By Marjorie Priceman
The market's closed the day she wants to bake, so she travels the whole world for the ingredients: Italy for the wheat, Sri Lanka for the cinnamon, Jamaica for the sugar.
The book opens by promising an apple pie is easy to make, as long as the market is open. Hers isn't. So she packs a suitcase and goes. Italy for semolina wheat, France for a hen to lay the egg, Sri Lanka for cinnamon peeled off the bark of a kurundu tree, England for a cow, Jamaica for sugar cane, and Vermont for the apples. She gets around by steamship, banana boat, and parachute, and hauls the whole load home. Then she bakes the pie. The last page prints the real recipe so you can make it too, and she calls everybody over to eat.
It takes one silly idea, that you can't buy the ingredients so you go fetch them straight from the source, and runs it all the way around the globe. The joke keeps working the whole way. A lot of five- and six-year-olds love exactly this kind of humor, where the logic is ridiculous but followed to the letter. Along the way your child picks up things that happen to be true: cinnamon is tree bark, sugar is a kind of grass, an egg comes from a hen. None of it feels like a lesson, because it's all part of the gag. The watercolors are loose and crowded, with a hen drifting down under a parachute and animals everywhere, so there's plenty to spot on a second read. And nothing about it asks anything of your kitchen. Your child can love the book and never bake a thing, though the recipe is right there if they want it.