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I didn’t cook much as a kid, at least not that I can remember. I know I ate a lot of toast. Between 5pm-5.30pm when Neighbours was on Channel Ten I could get through 8-10 pieces of toast: Vegemite and cheese with every alternate being honey, so that the knife held residual sweetness that would then influence the flavour of the Vegemite and cheese1. If I toasted during the ad breaks, and worked fast, I could take down enough toast to quite easily ruin my appetite for dinner.
The first thing I remember being taught to cook was a simple tomato sauce for supermarket ravioli. Garlic, onion, tomato paste, tinned tomatoes, and basil. It was simple and fresh and suddenly meant that I could not only cook something in the realm of good for myself but I could also feed my brother and sister. I might have been 10 or 11? It wasn’t until much later that I learnt to really cook. Food was a mystery to me for a very long time and while I would eat what I made, I did’t make things often.
I would never have had the guts to sell something I had made to people. Until you understand how things are working while cooking, making anything can be challenging, or even stressful, but it doesn’t have to be. In our current culture, it is not a priority to learn how to cook and it isn’t a priority to teach people how to cook. If I ever come across any young kids trying to cook or bake, I like to encourage it. To support it. To push them in the right direction, give them a bit of a leg, help them out.
Do I have children I could encourage myself? No, I don’t, so I gotta seek them out.
I was driving down the street towards my house today when I came across a 13 year old boy with a sign outside his parents house announcing that he was selling both cookies and brownies. In an effort to support his entrepreneurial endeavour I jumped out, grabbed my wallet and headed to the table. He had been baking, he informed me. $3 for a cookie and $3 for a brownie - although his sister baked the brownies so he couldn’t stand by their quality. “They are two days old,” he kindly offered, as if that were to in some way benefit the quality of the product that I had decided I was going to purchase.
I was standing in front of his table, looking down at the cookies and the brownies. Try both, I thought. Support the community, I thought. Australia has a strange relationship with entrepreneurial activity, you should champion it. Even though his offering didn’t appear to be all that good, I didn’t want to be a food snob. I wanted to show this young chap (through the power of my hard earned Australian Dollars) that if he did the work he might just get the payoff, especially (I figured) if he wasn’t paying for a rental fee for the stand, a food license fee to the council, or, I daresay, his own supplies.
In a friendly and entirely, not-at-all-condescending tone I asked him which recipe he used. He didn’t remember. I hoped for a split second that this young sprightly entrepreneurial chap was the next Christina Tosi or the next Cedric Grolet2, that he was some kind of boy genius, the next big thing, a food wonder kid beyond his years.
After all, Apple and Amazon were started in a garage and the first Dandy restaurant was a shipping container greenhouse in a driveway. Anything is possible.
I stood there, dreaming of how proud I would be to have discovered Australia’s next best baker, until I took a single bite.
The biscuit was a bitter Anzac style chocolate chip cookie. Sadly, everything was undermixed. If a kid came up to me at a party and offered me a biscuit like that I would encourage him to keep trying, maybe to look up some of Nigella’s biscuit recipes in How to be a Domestic Goddess, or if baking was really of interest to him to purchase The Pastry Chef’s Guide by Ravneet Gill or Milk by Christina Tosi.
You see these books have the secrets, all of the secrets, and should be core reading material for every child who dreams about days spent baking and cooking and eating, regardless of literacy levels. That’s before the child steps into the kitchen. And if child wants to set up a street-stall? Godamnit they’re mandatory. If you can learn to use a toilet you can learn to appreciate educational reading material on said toilet. There are no shortcuts to greatness, however, there are strategies that children can implement to get to greatness sooner.
He was old enough to know better. By the time he was seven years old he should have read, l at the very least, How To Be a Domestic Goddess, it’s pretty much a picture book.
The brownie was, sadly, not very good either. Bitter and slightly burnt, cooked too high for too long and lacking entirely in any sort of density of prominent chocolate profiling.
I promised the kid I’d offer him feedback, and I did not. I might just drop him some better recipes so he can try again. It takes guts to sit out the front and sell yourself, hell, I’ve done it.
