Cooking with the munchkins

We’ve recently had half term here and I’ve had a couple of days looking after my grandkids. We made witches’ hats, decorated pumpkins, played baby dragons, baked jam tarts, and made fat chewy pappardelle for dinner. It started me thinking, both about cooking with kids, and as a kid.

I learnt to cook in my nan’s kitchen. It was also my mother’s and my grandfather’s kitchen (we lived with my grandparents), but it was my nan who really cooked. My grandad made great porridge on cold mornings, topped with crunchy demerara sugar and the top of the milk; my mother made curries for my father on his infrequent visits, too hot for us to enjoy, and her signature dish which was tinned pilchards in tomato sauce with soy sauce and rice (don’t knock it till you try it); but my nan did all the day-to-day cooking.

The first thing I remember cooking with her was salmon fishcakes: I was probably about five. She showed me how to mix mashed potatoes with parsley and tinned salmon, then to shape the mixture into flat floured cakes for her to fry. Crucially she would get me to taste and decide if it needed more salt or pepper, even as a very small child. It gave me confidence in trusting my taste and an understanding that, as Nigel Slater has famously said, cooking is just about making something we want to eat.

She had an eclectic collection in her little handwritten recipe book. German apple cake, spaetzle, and kalter hund (hedgehog) cake jostled with rock cakes, almond slices and stuffed eggs, the hard-boiled yolks mashed up with anchovy essence and mayo, and piped back into the whites. I remember her telling me once that a famous pastry chef had told her not to rub the fat in too finely when making pastry so that it stayed a little flaky, and I never thought to question why she might have been chatting about pastry with a famous chef.

I spent a lot of time hiding in the kitchen as a child. We baked rock cakes and Victoria sandwiches and the jam to go in them (often from plums scrumped from next-door’s garden). I sliced runner beans and peeled endless spuds (roast pork for eight, every Sunday). Picked fat Bramley apples from the garden, scored their circumference and stuffed them with butter, brown sugar, raisins and spices to bake. Made jellies in moulds shaped like rabbits or castles, with fruit in the bottom. But what really opened my eyes to cooking-as-magic was baked rice pudding. We greased a dish with butter, scattered what seemed like a tiny spoonful of rice and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, then poured over a huge amount of milk. Finally my favourite thing: the whole nutmeg and tiny dolls’ house grater went into action. Then into the oven for a long time, while the house filled with the most comforting smell ever. And when it came out, that tiny spoonful of rice had turned magically into a whole dish full of delicious pudding! Absolute miracle, every time.

The first meal I cooked completely by myself was macaroni cheese when I was 10, and that became one of the regular teatime meals for myself and my siblings. By the time I was 15, I was doing a lot of the evening cooking for us after my nan returned to work. I was immensely proud of my steak pies, making rough puff pastry from a recipe in my Dairy Book of Home Cookery to top them. That had been a present from a neighbour after I baked and decorated a birthday cake for her. It was a sponge cake, iced to look like a straw hat and with a brim full of sugar paste roses – a genuine Blue Peter special, and probably the best decorated cake I ever made. (Just discovered that someone else has found and made this recipe from the seventh Blue Peter annual. Mine was better…) My decorated cakes have mostly been distinguished more by ambition than accomplishment.

I cooked with my daughters, but they had probably had enough of me telling them what to do. They both became excellent cooks when they left home and were able to work things out for themselves. My eldest was a finalist in a local cooking competition, making the most delicious potsticker dumplings under time pressure, on a stage, in front of an audience, while looking impossibly glamorous: I could never ever do any of that. I still get regular ‘Mum Helpline’ calls from both of them though. And I’ve definitely taught them to appreciate eating. They may not always thank me for that.

However my granddaughter and I have been baking together since she was old enough to stand on a chair at the kitchen table. Our two favourites when she was small were cheese scones and flapjacks. I started with all the ingredients measured out and ready to go, and she would share the mixing with me, then pat out the dough or flapjack mixture. “Pat, pat!” she would chant as she spread out the warm sticky oat mixture in the tin.

Later, I would get her to help me with the measuring and take over more of the mixing. We graduated to blueberry muffins, butterfly cakes, brownies and bread. And recently we have specialised in fork biscuits, apple cake and pasta. She winds the handle of the pasta machine and guides the sheet of pasta along the worktop, dusting it with fine cornmeal before cutting and separating the ribbons. She won’t eat them with sauce though: plain pasta (not even butter) and grated cheese is her preferred dinner, with a side of broccoli.

I have to be honest and say that cooking hasn’t extended the range of foods she will eat (school dinners have been much more successful at that), but they have shown her how easy it is to make something delicious. I hope that’s a lesson she’ll remember, like I did.