Easy as Pie (review)

A big fan of the high-spirited TV personality Chef Monty, young Jacob cheerfully embarks on the making of a tasty peach pie. As his family prepares to go out to dinner, Jacob focuses on the preparation of his pastry, rolling out the dough and rolling with the punches as things deviate from plan, and finally presenting his delicious dish to the family as a celebratory pre-dinner dessert. Without an actual pie to eat, there's not a lot of bang to the conclusion; the joy here is largely in the process, but that, due to Jacob's enthusiastic cheffery, is quite a luscious slice of joy. Chef Monty's Baking Rules, enumerated by Jacob as he cooks and included as a list on the front endpapers, hit the spot in a way that cooking guidelines often fail to do, focusing on having a good time when cooking and dealing with the inevitable surprises. Jacob provides an excellent example of the reward for the cook in following such sensible and pleasure-focused advice, and he's also a believable character as a young baker, enjoying the tinkering and the possibilities as well as the food. Watercolor-and-pencil illustrations have a trim homeyness, with details that enhance the personable scenes: Jacob nimbly clambers up a stepstool to reach the cabinets and perches atop a pile of books to peer through the oven window at just the right height, while happy sound-effect text snippets, often of action words ("Pat! Snip! Cut! Trim!"), emphasize the energetic nature of the activity. This would be a reassuring counterpart to a cookbook in an entry-level kitchen lesson, especially if celebrated with pie. A recipe for peach pie (which deviates from Jacob's by using premade piecrust) appears on the back cover.