Kids have been playing at cooking for millennia. Kids in ancient Greece, medieval Europe, and colonial America all made mud pies and baked them in the sun—a messy but satisfying practice that may be pretty much defunct now in the computer-game-and-cellphone age.

It’s not quite a lost art: See Marjorie Winslow’s Mud Pies and Other Recipes or Jason Sperling’s Mud Kitchen. But there’s no denying that mud pies just aren’t what they used to be.

Still, kids love role play and role play often means cooking. A good deal of that over the past fifty years has taken place in the Easy-Bake Oven, a toy so popular that in 2006 it was inducted into the National Toy Hall of