Teaching Your Children To Cook

My mum can cook. She can cook and bake the most amazing food. And she never kept her four children out of the kitchen: we were brought up in the kitchen, cleaning the pots, cut the vegetables and learning how to feed ourselves.

I am now a grown man, with a wife and son of my own. I prepare nearly all the food in our house. My mother-in-law kept my wife out of the kitchen when she was growing up. Consequently, though she can cook, she doesn’t enjoy cooking and rarely goes in the kitchen. I try to encourage my son to cook but he doesn’t enjoy learning from me. He will, however, bake with his grandma. I don’t blame him: she is a far better cook and a significantly calmer teacher in the dark arts of making food taste delicious.

A bit of background: my parents have quite a sizable garden. The front of the garden is given over to lawns, pretty flowers and bushes, but the far end of the garden was set aside for the business of producing food. As a child, if we needed potatoes for tea, one of the children would be presented with a colander and told, “Go and dig out enough potatoes for tea”. In May and early June, the strawberries would come into fruit: it would be strawberries for dessert almost every night for a month. The excess fruit would be made into strawberry sauce and jam. Shop-bought jam, when I was growing up, was both a luxury and an inferior product. At the bottom of the garden, we also had a shed full of chickens. The eggs that we ate were so fresh, they still retained the warmth of the mother hen. I grew up expecting the yoke of an egg to be an explosion of colour: shop bought eggs have been, ever since, a disappointment.

It was in this environment that I grew. As soon as I was big enough to stand on a step to reach the sink, I was set to washing the pots. And they had to be clean: if they weren’t, my elder brothers would reject my efforts and put the plates back in the sink for me to wash again. I watched my brothers making French toast, which they, in turn, had leant watching mum. The step would be moved from the sink to the cooker and, as soon as I was able, I was cooking my own food. This lead on to more complex tasks: rolling out biscuits, peeling vegetables and assisting with jam making. By the time I was leaving for university, I was experimenting with souffles. All under the watchful gaze of my mother.

As the years progressed, the chickens died off and their home was taken down. In its place was planted an orchard of apple trees, pear and plum. Bushes of blueberries were added to the black and red currents: as they aged, the gooseberry bushes receded into the hedgerow. I recall childhood walks to collect blackberries, to make into jam and bake into pies. While we were there, we would also gather sloes, to distil into sloe gin, which would warm your toes in the cold winter months. Today, there are two rows of cultivated blackberries in the garden: my parents’ days of walking through the local fields, collecting the wild bramble fruit are drawing to a close.

These days, the majority of the heavy lifting in the garden is taken up by me and a couple of gardeners. An hour or two mowing is enough to knock my dad out for two days and provide extra work for my mother’s physiotherapist. But she still tends to the garden, planting the flowers she has bought or been given, weeding the parts she can reach and watering the fruit plants that still remain in the garden. She still creates more homemade jam than two pensioners could ever possibly eat, so I regularly take my parents’ homemade jam back to my own home. I also take home mum’s amazing preserves and her wonderful chutneys. In the autumn, I collect wheelbarrows full of apples, which a friend converts into a delicious cider. Damsons from trees in the garden now replace the sloes as the fruit of choice in flavoured gin.

But all the while, as I am tending to the garden, my son will be baking with his grandma. He too will lean the wonderful gift which she has given to me.