Taste the Spirit of Creativity
What do you see when you imagine a cookbook? Recipes of course, some nicely photographed images of food perhaps – and accuracy! We wanted to take all of that, bring some creativity to this age-old genre, and add some insight into the meaningful nature of cooking, as well as how recipes develop within communities.
You won’t find only delicious recipes in this book- we’ve thrown in stories about burgers, a chicken who’s not a jerk, and a prince who wants to become a chef! How does it all come together? Cooking and eating was never just about measuring carefully and having the right ingredients- we wanted to shed some light on the process behind these recipes, the faces in our thriving community, and the individual families who brought their recipes to inspire a young generation of writers!
Recipes for the book were contributed by local businesses and from families of our club members, and the children also got the chance to visit a real professional kitchen – seeing what it takes to create high-class food in restaurants. We were also lucky to have families bring in their own recipes to the club and tell us about the culture behind them; the children wrote short stories and poems inspired by what they heard and tasted.
Focussing on food enabled us to work with different genres while challenging each child to tap into their innate creative drive. Our mission at the Ministry has always been to champion the writer in every child, and help them discover it in their own unique way; food as a topic made it possible for us to provide support within which the children were in charge of their creations! The theme also connected well to our vision of working with our community in Hoxton, as local restaurants and families chipped in by opening their doors (kitchen doors, literally!) and letting us into their world through food.
In the writing sessions, we were inspired by fiction and food writers such as by Lewis Caroll, Roald Dahl, and The Chicken Connoisseur. The children even got a chance to meet the acclaimed food writer Felicity Cloake from The Guardian, which cemented their approach to producing a genuinely professional book. This became very apparent at the launch, which saw the young writers signing each other’s copies and requesting their personal copies to be signed by others.
If you want to get your hands on The Tasty Book you can too, but you’ll have to pop into our Monsters Supplies Shop and wrestle some monsters to get yours!
The Tasty Book was designed & printed by Calvert's Coop as part of our Out of Schools Workshops. All contributions made from the book will help us keep going and continue to deliver such high quality workshops to children in Hoxton.
