Customer Reviews

Eating The Plates: A Pilgrim Book Of Food And Manners

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are a teacher, if you home school your children or even if you're just a mom like me that loves history and wants to share it with her children---Eating The Plates is a great place to get started. I loved this book! Young and old alike will learn what it might have actually been like to have come across the ocean on the Mayflower. I have shared it with children from kindergarten age through junior high(and I myself as well as other adults have enjoyed it). They were all held spellbound and came away having learned a great deal of respect for the people who settled our country and whom we often take for granted--the Pilgrims. They were real people with hopes and dreams! Lucille Recht Penner makes them and their struggles come alive. The recipes at the end of the book were especially fun to try. I highly recommend this book

I couldn't put this book down until I was done. Although it was a mere 107 pages long, it was full of fascinating tidbits. My 3 children (ages 3 to 9) begged me to read more from the book as a reward for getting ready for bed in record time! This will be a book that will be in our collection from now on! Never before have I had such a healthy respect for the brave Pilgrims of Plymouth. Eating the Plates will add a special dimension to our study of the Pilgrims.

This puts that first Thanksgiving meal in context: it's a fascinating story of the Pilgrims, their voyage to what would be Plymouth, MA, and the first hard years there. My five and six year olds sat rapt and silent for the whole thing, and it's a long book. Early American Pilgrim life was cold, buggy, stinky, and the kids had to keep wolves away from the precious planted corn hills, using a pile of rocks to defend themselves and the corn. Great, great book. I'm so sick of the usual twaddle: this one earns its stars.

I bought this book for homeschooling my 7 year old. Read half of it to her last night and didn't want to stop reading! (our eyes said otherwise.) I could read this to her in the same style as a fiction adventure book - the author did such a smooth wonderful job with her prose! I wish all history books were like this! This book is full of history and fun facts. It starts with why the Pilgrims wanted to go to the US, the hardships they faced, how they dealt with things (like bugs on food - eat in the dark), what they used, etc. The child is introduced to all the key terms (Pilgrims, Religion, Dutch, Mayflower, Mayflower Compact, Plymouth, etc.) and key people (Carver, Bradford, Squanto, Massasoit, (sp?) etc.) and is filled with ink drawings that supplement the child's own images. Although my daughter is a good listener, I did not expect her to be entralled with this book but she loved it! The book results in a lot of "cool" "ewwwww" and "i didn't know that" comments and easily leads to conversations comparing then and now....

Funny, I bought the book for fun to add to a cookbook collection and books on manners, restaurants, etc. (yes, there some cute recipes in the back) thinking I would only pick out some cute facts to share...very pleased and very surprised at the wealth of information in this book that is easily translated into a youngster's understanding in such a lively manner!

Excellent and highly recommended for homeschoolers!!!!!!!!

I bought this from our public library this summer at one of their book fairs per a friends
recommendation. I have not been dissapointed. My first grade daughter read a chapter
every night and we brought "Pilgrim food" to her school when it was her turn for snack.There
are recipes in the back of the book for you to try.
You haven't lived until you have seen 1st graders try "Swizler- a drink the Pilgrims
called "refreshing". Water, ginger, molassesa and vinegar. And yes, it tasted
as vile as it sounds. However, the kids talked about it all week. My daughter's
favorite chapter was one of the early ones which talked about the Pilgrims Mayflower
voyage where they would sometimes eat in the dark so as not to see the bugs in
their food! Captivating and a great information for all grade levels. And by the way
the book got it's title because some of the Pilgrims would make their dinner plates
out of bread (remember, they only had so much room to take things onto the Mayflower)
and then eat them. Then they didn't have to do the dishes. Of course sometimes they
would re-use them (no, they didn't wash bread plates, ugh!!!) and when they became
too hard, would feed them to the pigs. BUY THIS ONE!!!

Did you know that one of the Pilgrims' favorite meats to eat was neat's tongue, the tongue of an ox? They brought big boxes of dried ox tongues on the ship for the voyage.

Did you know that in large families it was common for some of the children to sleep on the table and then climb right down for breakfast in the morning?

Did you know that the Pilgrims always had cold feet in winter because they didn't wear socks or stockings?

Did you know that in Pilgrim families, trenchers (wooden bowls) were shared, because only show-offs would insist on each person having their own? And poor people without wooden trenchers had to do something else, which is where the title of the book comes from.

This book is full of many interesting facts about the Pilgrims. There is basic information about why the Pilgrims came to the New World, but the main focus is on the "eating habits, customs, and manners of real people who lived a long time ago." This book was outstanding for helping my children, and myself, to get a good idea of what everyday life was like for the Pilgrims.

At the end of the book are 10 recipes to allow you to make a Pilgrim meal. Some of them are foods the Pilgrims made in their early years, but other things weren't made until after they began trading for sugar, molasses, and maple syrup. We tried the fresh corn soup, bannock cakes, and swizzle. The first two were enjoyed by a few and found acceptable by a few more, but no one liked the swizzle. The fact remains though, it is something they drank, even if it doesn't suit our modern tastes.

Overall, this was an outstanding book that really brought the Pilgrims to life. I would definitely recommend this book to homeschooling families, or for any children studying the Pilgrims.

This a good book. Students seem to enjoy it. It contains historical information and presents fun at the same time.

Although Eating the Plates focuses on the Pilgrims' eating habits, it is about a lot more than that: this intriguing text gives the reader an intimate portrait of the Pilgrims and how they survived, beginning with their crossing on the Mayflower and highlighting their struggle against starvation in a harsh new land.

It makes a lot of sense to focus on food - as one of the Pilgrims' primary concerns, their entire existence depended upon successfully raising and preparing food. Penner makes it crystal clear that the Pilgrims would have never survived without Squanto's help - but her book is thankfully devoid of the overly apologetic, sappy treatments so often found in contemporary discussions about the Pilgrim-Indian relationship. Penner deftly loads her concise text with interesting-sounding "Pilgrim" terms (i.e., burgoo & plum duff) and sensory information that awakens (and sometimes assaults) the reader's senses - food, mixed (metaphorically) with all those stinks and smells and bugs are just the thing to grab a young reader's attention.

There is, additionally, a complete Pilgrim Menu at the end of the book - although, like Thanksgiving today, this menu is probably quite a lot more involved and diverse than an average day's meal; nevertheless, it provides a glance into what the "real Pilgrims" were eating, and offers a number of simple, kid-friendly recipes (written for modern-day cooks).

There are not a lot of illustrations, but enough to support the text adequately, and the Pilgrim portraits are particularly interesting, giving the reader a few faces to imagine around the table.