By Lisa Gullickson — In the kitchen, there are two types of people - cooks and bakers. I am a baker. Cooks are playing gastronomic jazz, tasting and tweaking, reacting and improvising. Cooks live in the moment, always striving for greatness but also enjoying a wide margin of error. Bakers are performing a symphony. There is some room for interpretation, but there are definitely right and wrong notes. Bakers live in the past - relying on experience, understanding a few scientific principles, and a dozen or so rules of thumb. Unlike jazz, when the first chair clarinetist misses a few notes, what was supposed to be Gershwin is now a disaster. One miscalculation in the ingredients of what was intended to be cake is now crap. Someone’s birthday is ruined. A cook with a spoon always has their fate between their fingertips, but once your batter or dough is in the oven, it is, as Mary Berry often says, “in the lap of the gods.”

I sense a kindred spirit in Yummy!: A History of Desserts, a fellow baker. Creator Victoria Grace Elliott has surely cried over cake. Yummy! is a comic book for all ages that acts as an ode to an encyclopedia of desserts which is fully in the wheelhouse of the baking inclined. The book includes chapters on cake, brownies, donuts, pie, cookies, and baking’s crowning achievement, macarons. There are also chapters on ice cream, which is more cooking, and gummies, which are confections but are both equally sweet and delicious. As our guides through the luscious lineage of some of humanity’s most delightful delectables, Elliott provides a green-haired, petit sprite named Peri and her two eager assistants, Fee and Fada.

Having sprites as guides does add chaos to what could have been a more rigidly structured but far less darling visual encyclopedia of patisserie’s past. The chapters are irregular in length and contents. Peri meticulously walks us through a recipe in some chapters, but others have none. For instance, there is a very compelling snickerdoodle recipe in the cookie chapter but no recipe for brownies. The more sciencey sprite, Fada, demonstrates freezing point depression using ice and salt in the ice-cream chapter, but how boiling hooves makes gummies’ gummy remains a mystery. Of course, Elliott is not the first to trade structure for a little light-hearted spontaneity, but what they fold into Yummy! is so much richer than a flight of fondant fancy. 

What makes Yummy!: A History of Desserts so extraordinary occurs regularly in a recurring segment called ‘Story Time’ where Peri sits in a blue armchair with her friends, Fee and Fada, at her feet. Peri reads them a legend of desserts’ past. In the first chapter on ice cream, Peri recalls “The Legend of the Waffle Cone” about how an ice-cream vendor ran out of cups at the 1904 World’s Fair in Saint Louis and a waffle vendor came to his aid. When Peri closes the book, the skeptical Fada squints her eyes and asks, “Is all that true?” And Peri replies, “No, it’s a legend.” She goes on to explain with a wink, “It’s always important to take legends like these with a grain of salt! But they usually have some truth to them!” Fee, the more whimsical sprite, gives a gratified nod, but Fada looks agitated. Yummy!: A History of Desserts may look like any other children’s illustrated encyclopedia. It is actually a sugar-coated primer in how to engage with the narrative of shared cultural history. It can never be complete or factual, and it will never satisfy everyone’s curiosity. 

Victoria Grace Elliott goes much further than giving the young reader the tools to discern the factual and the apocryphal. For example, in the chapter about donuts, Peri explains how the beignets of New Orleans resulted from African chefs, who were enslaved, adapting West African and French recipes. Peri then takes a sincere pause, placing her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and explains earnestly that “the desserts we enjoy aren’t ‘silver linings’ to the brutal horrors of slavery and colonization. Rather, to appreciate desserts in all their forms, we need to acknowledge the real history and people behind them.” In the United States, we have fumbled the teaching of American history to children. Our educators told us in school that the injustices of the past were repaired. As a nation, we hit some sour notes but resolved them to create a less dissonant, more resolved present. Now we are living in that error, and it tastes terrible. History is not cooking; it is baking. Only we will never really know how it all turns out - we are all perpetually and frustratingly in the lap of the gods. 

Yummy!: A History of Desserts has cracked the code of an essential conversation every child must have to engage with cultural narrative in a way that protects them from the inevitable dissolution of finding out that history is not made entirely of truth. In the final chapter, our sprite-friend Peri collapses with exhaustion. She is not satisfied and deeply concerned. Beads of sweat begin to form on her cheeks as she wonders if she did desserts justice. She starts running a mental inventory of the treats that she skipped or glazed over, and she raises her spectacled face to the heavens and cries, “Oh no… history is so big, and I’m so small!” She slumps into a stack of freshly baked cookies, discouraged by the realization. Her friends, Fada and Fee, hand her a chocolate chip to munch on and explain to us that what Peri really means is that it is not our job to know or understand everything but to “stay curious!”

Victoria Grace Elliott’s Yummy!: A History of Desserts is charming beyond measure, and that is what makes the message so effective. The twee illustrations, populated by their pastel food sprites, could not be any sweeter if they came straight from a piping bag. Peri promises on the second to last page that she’ll “see you someday soon!” and I will certainly be purchasing Yummy!: Volume 2 when the fates allow it, but now I want to meet any other sprites that may be flitting about Elliott’s imagination. Desserts are not every child’s passion. What about art sprites and sports sprites? I would love to read Poppy: A History of Popular Music, for instance. Now that Elliott has discovered the enticing recipe that teaches children not just history’s “facts,” but history’s function, it would be a shame not to bake it from scratch again and again. 

Graphic Novel Review - Yummy! - A History of Desserts by Victoria Grace Elliott

Yummy!: A History of Desserts
Writer/Artist: Victoria Grace Elliott
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Price: $19.99
Cake is delicious and comics are awesome: this exciting non-fiction graphic novel for kids combines both! Explore the history of desserts through a fun adventure with facts, legends, and recipes for readers to try at home.
Have you ever wondered who first thought to freeze cream? Or when people began making sweet pastry shells to encase fruity fillings? Food sprite Peri is excited to show you the delicious history of sweets while taking you around the world and back!
The team-up that made ice cream cones!
The mistake that made brownies!
Learn about and taste the true stories behind everyone’s favorite treats, paired with fun and easy recipes to try at home. After all, sweets—and their stories—are always better when they’re shared!
Publication Date: November 30th, 2021
More Information: Yummy!: A History of Desserts

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Lisa Gullickson is one half of the couple on the Comic Book Couples Counseling podcast, and, yes, the a capella version of the 90s X-men theme is all her. Her Love Language is Words of Affirmation which she accepts @sidewalksiren on twitter.