El Pan Mascota: Una Historia de Masa Madre

Also available in English; review is of the English version.

This whimsical story begins when a girl’s uncle leaves her his “Bread Pet” to watch while he goes away on a trip. “It’s sourdough,” he says, “with bacteria and fungi growing inside it.” It’s both “gross and awesome,” and helps to make bread light and fluffy, he explains. He gives her instructions on how to feed it daily—but feels like he has forgotten to tell her something.

Soon, it outgrows the biggest bowl in the house. The girl and her two moms try splitting it into other containers. They try baking some of it into loaves. It continues to expand, however, and eventually the whole family is sick of both bread and the mess. What to do? Luckily, the girl has an idea. I won’t spoil it except to say that it involves the whole community and a little help from her moms. Then her uncle shows up and tells her what he had forgotten….

DePalma’s narrative, told through the girl’s eyes, is simply delightful, with echoes of (but also some major differences with) Helen Palmer’s 1961 classic A Fish out of Water, about a goldfish that grows to enormous proportions after a boy feeds it too much. DePalma told me via online messaging that she first had the idea for the book in 2017, when a friend left her some sourdough starter. She thought that it offered a lot of lessons for children, both STEM concepts like biology and chemistry as well as social-emotional ones like perseverance and sharing. She had some inkling that sourdough bread might be an emerging trend—but no idea that it would take off as it has during the pandemic. “It’s very rare” to have that kind of timing with a book, she said, but she hopes it helps families to discover a new hobby together.

The book also gets mega-points from me for including LGBTQ characters without being “about” LGBTQ identities. The two moms aside, the uncle wears a rainbow-striped shirt that makes me wonder if he, too, is queer, or just showing allyship. It’s never explained, but it’s not critical to the story; readers can imagine him as they wish. Similarly, the girl has cochlear implants, but they are not part of the story; they’re just part of the girl’s life that we seen in the illustrations.

Verhoeff’s images don’t merely illustrate the plot, but also enhance the story. Whimsical and dynamic, they bring motion to every page as the girl, moms, and uncle pour, stir, and bake, while a bevy of pets—dog, cat, birds, and fish—mix and mingle with them. The jars of sourdough starter are drawn with faces, arms, and legs, dancing about the kitchen. There’s no magic in the book other than the “magic” of sourdough science, but this fanciful rendering helps convey the runaway nature of  the starter, to which anyone who’s made one can attest.

One mom wears a dress and has curly hair held with barrettes; the other has short, spiky hair, and wears jeans, a plaid shirt, and cowgirl boots. Bonus points to Verhoeff for giving one mom a more masculine gender expression, something we don’t often get to see in picture books (though that may be slowly changing). One mom and the uncle appear White; the other mom and the girl are darker skinned, possibly Latina. (The girl’s goldfish is named Poquito, which suggests Latine heritage in the family.)

At the end of the book are instructions for making your own Bread Pet and baking bread.

Given the recent obsession with sourdough, this book is likely to become a hit with families of all types. Even if the sourdough trend fades, however, this will remain a fun tale of a resourceful child working creatively with family and community to solve a problem. It’s a story that rises above.