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Howdy, Campers!

Note the four exciting announcements at the bottom of this post (including this: today's the last day to enter our current book giveaway.)

12,341,889 likes ~ 58,962 talking about this

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We are extra lucky today as not one but two experts have concocted a gourmet feast of their Top 10 favourite multicultural stories about food.  It seems fitting that authors Grace Lin and Jama Rattigan should each select food as their theme, since they have both written stories revolving around tasty recipes – as you will discover by looking at each of their menus.  In fact, each has put a book by the other on her menu, while unaware that the other was cooking up their own recipe, so it seems fitting that we should bring you the whole spread for you to gorge on at a single sitting – and it’s also interesting to see which books come up as double portions…

Jama Rattigan is the author of Dumpling Soup illustrated by Lilian Hsu-Flanders (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 1998);  The Woman in the Moon: A Story from Hawai’i illustrated by Carla Golembe (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 1996); and Truman’s Aunt Farm illustrated by G. Brian Karas (Sandpiper, 1996).  As well as her website (check out the recipe for Dumpling Soup), Jama also hosts the truly delectable Jama’s Alphabet Soup, a must-visit blog for anyone interested in children’s books, food, or both at the same time.

Grace Lin‘s latest book is Starry River of the Sky (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012), the much-awaited companion novel to Newbery Honor Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2009).  She has written and illustrated many books for a wide age-range of children, including The Ugly Vegetables (Charlesbridge Publishing, 1999) and Dim Sum for Everyone (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2001); and picture books she has illustrated include Where on Earth is my Bagel? by Frances and Ginger Park (Lee & Low Books, 2001).  You can read our 2010 interview with Grace here, and view some of her beautiful artwork in our Gallery here and here.  And do check out Grace’s website and blog, where she has a fantastic giveaway on offer in celebration of the launch of Starry River of the Sky.

Top 10 Favorite Multicultural Picture Books about Food by Jama Rattigan

Whether it’s a big platter of noodles, warm-from-the-oven flatbread, fried dumplings, or a steamy bowl of Ugly Vegetable Soup, there’s nothing tastier than a picture book about food. You eat with your eyes first, then step into the kitchens or sit at the tables of friends and family from faraway places, all of whom seem to agree that love is the best seasoning for any dish, and food tastes best when it is happily shared. These tasty tales always make me say, “More, please!”

~ Apple Pie Fourth of July by Janet S. Wong and Margaret Chodos-Irvine (Harcourt, 2002)

~ Aunty Yang’s Great Soybean Picnic by Ginnie Lo and Beth Lo (Lee & Low, 2012)

~ Bee-Bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park and Ho Baek Lee (Clarion, 2005)

~ Cora Cooks Pancit by Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore and Kristi Valiant (Shen’s Books, 2009)

~ Duck for Turkey Day by Jacqueline Jules and Kathryn Mitter (Albert Whitman, 2009)

~ Hiromi’s Hands by Lynne Barasch (Lee & Low, 2007)

~ Hot, Hot Roti for Dada-ji by F. Zia and Ken Min (Lee & Low, 2011)

~ The Have a Good Day Café by Frances Park and Ginger Park, illustrated by Katherine Potter (Lee & Low, 2005)

~ The Ugly Vegetables by Grace Lin (Charlesbridge, 1999)

~ Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto and Ed Martinez (Putnam, 1993)

 

 

My Top Ten Food-Themed Multicultual Books by Grace Lin

In my family instead of saying hello, we say, “Have you eaten yet?” Eating and food has always been a successful way to connect us to culture, familiar as well as exotic–perhaps because it’s so enjoyable! So these books about food can be an appetizer to another country, a comfort food of nostalgia or a delicious dessert of both. Hen hao chi!

~ Hiromi’s Hands by Lynne Barasch (Lee & Low, 2007)

~ Ganesha’s Sweet Tooth by Sanjay Patel and Emily Haynes, illustrated by Sanjay Patel (Chronicle Books, 2012)

~ Bee-Bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park,illustrated Ho Baek Lee (Clarion, 2005)

~ How My Parents Learned to Eat by Ina R. Friedman, illustrated by Allan Say (Sandpiper, 1987)

~ Apple Pie Fourth of July by Janet Wong, illustrated by Margaret Chodos-Irvine (Harcourt, 2002)

~ Everybody Cooks Rice by Norah Dooley, illustrated by Peter Thornton (Carolrhoda Books, 1992)

~ Yoko by Rosemary Wells (Hyperion, 1998)

~ Auntie Yang’s Great Soybean Picnic by Ginnie and Beth Lo (Lee & Low, 2012)

~ Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas by Pauline Chen (Bloomsbury, 2007)

~ Dumpling Soup by Jama K. Rattigan, illustrated by Lillian Hsu Flanders (Little, Brown, 1998)

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From Jama's Alphabet Soup's blog. I love the little feet!

