Guest post: The Joy of Cooking … With Children
Essayist Kate Lewis on learning and teaching in the kitchen
We were barely two weeks into our back-to-school routine, still adjusting to the post-pandemic world of going outside, wearing hard pants, and being held to the construct we call time, when my children asked me to bring back our infamous cooking nights, where I instruct them in the culinary arts and together we prepare a meal.
I looked at them in disbelief.
We were eating their favorite dinner from my extensive repertoire: quesadillas. There is nothing authentic or skilled or possibly even edible about my signature quesadillas. They are whipped up by taking overflowing handfuls of generic shredded cheese, dumping it into tortillas and microwaving them for one minute. The artistic presentation consists of slicing the microwaved masterpiece into triangles with a pizza cutter and calling it a day.
It’s the meal I make them when I am tired and over even the pretense of parenting, and so we have it often.
I looked at their faces, pure in their total sincerity, like the time I once sliced up microwavable hamburger patties and put them in the only bread we had: hot dog buns.
“You should put this in a cookbook,” my son said around a stuffed mouthful, and he nodded with the sage wisdom only four-year-olds can muster. “This is genius.”
High on confidence and nostalgia and the vague patriarchal sense that cooking with my children is something I am meant to do, I agree. Just like that, our cooking nights are back.
In college and for the first few years after graduating and living on my own, I wore my lack of culinary skills like a badge of honor. I could not competently cook or clean or launder or manage any of the details that kept a home running effectively. It felt like a marker of feminist progress, these lacks. My husband would have to be cooking for me.
It is ridiculous, in retrospect, the pride I took in this inability to care for myself or for anyone else. No one could tell me to make coffee for office-job meetings! I would get a pass because I simply did not know how. The list of things I didn’t know how to do kept me buoyantly happy in my incompetence, certain someone else would always be around to tend to them for me: Change a tire. Mow a lawn. Understand that soup could be conjured up in kitchens instead of factory-made in tin cans.
When I marry, I am lucky. He comes from a town where the running joke is, “What does a Santa Barbara spouse make for dinner?” Reservations. It’s love at first sight.
I wore my lack of culinary skills like a badge of honor. I could not competently cook or clean or launder or manage any of the details that kept a home running effectively. It felt like a marker of feminist progress, these lacks. My husband would have to be cooking for me.
My husband is a talented chef, combining ingredients more on instinct than by recipe design, and an equally talented homemaker. He prefers things so neat and orderly we portmanteau his name into a routine. We don’t clean, we prepare things for ‘Chrispection.’ Unfortunately for the both of us, he is also the more talented breadwinner, and so after the first and second Navy tours of fifteen- and sixteen-hour jobs and scattershot deployments, the cooking in our household falls mainly to me.
It begins as a disaster. Even foolproof slice-and-bake cookies are beyond my capabilities, as I mis-set the oven timer for five hours instead of five minutes then settle in with a glass of wine in the other room to wait. When smoke curls toward the alarm on our kitchen ceiling and I reach into the inferno of our oven to pull them out, I accidentally touch its coils and set my oven mitts aflame.
It is still a moment of celebration. I made something!
I am certain I had someone take a picture to document the occasion, charred mitts and all.
When we first had our children, like many other new mothers, I was struck by the awe-inducing responsibility of raising people from scratch. I had to teach them everything about the world. Names of animals and plants. How to brush teeth. How to floss teeth. How to handle teeth straight up falling out of your head.
How to care for themselves and the world they would someday step into, hopefully as fully capable adults that understood first that it was possible to create a soup from carrots and chicken and water and second, how to do it themselves.
Everything they knew came from me, and I felt unprepared. What did I know about raising people?
The cooking nights began as soon as they could safely stand on stools, tiny hands reaching across countertops for fruits and vegetables and wooden spoons. I could do this, I thought. I could raise them with knowledge it had taken me decades to only indifferently acquire.
I am their Ratatouille of a sous chef at first, re-chopping their jagged chunks of food into something resembling edible morsels.
If I began teaching them now, my thought process continued, by the time they were old enough to realize I had no idea what I was doing, I would have already become a master chef.
