cook, reluctance to learn to
Turning children into capable cooks is an essential part of parenting. But a busy grown-up who finds it a grind putting food on the table seven nights a week is, frankly, not the best advert for it. A far better role model is Zeralda. The daughter of a peasant farmer, Zeralda loves to cook, and knows how to ‘bake and braise and simmer and stew’ by the time she’s six. She and her father have never heard of the ogre who terrorises the nearby town, looking for children to eat. So when her father is too sick to take their produce to market one day and sends Zeralda instead, she has no idea that the ogre she finds on the side of the road, starving and with a sprained ankle, had been aiming to eat her. The tender-hearted girl cooks up a great feast12 there and then, using all the ingredients she was supposed to sell at the market. It’s the best meal the ogre’s ever eaten, and he invites Zeralda to come and be his personal chef, swearing off children for ever. Ungerer’s large-scale pen-and-wash illustrations, showing Zeralda looking fondly at her cookery book and sticking out her tongue as she bastes the suckling pig, are full of the generous spirit of this book, and the limited palette of black, white, taupe and orangey-red make the package as mouth-watering as Zeralda’s food. If anybody can plant a love of cooking in a child, it’s Zeralda.
Children of chapter-book age who are showing no signs of expanding their repertoire beyond toast and a fried egg will find inspiration in The Star of Kazan. When three eccentric professors agree to bring up a foundling called Annika, they do so on the proviso that she make herself useful. This she does, learning to cook, clean and indeed take care of all the domestic duties involved in running a large Viennese house in 1908. When, at twelve, she’s given the responsibility of cooking the Christmas carp – a dish she must prepare following the recipe passed down to Ellie, one of the maids who found her – the stuffing alone requires a whole morning to prepare. Annika is hollow-eyed with worrying about it all. She knows she must add nothing to the recipe, and leave nothing out, but at the last moment she daringly adds a dash of nutmeg to the dish.
Her three professorial ‘uncles’ (one of whom is, in fact, an aunt, but that’s another story) all pronounce the carp delicious. Only Ellie puckers up her mouth. ‘What have you done?’ she cries. ‘Mother would turn in her grave!’ But in the silence that follows, Ellie realises that Annika has in fact improved upon the recipe and her pucker turns into a smile. In her best handwriting, Annika adds ‘a pinch of nutmeg will enhance the sauce’ to the sacred recipe – and thus a cook is born.
SEE ALSO: chores, having to do • fussy eater, being a • granted, taking your parent for • spoilt, being
cows, fear of
SEE: animals, fear of
creepy crawlies, fear of
SEE: animals, fear of
cross
SEE: anger • moodiness • tantrums
cyber-bullying
SEE: bullied, being
1 And yes, you get your halo.
2 ‘A-penis’.
3 If it didn’t occur to you till now that there was a reason you were given Mr Slow, we apologise for breaking it to you so abruptly.
4 Yes, you read that right a second time. If you don’t know what we’re talking about – or if a child in the vicinity really has taken the legs off a centipede, either by talking too much or some other way – see: animals, being unkind to.
5 If you really want to know, he brings home all the cats and they eat each other up – leaving just one homely, frightened and presumably very full kitten.
6 Let it also be a tip-off for kids not wanting to fall into the grown-ups’ trap.
7 Yes, grown-up, that’s your standard.
8 We particularly love Tintin in Tibet, Prisoners of the Sun and Red Rackham’s Treasure.
9 The other titles in the series are One Was Johnny, Alligators All Around and Chicken Soup with Rice. All are great.
10 For those who are concerned by this: although this is a cautionary tale in the tradition of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, the story doesn’t end at the point where the lion eats Pierre. There’s another bit after that. Sendak has updated the form for fragile, contemporary nerves. Psychiatrists can focus on those suffering from the after-effects of Struwwelpeter instead.
11 In fact – ahem – this book might introduce the phrase into their vocabulary. Sorry about that.
12 Foodies will no doubt want to know the menu, so here it is: cream of watercress soup, snails in garlic butter, roast trout with capers, and a whole suckling pig.
D IS FOR . . .
dark, scared of the
Most children are scared of the dark at some point – although because it’s not so much the darkness itself that is feared as the horrible things that might be lurking within it, it’s often not until the imagination is fully fired up that the fear kicks in. The minute it does, bring out the irresistible Sleep Tight, Little Bear. When Little Bear says he can’t sleep, Big Bear has to put down his book just as he’s getting to the good bit1 and go and see what’s wrong. Lying on his back and holding onto both his feet in the way that children do when they’re a bit embarrassed to admit to something, Little Bear says that he doesn’t like the dark. ‘What dark?’ says Big Bear. ‘The dark all around us,’ says Little Bear, and you can practically see him rocking back and forth on the page. Big Bear goes off to find a lantern and its glow banishes the darkness a little; but there’s still darkness in the corners of the cave. And as Big Bear comes back with bigger and bigger lanterns, we feel his mounting tiredness. Meanwhile we watch Little Bear go through all the stages of restlessness and overtiredness (see: over-tired, being), captured with marvellous accuracy by Barbara Firth. Deeply comforting, this charming and ultimately soporific book will soothe both grown-up and child during these extended bedtimes and last just long enough that the little bear in your charge may also fall asleep before the end.
‘The dark lived in the same house as Laszlo . . .’ is the beguiling start to The Dark, a picture book by Lemony Snicket (pen name of Daniel Handler, best known for his chapter book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events2). By introducing the dark as a something, Snicket separates it from those things it might be concealing, showing us that in and of itself darkness is not a threat. Laszlo, the little boy in this book, gets to know the dark. It has its own favourite places to hang out: behind the shower curtain, in the closet and in the basement. And when he actually