A Fine Dessert by Emily Jenkins

Author:Emily Jenkins [Jenkins, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-98771-7
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2015-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

A Note from the Author

A Fine Dessert raises some topics you may want to discuss, adults and children together. I hope the book inspires conversations.

This story includes characters who are slaves, even though there is by no means space to explore the topic of slavery fully. I wanted to represent American life in 1810 without ignoring that part of our history. I wrote about people finding joy in craftsmanship and dessert even within lives of great hardship and injustice—because finding that joy shows something powerful about the human spirit. Slavery is a difficult truth. At the end of the book, children can see a hopeful, inclusive community.

A less painful but still important topic is the history of women and girls in the kitchen and the feminization of domestic work: it would have been unlikely before the end of the twentieth century to see a father and son making dessert, as they do at the end of this story.

Children may easily recognize the changes in food preparation technology but with encouragement will also notice other changes that happened with time.

Fruit fool is one of the oldest desserts in Western culture. It dates back to the sixteenth century. The word fool most likely originated from the French word fouler, which means “to mash” or “to press”—so the name doesn’t mean “silly fool”; it means “smushed-up.” A fool can be made with any fruits but traditionally features tart ones: raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries, or rhubarb.

Details of the kitchen gadgets and the types of refrigeration are as accurate as I could make them. Two useful websites are The Food Timeline (foodtimeline.org) and Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project (http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/). The rotary beater was patented in 1856. Before that, cream was whipped by hand. Electric mixers first appeared in homes around 1919 but did not become common until later. Food processors arrived in home kitchens in the 1970s. You’ll notice that the cream is pasteurized only in the later kitchens, and that the twenty-first-century family is the first to have an electric refrigerator. Pasteurization was invented in the 1860s, and the first home fridges appeared in 1911.

This book is about the connection of human beings to one another and to delicious flavors in the kitchen. No matter their circumstances, technologies, and methods of food sourcing, people have the same urge to lick the bowl!

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