Chowder Rules! Is a wonderful children’s book, but also a story adults will enjoy and chuckle over. Anna Crowley Redding has written a very funny story of a Maine Chef who is offended when someone in New York City adds tomatoes to Maine’s traditional clam chowder.
The chef is also a Maine legislator and he’s so furious with the act of adding tomatoes to our wonderful traditional chowder that he introduces a legislative bill to ban the addition of tomatoes to clam chowder, which he called a crime against cookery. The penalty for adding tomatoes would be having to dig a barrel of clams at high tide, an impossibility.
I don’t want to spoil the ending for you, but I bet you can guess what the legislature did.
I loved the funny illustrations by Vita Lane, especially the frowning face of the Maine chef and the beautiful bowl of clam chowder, which made me hungry.
If you’ve got kids or grandkids, this book would be a great Christmas gift. Published by Islandport Press in Yarmouth, this book is a keeper that you will read often. My wife zooms twice a week with our 4 and 6-year-old granddaughters in Massachusetts, and she’ll be reading this book to them soon.