I like to joke around with my young cooking students. So it’s not surprising that they sometimes think I’m making things up when I’m not.
No one in the semester-long Eat Your History classes I teach to elementary-school students, for instance, ever believes me when I try to tell them about the cinnamon bird. Or rather, they can’t believe that anyone ever believed a story like that one, used by spice traders in antiquity to jack up the already astronomical price of an exotic and sought-after substance like cinnamon. The traders told buyers that they wouldn’t have to charge them so much, the story goes, if they didn’t have to go to such great trouble to harvest cinnamon. Because it was supposedly a nearly impossible task, given the “fact” that cinnamon sticks were found only in the nests of cinnamon birds, fearsome creatures who built those nests on the sides of incredibly remote sheer cliffs, no less.
I get similar dubious looks in my classes when I try to tell students that pizza and so many other examples of everyday Italian fare were once looked upon as decidedly exotic foods in the United States. Or that the same was true for Chinese food or, for that matter, even something now as commonplace as that once very foreign condiment, salsa.
Yet no matter how many cups of bubble tea they’ve downed lately or overpriced macarons they’ve begged their parents for at a bakery, many of these quite culinarily sophisticated kids are still completely unfamiliar with foods from a few key parts of the globe. African foods are a prime example. That’s why this week, I’m offering some great ideas for ways that kids can eat their geography from that corner of the world, too. And my plan, I will tell you, begins with a plate of homemade Sorghum-Coconut Sandwich Cookies.
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