“You are going to learn to cook!” I tell them, with an authority I have not earned and do not have. I am cheerful about it, certain they will follow my lead, and they do, although at first it’s begrudgingly.
Then they learn we can make cookies. And banana bread. And pizza. Their enthusiasm soon turns to shouted disagreements with hands thrown over who will get a turn to chop and who will get to peel and before I know it I have organized separate cooking nights for each of them, where they choose the dinner recipe and they run the kitchen, so the weekly lessons don’t become a knife-wielding fight club instead.
I am their Ratatouille of a sous chef at first, re-chopping their jagged chunks of food into something resembling edible morsels. I sign up for every culinary e-newsletter with the word “basic” in its title. “Beginner.” “Learn.” I set limits. I choose the cookbooks from our well-stocked local library, they choose their night’s recipe and allocate the tasks. When we first implement the evenings, the other child must be out of the room entirely.
I learn that slices should be re-chopped to uniform size — it ensures they will cook evenly at the bottom of a pan. I learn and attempt to teach a knife skill called “The Bear Claw,” and I buy a children’s culinary hand guard when no one else bothers to learn, but everyone is an enthusiastic chopper.
We work our way through one children’s cookbook, then another, then another. My son invites our neighbors over for a dinner planned straight from The Ultimate Disney Party Book and they feign enough interest in our sourdough checkerboard mini ham sandwiches, meant to accompany a viewing of the movie Cars, that the kids get hooked on cooking.
Each meal becomes their moment in the sun, accepting praise and gratitude and an imagined laurel crown of prestige.
These chaotic overtures toward feeding my family and teaching my children to feed themselves are an attempt to teach myself the practical skills of caring for a life, of course. I launched into the world with fanfare and absolutely no practical skills, and rectifying that has now become a decades-in-the-making project of growing up.
I want my children to be able to rely on themselves, to know that wherever in the world they go, they can care for themselves with the long-standing ease of habit and routine. It’s a freedom, knowing how to cook and bake from scratch, to master that mysterious alchemy that turns powder and water into pandemic bread or family pancakes or pizza dough. It’s a freedom I still don’t have, this knowing. You can care for yourself. You can care for others. You can care.
The cooking nights are also part of a sinister plot, a not-so-secret master plan my children may consider a flaw of their own childhoods someday.
It’s a freedom I still don’t have, this knowing. You can care for yourself. You can care for others. You can care.
There are four people in our household, you see, and only seven days in the week. If I can get them cooking on their own by middle school, and each of my children and my husband handle two evenings worth of meals, I can be the hero with Friday night takeout and they will be none the wiser that at long last, I’ve managed to fully sidle out of all household responsibilities.
We’re well on our way.
I document my first-ever Thanksgiving turkey on my Instagram stories at 38 years old. “This! Is! Happening!” I say of the attempt, and just like that, far-flung friends and family take frequent pauses from their own isolated Covid holidays to tune in throughout the day to the almost certain epic tragedy mine will become. I set the children to de-gizzarding the bird, to glopping on the butter and herbs our recipe assures me will lock in its flavor. My husband lifts the pan and inserts the whole thing into the oven to roast.
I am on my first glass of wine when it occurs to me that I have outsourced the entirety of the bird’s preparation, and this possibly means I cannot take rightful credit for its deliciousness later. I add a poll to my Thanksgiving Stories, and friends who have lived through many of my trial and error culinary attempts assure me that the eventual glory will ultimately still belong to me. My second glass of wine convinces me they are correct, just as my non-online husband starts receiving texts requesting Turkey Updates and wonders what is going on. Our dinner has become a crowdsourced event.
It comes out perfectly. I look at the turkey, this beautiful bird that I had no actual part in preparing, settled on the table amidst our best-occasion dinnerware, surrounded by the beloved people I call my family — who did all the actual work.
I did it, I think.
I made this.
Kate Lewis is an essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Romper, Good Housekeeping, and more. She lives in Coastal Virginia with her husband, two elementary aged children, and a borrowed dog. Find her online @katehasthoughts, and join her Substack community at The Village.