Fat Tuesday is also Paczki Day. Paczkis are Polish doughnuts usually with jelly filling and rolled in either powdered sugar or granulated sugar. They’re made on Fat Tuesday in preparation for the Lenten season’s austerity. This past Monday, I homemade them and was excited to share them with my family, colleagues, and neighbors who all know my love for baking.
So it won’t come as any surprise that I also enjoy reading about books with cooking and baking in them. I’ve read Notes from a Young Black Chef (nonfiction biography) and With the Fire on High (young adult fiction) to Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (nonfiction short story collection) and Maker Comics: Bake Like a Pro! (graphic novel) to name a few.
Recently I’ve read two others that I’d like to share a bit about: the Love Sugar Magic middle grade series and Salty, Bitter, Sweet.
While the rest of the series will be in the queue, I have only listened to the first book called A Dash of Sugar in which Leonora Legrono’s family owns a bakery preparing for The Day of the Dead when she accidentally discovers that she is a bruja, a witch of Mexican ancestry like her mother and the rest of her sisters who use magic in the kitchen. It’s a heartfelt mix of family, culture, and baking with a deliciously humorous plot.
The second, Salty, Bitter, Sweet, is firmly a young adult title that follows Isabella Fields to France on her father and stepmother’s cherry farm where she is going to be apprenticing with a famous chef and a group of teenagers vying for a spot in his Michelin-rated restaurant. Her passion for perfection in the kitchen is thwarted by the mishaps during her apprenticeship and her stepmother’s stepson visiting for the summer. It’s a solid, well-woven story with a beautiful backdrop and rich stories of fond family memories in the kitchen. Look for it on March 3rd.
In the comments below, please recommend any more books about food that I should read!
And it’s the likes of illustrator Zeke Peña combined with the words of Isabel Quintero that merge Iturbide’s photography with an illustrated style that brings it to life two-fold. The most memorable panel, the one in which Peña re-works the iconic woman with the iguanas side by side with the photograph courtesy of Getty Images, is striking. And there are other panels that captivate the reader in their presentation and solidifies Peña’s skill both individually and collaboratively working with Quintero’s storytelling. Plus, the font itself worked seamlessly for my eyeballs to move around the pages and panels. Even Peña recognizes the beauty of illustrations by thanking readers “you and your eyeballs for reading this book”. You’re welcome, Peña. Thank you for illustrating it. And it got me thinking about my own life at thirty-something– how would Peña draw mine? What would Quintero write about me? Perhaps the best kind of self-reflective writing prompts could come from this book.
Here were some of my favorites to discuss:
Readers Be Advised 