Kids Books About Cultural Foods
If you’re looking to expand your child’s familiarity with other cultures and in particular cultural foods, here are a few great kids books that feature cultural foods.
Kids Books About Cultural Foods
Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story
By Kevin Noble Maillard
Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story is a beautifully illustrated book about Native American food culture and family. The author Kevin Noble Maillard is a member of the Seminole Nation and describes his book as, “The story of fry bread is the story of American Indians: embracing community and culture in the face of opposition.”
My kids love the colorful pictures of the kids cooking and eating and learning about fry bread. The end of the book features a recipe for “Kevin’s Fry Bread” as well as a lengthy author’s note detailing the significance of fry bread in Native American culture, history, story and art.
Click link for Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story on Amazon.
Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas
By Pamela Ehrenberg
Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas is an interesting cultural mash-up featuring unique food combinations: mom is Indian, dad is Jewish and the kids are learning to make dosas for Hanukkah. The children in the book go to Hebrew school but shop at the Little India Market.
Little sister Sadie saves the holiday when everyone gets locked out of the house as the Hannukah Dosas are cooking. The end of the book has a recipe for Dosas and Sambar.
Click link for Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas on Amazon.
Bee-Bim Bop!
By Linda Sue Park
I’m writing this Kids Books About Cultural Foods review during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement and a few months into the COVID-19 coronavirus quarantine. With social media images being very heavy at this moment - on top of being stuck at home with 7 small kids - the illustrations of the little girl in Bee-Bim Bop! engaged in carefree grocery shopping with her mom made me wish things were more lighthearted in life right now.
Bee-Bim Bop! (“mix-mix rice”) traces the creation of this traditional Korean dish that the protagonist child helps her family make. I like that this book follows the family from shopping at the market to prepping the items, setting the table and then all sitting down to eat a meal together. The author Linda Sue Park is involved with the We Need Diverse Books nonprofit organization and she shares her own bee-bim bop recipe in this book.
Click link for Bee-Bim Bop! on Amazon
Thank You, Omu!
By Oge Mora
This is a new book for our family that I saw recommended by a number of BIPOC influencers and parenting sites featuring recommendations for increasing cultural awareness in children. The book Thank You, Omu! stresses the importance of sharing.
Everyone in Omu’s neighborhood smells and wants a taste of her delicious stew, leading to a soon-empty pot. Omu (which means “queen” in Igbo, the Nigerian language of the author’s parents) is so generous with her food...and everyone surprises her by returning the favor in a big multicultural feast they eat together at the end of the book.
The author notes that “omu” for her growing up meant “Grandma” and, “When my grandmother cooked, she danced and swayed her hips to the radio as she stirred what was often a large pot of stew.”
Although her grandmother has since passed away, Oge Mora does a beautiful job honoring her loving, giving spirit in this book which is illustrated with collages made out of patterned paper and old-book clippings.
Click link for Thank You, Omu! on Amazon
A Big Mooncake for Little Star
By Grace Lin
Kids unable to control themselves around delicious food is a universal theme! In A Big Mooncake for Little Star, Little Star isn’t supposed to eat the Mooncake that she is making with her mom, but she just can’t help herself.
This is a book that I also reviewed in a separate post more generally entitled “My Top 10 Kids Books About Food”; click link to read that post. Although the focus of that post is not on Cultural Foods, we love this book in our family and it’s worth mentioning here again.
In her original story, author Grace Lin uses food to explain the phases of the moon. She notes the book, “...doesn’t have any roots in Chinese mythology, but I tried to imbue it with all the trains I associate with the Moon Festival - quiet joy, love, and beauty. All things parents from any culture can get behind!
Click link for A Big Mooncake for Little Star
Everybody Cooks Rice
By Norah Dooley
Rice features heavily in my world of baby-feeding because so many parents start solid food with iron-fortified rice cereal. Although baby-led weaning traditionally foregoes spoon-feeding of cereal, parents still ask a LOT of questions about how they can safely feed their babies rice.
(If you’re looking for more info on giving your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning, check out my free online workshop “BABY-LED WEANING FOR BEGINNERS: How to get your baby to try 100 foods before turning 1 without you having to spoon-feed purees or buy pouches!”).
In her 1991 book Everybody Cooks Rice, author Norah Dooley takes readers in and out of the houses of one particular neighborhood where everybody cooks rice.
