Arab Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook

Parents, cooks, children, and those who like to cook, will all enjoy this colorfully illustrated cookbook/collection of fairy tales featuring simple, nutritious (zero junk food) recipes for dishes such as shish taouk (chicken kebabs), mamoul (date-filled cookies) or shorbit adas (lentil soup). Some of the roughly two dozen recipes, such as qamaruddin (apricot sheets, which will appeal to children who enjoy dried fruit snacks), might take a while (up to nine hours in a low oven) to prepare. But that leaves plenty of time to enjoy the accompanying stories, which, like the recipes, come from a wide variety of Arab-speaking countries. There is the account of the Gazan fisherman, a fabulist whose granddaughter teasingly calls out his tall tales, or the Saharan story of how boastful pride robbed the ostrich and chicken of their ability to fly. Many of the stories focus on food, along with moral lessons, nourishing both mind and body.

-TOM VERDE