Cooking with Kids

One of the chief joys in my life is time spent with our Grandsons. They are 5 and 8 years old, a good age for doing things together and creating happy memories. I have found that they love to get involved in cooking, whether it be their own tea, or making cakes to give to someone else.

I have to acknowledge that their Mum started them off, with basic pizza toppings and cutting up things (such as mushrooms) that don’t need sharp knives. Making pizzas is something they regularly ask to do now. Stirring cake mixes and biscuit dough is well within the control of an average pre-schooler, and they have loved making sweet treats, too, since they were very small.

I have written in the past about the educational benefits of cooking together. Children get used to weighing and measuring, becoming more confident with such concepts as capacity, volume and temperature. They learn about safety and hygiene, tidiness, presentation and colour. We can encourage them to be more detailed in describing aromas and flavours, growing their vocabulary and boosting their creativity.

During recent holidays, I’ve become very aware of the power that cooking has to broaden children’s cultural horizons, too. The older boy was given a homework to find out about the ingredients that Tudors had available to them and to make some food with them. I thought this was a brilliant way to help them understand how the world changes over time; to give them a real, lived experience of how things were different 500 years ago. He was able to tell me about how expensive sugar was, how certain meats were restricted to certain classes of people, and how there were no supermarkets, so they had to grow their own food.

Armed with this knowledge, we set about cooking a peasant pottage. The seasonal larder is very sparse in January, so our soup was made from turnip and onion, boosted with barley and dried peas. We ‘foraged’ for herbs in the garden pots to make the dish more interesting and added fermented fish (Worcestershire Sauce) to make it more savoury.

By this time, his younger brother was becoming anxious to take part, so I set him to grating butter for pastry. We decided to make spiced mutton pies, something the wealthier Tudors might have enjoyed.

The boys were a little surprised at how far some of the spices came, when there were no planes to bring them. The older child is fascinated by maps, flags and countries, and we had a look at where the countries were that send us pepper, cinnamon, clove and mace. Although the boys found the pottage a bit bland, the mutton pies had more appeal. They concluded that they didn’t fancy the life of an early-modern peasant!

During school holidays, we’re always keen to have the boys for a time, both to shower them with love and to give their parents a break. With maps and countries being of such interest to them, I asked if they would like to do some Japanese cookery with me. This prompted lots of questions about what you do to rice to make it into sushi and what Japanese schoolchildren have for breakfast.

My demonstration of sushi-making proved fascinating: “Why do you do it outside, Grandad?” (So the rice cools quicker.) “What if it’s raining?” (You go inside - that’s why you’re holding a fan.) Children’s questions will always surprise you. There’s every chance one of they will ask something you have no idea about, so everyone gets to learn something.

I was pleased to see how adventurous our grandsons have become about food. They tasted and sampled their way through dashi stock, miso, beansprouts, nori seaweed, sansho pepper and yuzu juice. Some of these were not to their taste, of course, but they were keen to point out they had tried them. They both got a chance to roll sushi, had them with salmon & noodle soup for tea and had a go at eating with chopsticks. Their mum told me they were full of excitement about it when they got home, and now we’re looking forward to trying some Italian dishes (another homework) in a few weeks.

For a confident cook like me, cooking with children is a valuable exercise in patience and acceptance. It’s important to resist taking over and let them do things their way, even if you know it might not achieve perfect results. They’re not entering Masterchef or Bake-off, so it doesn’t matter if you think they’re overworking the flour or knocking air out of the mix. The results will still be good enough to thrill.

Once I’d let go of my need to be in control, I was impressed by how quickly my young apprentice got the technique of stirring rice to cool it and release starch, with just some little verbal advice and plenty encouragement. If the table finished up covered in bits, it just provided an opportunity for a joke about how cleaning up is an essential part of cooking.

It is certain that cooking with our grandsons has many benefits for both them and me. However, the principal advantage is simply that it brings us together. They know I love cooking, and I know they do, and our time together reminds us we love each other.