The Kids' Multicultural Cookbook (Kids Can!)

Presents over seventy-five recipes from countries around the world, including such dishes as coconut macaroons, apple pancakes, sweet couscous, and shish kebabs, and discusses basic cooking tools and techniques.

Grade 3-6-In this whirlwind tour of 41 countries, readers are given a quick dose of culture from each one. There are one or two recipes (their difficulty is rated by one, two, or three spoons) for each place and an introduction to a child who lives there. Occasional riddles and "fun facts" are inserted, such as the world record for watermelon-seed spitting. Foreign words are included with pronunciations. Readers are encouraged to try home-baked tortilla chips, ginger ale made from ginger root, and peanut butter soup. The writing style is breezy and inviting, and the illustrations are a combination of black-and-white cartoons and photographs. For a more straightforward approach, try Carole Albyn and Lois Webb's The Multicultural Cookbook for Students (Oryx, 1993), which contains information and one recipe from each of 122 countries. For more complete treatments of individual countries, try the "Cooking the...Way" series (Lerner).?Carolyn K. Jenks, First Parish Unitarian Church, Portland, ME
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.