Learning US History Through Food {TOS Crew Review}

Kids love food.  It’s a known fact.  People love food.  Food is integral to our cultures and our lives.  My kids recently have been learning US History through food with Eat Your U.S. History Homework.   This is a book in a series of Eat Your Homework books by Ann McCallum Books.  

 

We received a hardcover version of the Eat Your U.S. History Homework book.  It retails for $15.95.  It is also available as an ebook but this is definitely one I’d recommend as a hardcover version.  After all you’re going to be in the kitchen with it!  The illustrations are catchy and engaging and it’s written in such a way that even the smaller of our children were enthralled.   Learning US History Through Food has never been easier or more fun or yummy!

Ann McCallum is the author of the three Eat Your Homework books(history, science, and math) as well as others.  She currently is a high school teacher in Maryland.  The fun fact my children and I loved was that she started her teaching career as a teacher in a one room schoolhouse in northern Canada.  One of our favorite literary characters was a school teacher in Canada(Anne of Green Gables) which immediately made this book and author one step up in their minds!

This book is different than what I thought it might initially be.  I thought we were going to connect recipes that we know and eat now with recipes that were eaten back in a certain time period.  For instance, we eat Shepherd’s Pie and they ate that during the Revolutionary War.  Or we love to eat Sutler’s Beans which is a Civil War era recipe.  But it’s not!  Instead we’re introduced to mainly new recipes that my kids are not familiar with.  Therefore, they get a new memory of a new taste and can associate that with a time in history.  It’s really quite brilliant!!

 

I did have to do some tweaking to the recipes.  As a mom of a large family I often had to double or triple the recipes.  I also am a mom of a food allergy family.  This means that I had to replace the wheat or gluten in the recipe with a gluten free version and replace any milk products with milk free versions.  It’s something I’m used to doing so it was not hard for me, but I did want to mention that the recipes are not all allergen friendly.  

The time period that this book covers is prior to and including the Revolutionary War.  This is great because it means(to us and hopefully to the author) that a sequel or two are in the works.  After all, there is still quite a bit of history to cover!

The book is geared towards ages 7-10.  You really want them to be old enough to read and do small acts in the kitchen.  I being the mom that I am with 9 kids ages 10-2 had a lot more help in the kitchen.  I designated one child as our recipe reader.  We then would give each child one ingredient to measure out(if there were enough ingredients) and other jobs such as mixing or pouring, etc could be assigned to different children.  Then we picked one recipe that an older child got to prepare on their own(with adult supervision) and then teach the rest of the kids about the dish and why we were eating it.  As I stated before, this book and the concept of learning US history through food is brilliant!

We have one main complaint about this book.  It’s not long enough.  Seriously.  It only contains six recipes so we only were able to discuss six time periods.  I stated above that there is hope for a sequel since only a small section of history is covered and I hope that this will be done.  Then all the different books and time periods could be compiled into one large book.  This mama would for sure buy it!

A fun tidbit, but all of these recipes can be cooked over an open campfire!  We reenact the Civil War and plan to cook several of these again over the campfire when we are out and about at our events.  We already did a recipe similar to the Colonial Cherry Berry Grunt and can’t wait to give it a smoke infused taste.  Yummy with homemade ice cream!  We tried the Independence Ice Cream in the book.  It was super simple of course and very good.  We did decide though that we’d stick with our hand crank at events.  Makes a whole lot more!!

If you’d like to learn more about the Eat Your Homework books or see some of the other great offerings that Ann McCallum Books has please check out the Main TOS Blog for the link up.  Several of our bloggers received different books and are sharing their thoughts.  You’ll see more of the Eat Your U.S. History Homework as well as Science and Math and two other books.  Ann McCallum Books currently does not have any social media sites for me to send you to, so please make sure to check out their website in my first paragraph!  We’re loving learning US history through food and hope you will too.