 This is such a pretty blog!  Excellent lay-out, lovely photos and scads and scads of book reviews.  Add Jama's Alphabet Soup to your list of Kids Book Websites.  You won't be sorry.

I found Jama's blog by looking at THIS site, 100 Best Book Blogs for Kids, Tweens and Teens.  What a treasure trove of literary superb-ity!  BTW, while you are looking at all those amazing blogs, click on Study Hall to find ALL kinds of education related links - about nutrition and Twitter feeds and history blogs and websites and teacher resources.  Onlineschools.org looks pretty darn interesting.  I must investigate further.

Jama's blog appears to concentrate on picture books.  (On a closer look, I realize it covers a lot of different things.) Onlineschools concentrates on everything.   For book reviews of elementary through high school titles, check out BooksForKids.  This blog features excerpts of the books, an excellent marketing device.  Picture books for primary grades, "chapter" books (is that actually a literary designation, or just what kids call them?) for older readers, the blogger offers a potpourri of book selections. 

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See Saw Saskatchewan is a children’s collection of poems about Canada by Robert Heidbreder, illustrated by Scot Ritchie (Kids Can Press, 2003.)  I found out about this delightful book from librarian Sue Fisher’s blog, Mousetraps and the Moon.  For National Poetry Month which was April, Sue featured various  children’s poetry books on her blog.

See Saw Saskatchewan is a playful collection of poems  that can be skipped to, ball-bounced to, or clapped to.  The poems are about life in Canada in various locations featuring activities, or animals, or sights particular to the locale.  There’s definitely a touch of Dennis Lee in these poems that’s detectable in such poems that play on Canadian place names like in  ‘Niagara Falls’:

Kapuskasing sings
Cornwall calls
Thunder Bay storms,
And Niagara
FALLS!

In fact there are a lot of playful references to famous children’s rhymes which you can tell by the titles of some of the poems like ‘Pick a peck of P.E.I.’ or ‘Take Toronto by the Toe’.  I had to laugh at the poem referring to my home city of Winnipeg: ‘Winnipeg Mosquitoes’. Yes, we do often have them and in enough abundance, to make them poetry-worthy! There’s a cute illustration of two besotted mosquitoes sucking blood out of a finger, which vaguely reminded me of a line from John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ — “wherein two bloods mingled be” — except in this case it’s the reverse with the blood of one Canadian ‘mingled’ into two lovelorn mosquitoes! Now if that isn’t an image of Canadian love, I don’t know what is.

Do you know of any good poetry books that celebrate your locale? Or play with the funny names of your towns and cities? In Canada, we have some great place names like Moose Jaw and Nipissing, Tumbler Ridge and Nanaimo. See Saw Saskatchewan does a nice job of making Canada a fun place to read about with its delightful poems set all over the land.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by jama at jama rattigan’s alphabet soup.

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Jama Rattigan, at jama rattigan's alphabet soup, is hosting a potluck for National Poetry Month. Here's how she describes her yummy project:

"I've set the table, chilled the wine, hired a string quartet (don't worry, some jazz musicians will be joining us later), and am ready to enjoy a month's worth of poems written by some of the wonderful folks I've met through Poetry Friday.

I've been hooked on PF ever since I first started blogging in 2007. Every week, I look forward to seeing what beautiful, inspiring, funny, or thought provoking poems these friends will post. Whether they've written the poems themselves, or have chosen the work of others, I'm grateful for the momentary glimpse into their emotional lives.

I thought inviting them to the alphabet soup kitchen for a potluck would be the perfect way to celebrate National Poetry Month. I asked each to share an original poem and a favorite recipe, and they all, without hesitation, enthusiastically agreed (further evidence of their overall awesomeness). They came through for me in a big way, even sharing recipe photos. Friends, this is going to be a supremely delicious month -- a bountiful, nourishing feast for body, mind, and spirit!"

