By cutting and grinding the wheat for flour, Jack starts from scratch to help make his breakfast pancake.

Eric Carle lays out all the work that goes into making a pancake starting with cutting wheat in the field up through churning butter and finally ending with a big bite. (Thankfully, we don't have to stick around for Jack's visit to an outhouse a few hours later.)

It's educational and fun, with bright illustrations and some animal sounds thrown in. ( )

I've been reading Carle my whole life, but only turned this up on OpenLibrary today, and it's easily my favorite Carle work to date. All the details of how to get from growing wheat and milking a cow to eating a pancake. Excellent - and the recipe for the pancake is there too, though it's an unleavened pancake. ( )

A how-to-do-it-from-scratch book, but unlike Pelle's New Suit or Tomie de Paola's Charlie Needs A Cloak, this one stretches the bounds of credulity by forcing the poor hungry child Jack to harvest wheat, thresh wheat, visit the mill to have it ground, milk a cow, churn butter, fetch wood for fuel, and gather eggs ALL BEFORE BREAKFAST. At least he's allowed just to fetch strawberry jam from the basement instead of picking strawberries and refining sugar from beets. But rather than a realistic picture of how breakfast gets onto the table, it shows how ridiculous it would be to try to create a pancake from the rawest of raw materials every time you get hungry. The sun would be going down and Jack would have fainted from hunger long before his breakfast was done.

Our kids know about making pancakes, but they don't have to go to the henhouse before breakfast, let alone the flour mill. ( )

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