Students’ food stories create a unique cookbook

As we saw yesterday with Jenny’s post about how she became a cookbook collector, when someone shares her love of food and cookbooks it resonates with others. Recently, a charter school in Washington, DC used this concept in a project to help students improve their writing skills, and in the process created a cookbook filled with memories.  

The Capital City Charter School’s student body is very diverse – many of its 981 students are first-generation Americans whose families hail from all across the globe. When it came time for a book project for the junior class, the sponsors of the project settled on a topic that would bring this diverse group together: food. They asked each student to choose a family recipe that had a story behind it and write an essay about the dish. 

The result was a collection of 81 recipes from many different cuisines, each with a heartfelt explanation about why the food was important to the writer. The capstone for the project involved sharing all of these recipes, with the students hosting a potluck and each bringing the dish that was the subject of their essay. The NPR article shares five excerpts from the cookbook so you can get a taste of the cookbook. If you want to read more, head over to the project’s website, where you can find all 81 of the recipes and stories from the cookbook, which was titled Delicious Havoc.