Kids’ Cookbooks Are Finally Growing Up

I still have my copy of the Barbie Party Cookbook. Published in 1991, it was meant to introduce children to the idea of hosting a party. It begins with tips on choosing a date (don’t choose a school night), reserving a skating rink or a park in advance, and picking a theme. But of course, it’s mostly about cooking. The book is divided into 10 types of parties, with menus to match. There are jelly heart cookies and chocolate-dipped strawberries for Valentine’s Day, and mini pizzas for a video slumber party. “Before you begin to cook, make sure that you can use the kitchen,” a section titled “Barbie’s Kitchen Rules” advises. “An adult needs to be present to help you with difficult steps and answer your questions.”

This was not my only cookbook for “children,” but none of them really taught me how to cook. Any recipes involving knives or the stove (so, all of them) said to get a grown-up to do that part, leaving me mostly to spread jam on sandwiches or decorate scoops of ice cream to look like butterflies. I did not learn how to dice vegetables, or roast a chicken, or even throw a bunch of stuff into a pot to create a soup. They read more like craft projects than instructions meant to get kids excited, and knowledgeable, about cooking.

But now, it seems there is a whole new infrastructure for making children adept in the kitchen. There are kitchen towers and safety knives so even young children can chop along on the countertop. There are culinary schools for teens. And of course there are cookbooks. A wave of books dedicated to children, like Waffles + Mochi, The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs, and two forthcoming titles, Priya Krishna’s Priya’s Kitchen Adventures and the Juneteenth Cookbook by Alliah L. Agostini and Taffy Elrod, are written to teach kids to not just follow decorating instructions, but to actually cook with heat and flavor and sharp objects. And writing them requires authors to rethink a lot of what they know about cooking.

Do children even need cookbooks? Ask many adults and they will tell you they learned to cook by watching their parents, or in the college dorm room watching Food Network, or out of necessity with cookbooks and recipes written for adults.

But the idea of a cookbook for children is actually not so modern, or really about as modern as the notion of childhood itself. By the late 19th century, at least among the middle- and upper-class white families whose children did not have to join them in the factories or the fields, childhood was seen as a time of innocence, one in which children should be protected and taught important morals and values. This view was encouraged by a simultaneous proliferation of literature and entertainment devoted specifically to children, meant to mold them into upstanding adults.

In 1900, Louisa Tate published The Child’s Cookery Book, noting in her introduction that it was the second cookbook she had written for children. “My idea in writing the book was that children might be able to cook dainty and palatable food, without wasting a large amount of material, should their efforts prove successful,” she writes, “and to put it into their power to make, on a small scale, dishes as good as those found on the dining room table.” Notably, Tate writes that the book is for boys and girls, though she winds up making more assumptions about what girls should know in the kitchen.

Though Tate intended to avoid recipes that are too complicated or require cooking over a fire, the content of The Child’s Cookery Book isn’t noticeably different from other recipes for the time. Haricot mutton asks kids to trim the fat from a mutton neck and cut the meat at the joints, and almond custard requires them to successfully stir eggs into hot cream without letting the mixture boil. The final chapter, dedicated to “invalid cookery,” has recipes for gruel and barley water so children can take care of sick parents.

By 1957, when Betty Crocker published a cookbook for children, the recipes were written in a more modern style, with ingredients and amounts separated from the instructions, and had been tested by actual children. They still asked children to do more “dangerous” kitchen work by themselves, like creating a double boiler to melt chocolate for coating cookies, or using a knife to cut shapes out of cupcakes. However, the book also showed the rise of “children’s food”: Instead of mutton with vegetables or a curried fowl, there are cakes shaped like drums and bunnies, baked potatoes decorated to look like sailboats, and pigs in a blanket. It’s cute, it’s fun, and it’s distinct from what an adult would want on their plate.

Though there were exceptions, most cookbooks for children continued this trajectory through the remainder of the 20th century. For every Fanny at Chez Panisse, there were a dozen cookbooks for kids with cutesy recipe names where every sandwich has a face. “When I was a kid, I just really wanted to cook,” Krishna says, but she was uninspired by most of the kids’ cookbooks that existed at the time. “It was mini pizzas, turkey roll ups. They read to me as kid food, but I was a kid and wanted to feel like an adult.” She notes that they also catered largely to white tastes.

But Krishna knew that kids’ cookbooks, when done right, could be inspiring. She spent a lot of time cooking from Pretend Soup, a 1994 kids’ cookbook published by The Moosewood Cookbook author Mollie Katzen. One of the recipes was “green spaghetti,” essentially pesto, that she wound up loving despite being unfamiliar with the dish. “They were introducing me to flavors and tastes that I’d never seen or tried before,” she says. “I think it was that newness that felt really thrilling to me.”

“It seems kind of obvious when I say it now, but, like, kids can’t make recipes with butternut squash,” says Jack Bishop, the chief creative officer at America’s Test Kitchen. Many adults can barely cleave through a tough squash without a close call with the ER, so it’d be nearly impossible for a 10-year-old with small hands. And keeping things possible is the main goal of a cookbook for kids. A chicken burning is upsetting to an adult, but to a child it can feel like a catastrophe.

