Put a flower in your bread's ear and get your tuna some lemonade! It's time for kids to cook.

I want to admire A Child's First Book of Cooking (created and illustrated by Jesse Zerner, 1975). You can tell from the cover that it's kind of trying to go for equality, saying that both girls and boys should learn about cooking.

You can also tell it's not trying too hard. The girl is doing the actual work while the boy is just licking the bowl. (And who cooked in a wood-burning stove in the 1970s, much less trusted the kids with one? Okay, I'm sure a few families probably did, but I doubt they were the same types of families as those who bought learn-to-cook books for the kids.)

The note to parents at the books' beginning reinforces this half-hearted commitment to equality, noting that "The child can be assisted in the kitchen by Mother, or possibly Father." So I guess I almost appreciate that they gestured toward equality without really committing to it.

The recipes themselves are pretty basic, as children's recipes tend to be, but they do usually have a bit of a twist. Frozen ice treats are a pretty usual entry in the kids cook genre.

This one moves beyond straight-up orange juice or lemonade by adding "baby food fruits." I guess it's a '70s version of smoothies that doesn't require a blender!

There are super-simplified versions of common main dishes too. If tuna and noodles is a little too much work, well...

Just mash together tuna, cream of mushroom soup, and crushed potato chips and bake them into a loaf. (Kids will probably especially appreciate that this leaves out the vegetables common in tuna noodle casseroles, unless you want to count potato chips as a vegetable. They'll just be an indistinguishable part of the loaf, though, rather than a crunchy topping.)

The thing I really love about this recipe is the picture, though! Tuna Loaf means a tuna fanning itself on a hammock while drinking a glass of lemonade! I love the literalism. Plus, I guess the lemonade means the tuna is self-seasoning.

Other recipes are surprisingly involved and have a more sophisticated flavor profile than I would expect. The Jam Tarts are not toast cups filled with a little jelly, as I suspected.

Kids are actually supposed to make pastry dough for the crust, and it's a cheddar cheese dough, so these are fruit and cheese tarts. Not exactly what I expected. (Not sure how my childhood self would have reacted to that combo, but it sounds pretty good to me now!)

For kids who really wanted to go all-out, there was a very special French toast.

You've just got to love the toast doing the hula! I especially love the flower somehow perched on the bread's non-existent ear.

What makes this toast Hawaiian? It substitutes pineapple juice for the usual milk in the egg wash. As it's fried in bacon grease and topped with the bacon that created the grease plus pineapple rings, this is a much more decadent recipe than I would have expected. (And of course being loaded with probably-canned pineapple, it's also exactly what I expect from '70s cookbooks.)

In short, even if the book only gestures toward being progressive, the imaginative pictures and slight twists on the common kiddie recipes make this a fun addition to my stacks and stacks of vintage cookbooks. Now I just have to find a wood burning cookstove and find some kids to bake in it. (Do I mean that the kids will be baking inside the stove or that they will use the stove as they learn to bake? Take your best guess.)