Summer Joys #13 -- Mud Pies!

This spring I was wandering through my favorite used bookstore -- one of those delightful places with carefully-selected and hard-to-find items -- and I came across a book I'd heard about but never seen in person. I snatched up an old hardback copy of Mud Pies and Other Recipes (NY: Macmillan Co.). In 1961, inspired by the play of her two young daughters, Marjorie Winslow created a mock cookbook that beautifully blends grownup and childhood worlds. If Winnie the Pooh and Piglet open a restaurant, this volume will be their guide...

Fried Water
Melt one ice cube in a skillet by placing it in the sun. When melted, add 1 cup water and saute slowly -- until water is transparent. Serve small portions, because this dish is rich as well as mouth-watering.

Rainspout Tea
Place a teapot, or a sandpail, at the end of a rainspout and wait for it to rain. After the sun comes out, serve this tea under a rainbow with sawdust cakes.

Sawdust Cake
Mix a little of the clay found along riverbanks with sawdust and pack into a square cake pan. Sprinkle with water from a sprinkling can. Bake in the sun until hard, then turn out of the pan and frost with moss.

Eli suggested his buddy, Eileen, might like the book too, so we invited her (and her mom) over for a mud pie cooking session.

We let them borrow our mud pie cookbook and even wrapped it in brown paper, paper string, and grass stems to add a little mystery.

We sent out our invitation at Spring Break, but it was such a chilly spring that we kept putting off the cooking session. Ah, but summer finally arrived, warm and weedy. The sun is hot enough to bake a mud pie on the sidewalk. The leaves are thick and juicy. The wild strawberries are just waiting to get squished. Perfect.

One Mama's Two Cents:
I was a huge mud pie connoisseur when I was a kid. (Click HERE for a post about how mud pies still influence me!) Eli loves pretend cooking too. When he attended a Waldorf preschool in California, his teacher talked about giving kids access to functional tools and making sure they have toys that aren't just plastic. Thus Eli and I started collecting real but small-scaled kitchen gear at Goodwill and garage sales. Aluminum, copper, and stainless steel won't rust if left out in the rain and feel wonderfully real (because they are real). If you start your own collection, what should you look for? Here are a few suggestions: a saucepan, a mixing bowl, a teapot, spoons, butter knives, a spatula, measuring spoons, a funnel, saucer-sized plates, cups, muffin tins, and a colander. We provided the kids with a filled water table, a dish pan containing a shovelful of dirt, and access to a yard full of greenery.

Eileen's mom and I thought it would be fun to have the kids dictate invented recipes to us that we could photograph and turn into a cookbook with the kids. But the weather meant that Winslow's book was largely forgotten by the time we finally had our mud pie session. Maybe it's time to pass the book around to Camp Rainbow families and have a huge mud pie and cookbook session!