The Best Cookbooks for Kids

Both Sam Sifton, the food editor of The New York Times, and I are big fans of the American Girl cookbooks. The recipes are easy for children to follow, but worthy of the family dinner table — dishes like turkey chili, rosemary roast chicken and sautéed green beans with almonds. There are eight books in the series (which Weldon Owen began publishing in 2016), many produced in partnership with Williams Sonoma; they include “Cooking: Recipes for Delicious Snacks, Meals & More” and, coming later this year, “Cupcakes: Delicious Treats to Bake & Share.” My girls loved filling and folding the vegetable dumplings from “Around the World Cookbook: Delicious Dishes from Across the Globe,” which was like a craft and a cooking project in one.

There are fewer step-by-step instructions and photos in these books, so readers will need a bit more experience, or adults will need to provide more hands-on help. But they are loaded with excellent recipes that are not dumbed down for children, which means that grown-ups will want to eat them, too. It’s disappointing that the books are marketed solely to girls, because everyone could find something to love in them.

When your children are done cleaning up the kitchen (ha!), here are four books — more memoirs with recipes than cookbooks — they can sink their teeth into.

Two cookbooks by the chef Alice Waters — “Fanny at Chez Panisse: A Child’s Restaurant Adventures With 46 Recipes” (William Morrow Cookbooks, 1997) and “Fanny in France: Travel Adventures of a Chef’s Daughter, With Recipes” (Viking, 2016) — are full of classic recipes, beautiful watercolor illustrations and charming stories told from her daughter’s point of view.

Laura Ingalls Wilder fans love “The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories” by Barbara M. Walker (Harper Collins, 1979). First published in 1979 (a revamped 40th anniversary edition was published in 2018), it contains more than 100 recipes, like pulled molasses candy and corn dodgers, alongside excerpts from the “Little House” “novels.

Older kids might enjoy “Relish: My Life in the Kitchen” (First Second, 2013), a funny and touching graphic memoir by Lucy Knisley, a cartoonist raised by a chef and a food lover. She recounts important moments in her life by what she was eating at the time.

Each chapter ends with an illustrated recipe, like spaghetti carbonara, that just might inspire your kids to head into the kitchen and make memories of their own.