Can you share great picture books on pancakes?
“Pancakes and Fins,
Roses and Pins
Set him a grinning
And see how he grins!’
Edward Lear’s succinct lines sum up the delight that pancakes bring. Sweet or savoury, they are a finger-licking treat at any time but Pancake Day gives everyone a reason to eat them. And it is not just that they taste delicious. They are also fun to cook. When else do you get the chance to toss food around the room without anyone worrying too much about it all ending up on the floor or straight in the dog’s mouth?
In different versions, and with a slight variation in ingredients such as ghee instead of butter and different kinds of flour, pancakes appear all over the world and are enjoyed by adults and children alike.
And there are some great children’s picture books around that celebrate them!
They can be given a semi-human form as in various retellings of The Runaway Pancake, including Mairi Mackoon and Silvia Provantini’s version published by Usborne, by in which a pancake takes on the role of a gingerbread man and manages to escape from all kinds of dangerous predators.
Julius Lester’s Sam and the Tigers, takes themes from Helen Bannerman’s controversial story about tigers and pancakes and reworks them into a light-hearted version of the story told in the style of his Uncle Remus stories. Sam lives in Sam-Sam-sa-mara, a country where everyone is called Sam which makes for lots of jokes along the lines of “Sam said to Sam”. Sam outwits the hungry local tigers and, as in the original, tricks them into chasing after each other. Through the ferocity of their chase they turn into butter which Sam makes into delicious pancakes. The garishly dressed Sam and the brightly coloured tigers are beautifully illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. And the pancakes look delicious!
The pancakes in the Elfrida Vipont and Raymond Briggs’s The Elephant and the Bad Baby are paler versions but the fact that they are being made for the two miscreants of the titles after their “|rumpeta-rumpeta-rumpeta” shoplifting spree is an act of love and forgiveness by mum.
Mr Wolf, the star of Jan Fearnley’s Mr Wolf’s Pancakes, would love to be able to run up a batch of pancakes but he doesn’t know how. Dreaming of a stack of steaming yellow pancakes, he knows that they would be delicious but he doesn’t know what ingredients he needs to make them.
When he asks his neighbours, who include Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs, they are far from friendly and give no help at all so he sets about making them all on his own. Once the glorious pancakes are made, the neighbours behave quite differently. But will Mr Wolf let them share? There’s a great twist in this engaging story about sharing – or not!
In Eric Carle’s Pancakes, Pancakes! Jack must also have been dreaming of pancakes as he wakes up one morning and says, “I’d like to have a big pancake for breakfast.” But Jack’s wish to have a pancake cannot be so easily satisfied. His mother doesn’t have the ingredients for pancakes in the house so she explains to Jack that eggs, flour and milk will all be needed. A useful story for thinking about what goes into a pancake – and where those ingredients come from, as Jack has to get them at their source cutting wheat and taking it to the miller, fetching an egg from a black hen and the milk from a spotted cow.
In Phyllis La Farge’s about to be re-issued The Pancake King, gloriously illustrated by Seymour Chwast, Henry Edgewood also wakes up one morning feeling hungry and declaring that he must have pancakes. He is luckier than Jack as there is a pancake mix on the shelf and eggs and milk in the fridge. Henry makes and eats pancakes, a lot of pancakes, for breakfast; then he makes some more for lunch and a third batch for supper.
After that he makes all different kinds of pancakes every day much to his dog Ezra’s delight. Soon he is feeding his friends and the milkman and the mailman. His fame spreads so far that Henry is set up in business as the Pancake King and is soon making pancakes for all – even the President of the United States. But one day Henry has had enough of pancakes. He gives up everything and returns home. And never wants to eat another pancake again. For those who might like to become the next Pancake King, bearing in mind the warning of what happened to the first Pancake King, there is a useful pancake recipe book in the back of the book!
Got any great pancake stories to recommend? Tell us on Twitter @GdnChildrensBks or by emailing childrens.books@theguardian.com and we’ll add your ideas to this blog. You can use the same email address to ASK the Book Doctor a books related question.
Your favourite pancake reads:
@GdnChildrensBks Don't forget LADY PANCAKE AND SIR FRENCH TOAST by @joshfunkbooks! #pancakebooks
— 匕คrค lคzค尺 ✎ (@taralazar) February 8, 2016