sour. Salty and tangy. Food that looks weird (khash, anyone?) and food that looks like a star (star fruit, conveniently enough).
In a country of convenience, making good, healthy, organic food is tough. Julia Rothman and Rachel Wharton (whose expertise is in the culinary world) have joined forces to give us this book. They try to cover a range of topics, with the knowledge that not everything that can be eaten can (or should!) be included. This is a taste of what was interesting to collect and draw.
What’s Does This Book Cover?
There are nine chapters on topics covering a history of food (ch. 1), fruits and veggies (ch. 2), grains, pastas, and noodles (ch. 3), meat, seafood, chicken, and eggs (ch. 4), dairy, milk, and cheese (ch. 5), street foods: fries, hotdogs, pizza (ch. 6), seasonings: spicy, sugar, salt, vinegar, mustard (ch. 7), drinks: coffee, tea, fizzy, wine (ch. 8), and sweets: ice cream chocolate, candy, pastries, and donuts (ch. 9). That’s a simple overview. There is so much more here.
Sometimes Rothman gives pages just of illustrations and the names of the food or objects. Usually though Rothman gives simple explanations for things so that you actually remember what you read. Did you know blueberries are true berries? And that tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are technically berries too?
Rothman doesn’t teach your kids about generic foods: lemons, fish, beef, cheese, etc. She writes about specific types of food: makrut limes, chickweed, silken tofu, teff (as well as koshihikari rice, cemita and tramezzini sandwhiches—even… vegemite, dao xian mian noodles, drunken noodles, prime cuts of beef, pork, and lamb, and geoduck (pronounced “gooey-duck”), to name a few).
Rothman writes briefly about how you can grow rice, make tofu, properly cut a mango, braid a challah, bake traditional Finnish rye bread, make pasta (below) and noodles, how to tie sausages, and how to fillet a fish (above). She also helps you understand how meat cooks, the difference between wet and dry heat with cooking meat,
Recommended?
I find making dinner to be quite the chore. Part of this is because it requires having the headspace to do so (something hard to get with small kids). The other part of this is because I don’t know what goes together! Rothman and Wharton have given us a fun book about foods from all around the world. Like all of Rothman’s books, this is a book I wish I could have had as a kid, but at least now I get to share it with my own kids.
Buy it on Amazon or from Storey Publishing!
Lagniappe
- Author/Illustrator: Julia Rothman
- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Storey Publishing (November 15, 2016)
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Review Disclosure: I received this book free from Storey Publishing. The opinions I have expressed are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html.
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