How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World By Marjorie Priceman is a whimsical take on how to locate ingredients when your local market is closed.  You catch a steamship to Italy for semolina wheat or stow away on a banana boat to gather sugar in Jamaica, for starters!  This is a wonderful book to read for fun but it also fits in nicely with a Geography, Transportation or Sequencing unit.  There are also some great vocabulary phrases to act out  or demonstrate with children, such as “grind the kurundu bark into cinnamon” or “evaporate the seawater from the salt.”  Be sure to read this book aloud with a map or globe or flip back to the endpapers so students can chart their own course through the locales referenced in the book.

What to do after reading and discussing this delightful book?  Make an apple pie, of course!  You can use the recipe in the back of the book with children or this more complicated recipe from Melissa Clark of The New York Times Food section, if you are baking the pie in advance.

One thing you might want to try if you are baking with children is, instead of baking one pie, scooping the apple mixture into individual ramekins and then cutting out a top crust with the round edge of a drinking glass, scoring and baking until the crust browns.  (See the ramekin to the left of the pie in the middle photograph, below.)Here are some photos from an apple pie that I made recently for my family.  There may be more satisfying pleasures in life than rolling out a crust, the aroma of a baking pie or the taste of a flaky crust laden with apples and ice cream but right now I can’t think of any!

Are there any other books that feature apple pies?  Let’s start a list!  Happy reading and baking!