Sandhya Parappukkaran (text) and Michelle Pereira (illustrator), Stay for Dinner, Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing, May 2023, 32 pp., RRP $24.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781761211966
Stay for Dinner is a celebration of culture, community, and cuisine. Meals are a time of sharing in this beautiful book—and of family and special friendships. Traditional food is prepared and served with love and care throughout this story by families who have come from quite diverse backgrounds and nations and around the world.
Our young narrator, and her good friends Charlotte, Phoebe and Leo, live in the same neighbourhood and often eat meals at each other’s homes, especially when parents find themselves delayed by urgent matters needing attention.
Eating at Charlotte’s house presents a new experience for our protagonist whose family is from India. Charlotte’s mother lays out the dinner on serving platters in the middle of the table which they serve onto individual plates. When it is realised that the food is to be eaten with a knife and fork, Charlotte shows her friend how to use the cutlery. At home, her family eat with their fingertips. Papa says food always tastes better when we eat with our hands. The food is also quite different. The table is laden with unfamiliar meats, vegetables (including troublesome peas), baked pumpkin, and bread topped with smooth hot poured over the top. It is delicious.
After playing badminton with Phoebe, our narrator is invited to dinner with Phoebe’s family. In Phoebe’s home, chopsticks gracefully gather rice and slippery noodles as dumplings precariously balance from chopsticks to mouth. It is a bit of a juggling act and certainly an interesting way to eat rice. Eating with fingers is so much easier but the food is very tasty, and chopsticks are fun.
When finishing a game of baseball at Leo’s, his Nonna says ‘stay for dinner.’ Once again, the meal is quite different; this meal is a slurpy, slippery business. Leo demonstrates how to spin the spaghetti onto the fork and into the mouth as sauce splatters and the occasional meatball bounces out of control. Spaghetti eating is great fun especially with Nonna encouraging the children to keep filling their bowls and winding the pasta onto those forks. Yum.
Our narrator’s family is most grateful to Charlotte, Phoebe and Leo’s families for helping them out by giving their daughter dinner on the occasions that they were unavoidably detained. They decide to say thank you by inviting them to a barbecue. But will the other children laugh at the way the barbecue is served and eaten—mixed, scooped and lifted by hand into the mouth? The children join the dinner table and watch as the food is mixed, scooped and lifted into mouths with the fingers of the right hand. In no time at all, the children are loving eating Indian cuisine served on banana leaves. They particularly enjoy the custom of finishing the meal with a hearty burp as a great compliment to the cook.
Sandhya Parappukkaran has created a delightful book that embraces the joys of new culinary experiences and the importance of sharing meals with friends and family. The fun of the children, and the care of the families in the preparation and serving of food that is special to their country-of-origin, is heartwarming. The illustrations of the families, the different cuisines and various customs by Michelle Pereira are energetic and appetite inducing, to say the least, and work so well with the cleverly considered text of Sandhya Parappukkaran. The words and images combine perfectly like a feast. This is an important book about many more things than food. It highlights the importance of family, friendship, community, diversity, and acceptance—as well as delicious cuisine. Stay for Dinner is a keeper, to be read over and over again, just for the fun of it.
Reviewed by Jennifer Mors
