My small hometown, Hawley, houses just over 300 people. Nevertheless, it has been home to luminaries in different fields. We have housed writers, theologians, and architects.
Two of Hawley’s residents stand apart from the rest. Alice Parker, a world-renowned composer, lived here until her death two years ago. And Eric Carle, the beloved children’s book author who died in 2021, had a home in Hawley for many years with his wife Bobbie.
Eric enjoyed food and cooking. He was kind enough to let me publish his bread-pudding recipe in my first book, “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook.” Although I knew Bobbie better than I knew him, I always enjoyed Eric’s whimsy and of course his colorful books.
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst is currently displaying an exhibit that is dear to my heart and will appeal to lovers of Carle and cuisine.
“Cooking with Eric Carle,” which opened last month and will run for almost a year, focuses on this author/artist’s love of food and food illustration.
Readers of his work (just about every American child and parent) will have seen his food-related work in children’s books like “Pancakes, Pancakes!” and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”
The exhibit has less familiar art from Eric Carle as well, however, including linocuts from a cookbook he illustrated in 1965 titled “Red Flannel Hash and Shoo-Fly Pie.” Linocuts are block prints made with linoleum.
There are also doodles the author drew on checks from one of his favorite restaurants, the new defunct Sienna in South Deerfield, and much more.
One of my favorite features of the Carle is its studio. I’m not particularly artistic, but the act of drawing, coloring, and pasting there gives me insight into the artistic process. It’s also just plain fun.
The cooking exhibit has its own little craft area. The museum encourages visitors to write down their favorite recipes on cards and draw pictures of the recipes.
On the exhibit’s opening night, associate curator Isabel Ruiz Cano interviewed Lisa and Sally Ekus. The pair are cookbook-and-lifestyle literary agents at the Ekus Group in Hatfield. Lisa founded the group, and her daughter Sally now manages it. The Ekus women are lively … and they know their cookbooks.
In fact, Lisa holds the Guinness World Record for the largest personal cookbook collection in the world. In 2019, when she was added to the record book, she officially housed 4,239 cookbooks in her vast, multi-story library. I’m sure she has more now.
Lisa and Sally discussed trends in cookbook illustration over the last century or so. Earlier cookbooks tended to have simple sketches or no illustrations at all. Over the years, photography was slowly introduced.
In the last 20 years or so, as color printing has become more affordable, vivid yet naturalistic photos have come to dominate the pages of cookbooks.
The two also charmingly linked cookbook illustration and picture-book illustration as they talked about teaching Sally’s young daughter to read and to cook.
Isabel told me that the Ekus appearance was the brainchild of the museum’s former director of education. “Cooking with Eric Carle” was Isabel’s own idea.
One of her first projects when she joined the staff of the Carle in 2022 was to sort and, as she put it, “rehouse” many of Eric Carle’s illustrations, including the linocuts for “Red Flannel Hash.”
“I was fascinated by all these different art works,” she said. “I kept finding food imagery.”
She relished putting together the exhibit. She found the work particularly meaningful because she had never met Eric Carle, arriving as she did after his death.
“I learned a lot about his favorite foods and favorite food preferences. He was a very simple man who loved bread and honey … and sushi,” she recalled.
She quickly added that the sushi was consumed separately from the bread and the honey. I’m sure Eric could have come up with a story in which they overlapped, however.
“I enjoyed getting to know the kind of warm person he was, especially since I came after he passed,” she said.
I asked Isabel Ruiz Cano if she had a favorite piece in the exhibit. “Everything becomes my favorite!” she laughed.
She sees the exhibit as a way “to honor who [Eric Carle] was but also present things that people didn’t know about him that will surprise them.”
Of course, I wanted to prepare a recipe to honor Eric Carle and the exhibit. I decided to make pretzels to pay tribute to the 1972 picture book “Walter the Baker,” illustrated with Eric’s trademark collages.
Here is what Eric wrote about the book on his website:
“The story is based on the tale of how the pretzel was invented, which was told to me by my Grandmother when I was a boy. But I truly had an uncle named Walter who was a baker and who baked, along with all kinds of bread, cookies, cakes and rolls; pretzels!”
In the book, a hardworking baker named Walter is stymied early one morning when his cat knocks over the pail of milk that gives his sweet rolls their signature texture.
He tries substituting water, with disastrous results. His best patron, the Duke, is affronted and threatens to exile Walter from the Duchy … unless the baker can come up with a special roll “through which the rising sun can shine three times.”
Walter tries and tries to create such a roll with no success. Frustrated, he throws his last bit of dough into the air. It lands in a pail of water, somehow twisting itself along the way. When this creation is baked and served, the Duke beams. Walter is saved, and the pretzel is born.
I’m a less talented baker than Walter so my pretzels weren’t actually pretzels, just blobs. (Knots might be a nicer-sounding descriptor.)
I think I needed to roll them into longer ropes before folding them into their final shape. You’ll note that the recipe calls for ropes of more than 2 feet; mine were about a foot and a half.
Even as blobs, my pretzels were tasty enough for my friends to eat, with a soft, chewy interior. Fortunately, unlike Walter, I didn’t need to worry about seeing the rising sun shine through them. (This was just as well since I never leave my bed to bake at sunrise.) The recipe is based on one from King Arthur Baking.
“Cooking with Eric Carle” will run through Sept. 6, 2026. Visit the museum’s events page, https://carlemuseum.org/visit/events, to see a list of upcoming activities at the Carle.
Pretzels
Ingredients:
for the dough:
1 generous teaspoon yeast (1/2 packet)
1/2 cup lukewarm water, divided
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1-1/4 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
for the water bath:
1/4 cup warm water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
for finishing:
1 1/2 tablespoons salted butter, melted
coarse, kosher, or pretzel salt as needed (I only had regular sea salt; it added lovely flavor but wasn’t visible in the final product.)
Instructions:
Make the dough. Proof the yeast for about 5 minutes in 1/4 cup of the lukewarm water along with the sugar. When the mixture bubbles, add it to the flour and the remainder of the dough water. Mix briefly; then stir in the salt.
Knead the resulting dough for about 4 minutes, until it is soft, smooth, and slack. Dust it with flour to prevent sticking and place it in a plastic zip-top bag. Close the bag, leaving room for expansion, and let the dough rest for 30 minutes
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat.
Transfer the dough to a greased work service. Divide it into 4 pieces. Let them rest, uncovered, for 5 minutes. While they rest combine the water and sugar for the bath in a bowl.
Roll each piece of dough into a long thin rope (around 28 inches long). Twist each rope into a pretzel shape (or a blob!). Dip the pieces in the water bath; then place them on the prepared baking sheet. Bake them until they turn golden brown, about 8 to 10 minutes, turning the pan halfway through.
Remove the pretzels from the oven, and brush them with the butter. Sprinkle with salt. Makes 4 pretzels. This recipe may be doubled.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning food writer and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.