Chowder Rules is a very funny story

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.

 

 

 

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.