The protagonist Carrie sets out to find her lost brother Anthony who is likely “mooching” a meal from one of their many culturally diverse neighbors. Each family invites her in - and everyone is cooking rice, albeit it as rice dishes from all over the world.
My kids LOVE this book and have asked me to make some of the recipes of each dish which are featured at the end of the book (Mrs. D’s Black-eyed Peas and Rice, The Diazes’ Turmeric Rice with Pigeon Peas, Tam’s Nuoc Cham and Rajit’s Biryani to name a few).
My favorite parts of this book are the few households where the parents are working late, so the kids are cooking rice for the family. We aren’t there in my family yet, but I dream of the day...
Click link for Everybody Cooks Rice.
A Little Bit of Soul Food
By Amy Wilson Sanger
A Little Bit of Soul Food is by one of my favorite kids’ food book authors Amy Wilson Sanger. If you’re not familiar with Sanger’s work, she is the creator of the popular World Snacks series of toddler books. These include “hola! Jalapeno”, “let’s nosh!”, “chaat and sweets” and “yum yum dim sum”.
My 2 year old twins loves these books because they are board books with colorful pictures. And they’re short :)
We just got A Little Bit of Soul Food and it’s cute and quick and rhyme-y and was originally written in 2004. It features traditional soul food staples like grits, gumbo, fried chicken, catfish, butterbeans, chitlins and collard greens.”
I love the last page, “Grandma says, Soul is good for you, just use a little lard, it’s ok if we get messy when we’re eating in the yard!”
Click link for A Little Bit of Soul Food on Amazon.
Cora Cooks Pancit
By Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore
Cora Cooks Pancit is a great introduction to Filipino food for kids (...or adults for that matter!) There’s another little sister story arc in this one, but Cora finds herself mom’s assistant chef when her older siblings are gone.
I love that the mom lets Cora do some of the harder kitchen tasks in preparing the little girl’s favorite noodle dish: pancit. The end of the book (originally published in 2009) features a glossary of terms and a recipe for pancit.
Click link for Cora Cooks Pancit on Amazon.
Strega Nona
By Tomie dePaola
Another favorite food book in our family (also featured in my Top 10 Kids Books About Food blog post) is Strega Nona. Now, you could argue that Italian food isn’t really a cultural food book experience for kids...but that’s all relevant and depends on your level of exposure to authentic Italian cooking!
In this 1975 book both authored and illustrated by Tomie dePaola “Big Anthony” observes Strega Nona working her magic pasta pot. When Strega Nona (“Grandma Witch”....but a good witch!) skips town, Anthony tries to impress the townspeople with the magic pot.
He makes pasta for everyone...except it never stops and pasta keeps pouring forth out of the magic pot.
Now I’m no fan of making kids finish their plate or eat every bite, but when Strega Nona returns to the spectacle she declares, “The punishment must fit the crime.” She makes Anthony eat every last bite. “And he did - poor Big Anthony.”
Click link for Strega Nona on Amazon.
Stone Soup
By Marcia Brown
This is a classic from 1947 that I remember my parents reading to me when I was little. I’m including it in the Kids Book About Cultural Foods roundup because literally until I was studying nutrition and took a Cultural Foods class in college, because of this book I actually thought Stone Soup was something French people really ate 🤦♀️
The book is about 3 hungry soldiers who enter a town full of greedy townspeople who don’t want to feed them because soldiers always eat too much! They hide their food and the soldiers are left to start preparing a soup made from stones. Little by little they entice the townspeople to start contributing ingredients to the soup, and the book has a happy ending.
I like the messages of sharing and it has a similar feel to Thank You, Omu! albeit with much less cultural diversity. I do like to include older books in our family library, and this is a classic that teaches about the camaraderie food can provide no matter where in the world you are living.
Click link for Stone Soup on Amazon.
THE QUICK-START GUIDE TO BABY-LED WEANING
By Katie Ferraro
If you’re looking for more info about baby-led weaning, check out my e-book “THE QUICK-START GUIDE TO BABY-LED WEANING”.
This is a 16-page e-book jam packed with everything you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning.
Inside of the QUICK-START GUIDE TO BABY-LED WEANING you’ll find tons of info about seasoning your baby’s food without salt, a nutrient deep dive so you’re getting the most out of the foods you’re feeding...plus I’m including some of my favorite combination food recipes, like roasted curried cauliflower.
Click link to download the guide.