Making sure kids are actually learning, having fun, and able to achieve what they attempt means that writing cookbooks for them comes with a lot of trial and error. When Bishop was working on The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs, which came out in 2018, some of his choices came from safety concerns: Aside from butternut squash and other difficult-to-cut ingredients, the book, aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds, doesn’t include grilling or deep frying. And testing with dozens of kids revealed that cooking times on some popular recipes needed to be adjusted to match how long it takes kids to get through prep that might go much faster for adults.

Many cookbook authors I spoke to were adamant that their recipes are for anyone; some of them were in fact first written for adults. “We didn’t give things silly names. We didn’t cut everything into dinosaur shapes,” says Bishop. What makes a cookbook “for kids” is largely how a recipe is written. Many include reminders for things that adults may intuitively know by now, like turning off the stove when you’re done, or washing your hands after handling raw meat. There are ample photographs for visual learners. Joanna Saltz, editorial director of Delish and author of the 2021 Delish Kids Cookbook, focused on clear recipe formatting. “Normally in a cookbook, you see the amount first and the ingredients. I wanted kids to see the ingredients first,” she says, so they can quickly learn which ingredients are common in certain dishes.

Kids also often need to have different techniques explained a little more thoroughly (though plenty of adults don’t know the difference between a chop and a dice either). “It’s a really delicate balance between not talking down to a kid, while also not assuming that they know what certain kitchen terms mean,” says Krishna. For her, this meant finding visual and tactile cues that kids could relate to, like describing a well-kneaded dough as feeling like Play-Doh.

Three authors I spoke to all brought up the difficulty of “folding” as an instruction — again, something that also trips up many adults. Krishna says she described it by writing down her every movement when making chocolate mousse. “I’m taking a spatula, and slicing down the middle. And I’m turning the bowl as I turn the spatula,” she says. Saltz’s book uses photographs of a kid utilizing the technique step by step. Bishop and his team avoided using the word entirely, opting instead for more direct descriptions. Given all the attention paid to “folding” in this generation of cookbooks, Saltz jokes, we’ll all be eating soufflés by 2035. “No one’s going to have this problem again,” she says.

But the biggest question for many kids’ cookbook authors is what is actually in the recipes. Everyone I spoke to emphasized that they made no assumptions about what flavors kids were and weren’t familiar with, but yes, there are a lot of picky eaters out there. Cooking may be a kid’s first foray into choosing for themselves what flavors are on their plates. There needs to be a balance, then, between encouraging kids to try new things, and not assuming what’s “new” for them.

For Maile Carpenter, the editorial director of Food Network Magazine and the author of three kids cookbooks with the brand, making adult recipes interesting to kids was somewhat a matter of branding. Anchovies might be off-putting to some kids because of the long cultural tail of jokes about them being gross, but “if you had anchovies on something and you named it ‘Caesar’ something, that’s familiar,” Carpenter says. ‘My kids will eat Caesar salad all night long.” Her books also feature a lot of ways to customize dishes to any taste; a page of English muffin melts includes variations with ingredients like curry powder, pesto, ricotta, and pickled jalapenos.

But authors have largely found that kids are more adventurous, and capable, than their parents give them credit for, especially when they’re in charge. “Kids are coming to ingredients and coming to cuisines with far fewer preconceived notions than adults are,” Krishna says. When she was testing her book (with classmates of her cousin’s children), she found the kids never dismissed ingredients outright, but their parents would say “my kids don’t eat broccoli.” Kids, instead, would give feedback like “I didn’t like the way the fish sauce smelled, but once it was in the recipe, it was really good,” or “I didn’t think I liked mushrooms, but with all these other things it tasted delicious.”

“If we had written these kids cookbooks 15, 20 years ago it would have been a completely different story. There is an assumed base level knowledge now for kids,” Carpenter says. Both kids and their parents may have grown up with food television, YouTube, and now recipes on Instagram and TikTok. Recent cookbooks have to speak to kids on their level.

If kids are learning more about cooking than many of their parents did at their age, however, then what is the point of a kids cookbook? For Saltz, it’s about translating the intricate and cool dishes kids see in media to something they can actually accomplish, and smoothing the path between idea and action. “My favorite bread recipe is seven pages long,” Saltz says. “That’s the kind of stuff we really try to avoid. It’s not that it’s insurmountable. We all figured it out as we were growing up, but if I can remove some of those hurdles that make adult cookbooks sometimes challenging, we should do so.”

While there are options and certainly more sprinkles than there were in the early 1900s, today’s cookbooks are perhaps taking cues from Louisa Tate. There is a commitment to not cooking down to kids, assuming that all they want is plain grilled cheese and pancakes, or that they’re incapable of using a knife until they’re 18.

For Krishna, there’s no hard distinction between a kids’ cookbook and one for adults. She says she didn’t change her playful, friendly tone much between her previous cookbook, Indian-ish, and Priya’s Kitchen Adventures. She just hopes that “when someone is in the kids’ section of a bookstore, they will see this amidst a sea of white books and feel like hopefully, there’s something that better represents them. So maybe it’s just a matter of marketing and bookstore placement.”

Carolyn Figel is an illustrator and animator. She currently lives in LA with her dog, Fred.