Today, it's MY turn to share the spotlight! Head on over to alphabet soup and enjoy a helping of apple crisp. Thanks, Jama, for inviting me to your feast! It's an honor to sit at your table with

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By Anatoly Liberman

Etymologists constantly lament their fate: either the word to be explained was not recorded early enough (a typical case with vulgarisms and slang) or it is isolated (some monster like catawampus), or it has a sufficient number of allied forms but they are so similar that their semantic history cannot be traced (this circumstance—to give one example—handicaps the research into the origin of dwarf: like their English cognate, German Zwerg, Swedish dverg, etc., denote a short person, but how this combinations of sounds acquired its meaning is hard to decide ). The list is long enough for composing a full-fledged elegy “The Etymologist’s Complaint.” By contrast, an overwhelming amount of material may also pose problems. A case in point is the children’s verse of the eena—meena—mina—mo type. It has been recorded in numerous countries from east to west—naturally, in different form, but the first word is more or less the same everywhere. Although eena and its kin resemble one, they are too far from it to be qualified as its “garbled” or “corrupted” variants. Nor are meena, mina, and mo less obscure than eena. Why some human or beast has to be caught by the toe is equally puzzling but will not concern us. I will touch only on the English word eena and its analogues.

Our first sojourn will be in the Yorkshire Dales, where sheep are (or were at the end of the 19th century) scored as follows: yain, taien, tethera, (m)ethera, pi(m)p (the first five numerals). Another variant is eina, peina, para, pattera, pith. The origin of those numerals has been subjected to a long and fruitful discussion, whose main result is that we observe here a relic of an ancient British (Celtic) system of counting. Since to modern speakers yain, taien, etc. are meaningless words, their form is unstable and tends to vary from region to region. Some of the lists are mere gibberish, with English words replacing the original numerals, and rhyming words invented by informants. Complications arise when we cross the ocean and discover a similar string of numerals in use among the native population in North America, for example, een, teen, tother, fither, pimp, with the variant eeny, teeny, tuthery, fethery, fip. The American (Wawena) numerals were published in 1867. According to an informed opinion, those scores should be regarded as tally-marks rather than numbers; they were used in counting by fives, tens, or twenties. Presumably, they were “brought to New England by English colonists and used by them in dealing with the Indians in counting fish, beaver skins, and other articles of traffic. When the memory of their origin was lost, the Anglo-Americans believed them to be Indian numerals, and the Indians probably believed them to be good English.”

According to other hypotheses, the home of the phrase eena, meena, mina, mo is French Canadian or a language spoken on an island off the West Coast of Africa. Both hypotheses are fanciful. One should never tire of repeating that the idea of borrowing has value only when the way of penetration is known. In the world of words, tales, and customs, seeming convergences abound. Some words, plots, and rituals often have close analogue in different regions. It is easy and tempting to suggest borrowing. Positing loans without identifying intermediaries is a waste of time. The Celtic origin of sheep scoring is nearly certain. Incidentally, not only sheep and not only in Yorkshire are counted this way. The unresolved question is the connection between the American list and eena, meena, mina, mo. The resemblance between the rhyme and eina, peina, para, pattera; yain, taien, tethera, (m)ethera; eeny, teeny, tuthery, fethery is minimal. Only the first word is almost the same, and, as pointed out, it is such everywhere. Far from the English speaking world, Russian girls begin their games with the words eniki, beniki (eni-, pronounced like Engl. any). The second words (meena and beniki) must have been coined as rhyming partners of eena and beniki, but where did the first ones come from? The Old English for one was pronounced an (with a as in father), in Middle English it changed to on (with o as in British pawn); neither can be called a phonetic variant of eena. Equally slight is the similarity between eniki (after we subtract the meaningless ending -ki) and Russian odin “one” (stress on the second syllable; its older form began with ted- or yed-). Referring eeny to some “ancient British numeral” like eina suggests itself (obviously, a reasonable solution), but why wasn’t the entire sequence reproduced? Why only the first word? Children’s folklore often preserves remnants of ancient incantations, but no such incantation has been found. As far as we can judge, no magic formula ever began with eeny or eniki. Russian etymological dictionaries do not discuss eniki; the OED calls eena a nonsense word. To be sure, all is nonsense that we do not understand. Folklorists believe that the English counting out rhyme is relatively recent. If this is true, the emergence of eeny and its closeness to words like eniki makes the riddle of its origin even harder.

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Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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