The New York Times called it the gold standard for children's cookbooks, and the reason is on every spread: each recipe is printed twice, once in words for the adult and once in pictures for the child who cannot read yet. The child is the head chef. The grown up is the helper.

Mollie Katzen wrote the Moosewood Cookbook. Here she and educator Ann Henderson bring real cooking down to a three year old's eye level, with vegetarian recipes tested in classrooms and kitchens until they worked with small hands. Whimsical watercolor critters walk through each step, and along the way children practice counting, reading readiness, patience and the discovery that pizza does not come from a telephone.

Ninety six pages in hardcover, a generous 8 by 10 inches so the pictures are big enough to follow. It is the cookbook parents keep and then hand down, and it makes an unusually good gift for a preschooler who has started asking to help.