Children's books about soup 🥣

January 9, 2025

I originally published this post on October 12, 2021. I’ve edited it and updated it here.

---

Mini issue: Soup!

This mini issue is dedicated to the Culver’s digital sign that reliably displays, every single year from September to at least March, the words “HOT SOUPS.” Every time we drive by it, I make my husband laugh by shouting, in an extra Wisconsin-y Wisconsin accent, HOT! SOUPS!

As always, this is not an exhaustive list of books about soup. If you have any to recommend, please leave a comment. (If I’ve ever reviewed any of the titles below, I’ve linked to them here.)

And if soup is not your thing you can still enjoy all these great titles — they are, at the very least, warming to the soul.

• Freedom Soup by Tami Charles

• Bravery Soup by Maryann Cocca-Leffler

• Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper (shoutout to my cousin Mandy, who knows 😉)

• Quill Soup: A Stone Soup Story by Alan Durant

• Rainbow Stew by Cathryn Falwell

• Gator Gumbo by Candance Fleming

• Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook by Gary Goss 👇

This is actually a pretty good cookbook in and of itself as well as an easy one to use with kids

• Chicken Soup by Heart by Esther Hershenhorn

• Soup Day by Melissa Iwai

• Dumpling Soup by Jama Kim Rattigan

• Gazpacho for Nacho by Tracey C. Kyle

• Boy Soup by Loris Lesynski

• The Whole World Inside Nan’s Soup by Hunter Liguore

• Mouse Soup by Arnold Lobel

• Stone Soup by Ann McGovern (this is my favorite version, as it’s the one I had as a child, but versions by Marcia Brown, Heather Forest and Jon J Muth are all excellent as well)

• Thank You, Omu! by Oge Mora

• Soup for Supper by Phyllis Root

• Hammer Soup by Ingrid Schubert

• Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months by Maurice Sendak

• Octopus Stew by Eric Velasquez

---

Bears Make Rock Soup and Other Stories by Lise Erdrich, illustrated by Lisa Fifield (2002)

This review was first published in issue No. 24 — I’ve edited and updated it here

How does one read a story collection to the littlest of folks — the ones who can’t sit through any pages without images, the ones who can barely make it through a couple paragraphs?

You start small, and this unique and captivating title is the perfect answer to that dilemma. Erdrich (daughter of Louise, and member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Plains Ojibway) and Fifield (member of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin) have come together here to create a collection of short — very short, 3-5 paragraphs long short — stories about the relationships between people and animals.

Sometimes they are pourquoi tales (narratives that explain why something is the way it is, or how things came to be), sometimes they are not, but they are all simple and deeply evocative — conjuring very clear internal images alongside Fifield’s dreamy paintings. I haven’t found many excellent collections with stories of such brevity, stories that even toddlers can sit through — so this is a rare title, and a good one at that.

*Note: sometimes Erdrich’s name is spelled “Lisolette” (this is what comes up if you Google this book, for instance) so if you can’t find this title in your library system or bookstore of choice, search using both names.

---

Mean Soup by Betsy Everitt (1992)

This review was also first published in issue No. 24 — I’ve also edited and updated it here

Mean Soup is a gift that allows each of us, adults included (ahem), not only to have a bad day but to make something good out of it. Here preschool- and early-elementary-aged kiddos can learn this by watching Horace, a little boy who starts off from the very first line having a rough go of it, proceeds to have a very bad day, and walks in the door at the end of it — there is no other word for it — PISSED.

“Let’s make soup!” his mother suggests, and by “soup” she means filling a pot with water and salt, and screaming into it. (I could not love this more.)

Everitt has written a subtle and masterful book full of reality, honesty, empathy, love — even a real, concrete solution to something that can feel, often feels, unmanageable. Anytime we help our kids better understand their emotions and allow those feelings to exist without trying to fix them or change them in any way, we’re teaching them important life skills, holding space for real and valid parts of them, and loving them exactly the way they are. And if we learn to make mean soup, in the form offered here or any variations thereof, we learn to nourish our kids, and just maybe — cough — ourselves.

---

May whatever you eat — and whatever you read — comfort and nourish you, now and throughout the rest of the season.

Read good books and take good care 😘
Sarah