Now, I am not attempting to be cruel and I am all for supporting young business and entrepreneurial activity but at some point there has to be some kind of negligence by the parents for suggesting that the kid’s work was good enough to be sold to the discerning sweet tooth of the New Farm dog-walkers, especially without an allergen sheet, an ABN for tax deductibility or even the consideration of a GF or dairy free option.
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Child prodigies seem to be given a whole bunch of leniency on quality when it comes to things they cook. If someone young is cooking professionally, people are awestruck, flabbergasted, and as such they celebrate it. Quality and creativity is far from the priority if there is a little munchkin at the pass.
“Let him feed us!” They shout from the rooftops, “$400 a meal?! No worries! Look at him, he’s so cute in tiny chef whites, I’d pay just to see him smile.”
This is how the public and the media treated New York Based chef Flynn McGarry. Described as the Justin Bieber of food, he was holding supper clubs and private dinners in different restaurants and venues throughout New York, LA and Chicago from the age of 11. He staged at Eleven Madison Park, Alinea, Next, Geranium, and Maeemo. His black book of hotshot chef friends runs deep.
He started cooking when he grew tired of his parents poor repertoire of home-cooked food and safe repetitive takeout. As a rebellion he cooked his way through Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook, and watched Youtube educational videos religiously, aware of all the most important food blogs and where and how to find all the secrets. In seventh grade he began to homeschool so that he could focus on cooking, and his parents installed a kitchen in his bedroom complete with a yakitori grill, induction cooktop, vac pac machine and an immersion circulator3. At 16 he started writing his autobiography, listing Thomas Keller, Grant Aschatz and Rene Redzepi as inspiration.
At 17 he was a special guest on Masterchef Australia where his pressure cook test was some weird blend of modernist and traditional cooking - a bit boring and underwhelming, even for a kid.
In 2017, at the age of 19, Flynn opened Gem in New York. People loved the restaurant owned and run by a good looking, red-headed teen. Pete Wells in his review for the New York Times described his cooking as “nuanced, his plating often lyrical, and the flavours, at least (this) spring and summer have been delicate, subtle and very fresh.”
In 2019 he came to London to cook a supper club at Carousel. The menu can be found here. It was fine. Entirely fine. Which, sadly means it was entirely underwhelming and disappointing due to the hype surrounding it. It was just like the rest of the food being made by the rest of the chefs who existed within that context in the industry, except executed with less nuance and less creativity. That’s because the kind of nuance and technical creativity that is groundbreaking and interesting and thought-provoking takes time, experience and a whole lot of eating. There is just no way Flynn has had enough time to eat and cook and drink and feed to know this. At least not yet. For a 24 year old television chef I guess it’s impressive - not quite as impressive as Harry Styles’ first solo record at age 23, but good nonetheless.
Of course, when a chid is learning to cook, criticism has no place in the kitchen. If a child is learning to cook, it has to be nurtured like any other skill. When kids learn to draw, even the formation of a shape beyond a squiggle is worthy of praise. Letters and numbers and words all require positive reinforcement. Being able to encourage them to grow and to learn and to enjoy what it is they are learning seems vital to parenting. This is equally important when they begin to learn to cook. Cooking is a skill for life, something that they will hold with them and pass onto their family when the time comes. They will use it to feed themselves and their friends over the years, to romance, to sell ideas, to show affection, to explore their own taste buds and Proustian responses.
To be able to teach a fully grown man, woman or child - think apprentice - to make something that they will hold in their head for the rest of their life is empowering to both them and to the person educating. I have experienced this. It is a beautiful thing to introduce someone to a whole new world of possibility in food, whether it be through cooking or exposure to new tastes, it is one of the very few thrills that can be sought regardless of age. We all continually chase that innocence, to experience something as if for the first time, like a green mandarin from the volcanic hills of Mount Etna, as pure a citrus experience as anyone could dream. It is the point.
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I’ve cooked with tiny people, I’ve cooked for tiny people. Both are more difficult than they should be. However, one thing is clear to me, when you cook with kids, intentionally and actively in conversation with them, they enjoy and understand the food better.
Children are smart. They get it. They don’t have great hand eye coordination but if you show them how to make a chicken broth they will understand that there is broth in chicken bones. If you show them how to make their own chocolate by melting down other chocolates and adding ingredients like sprinkles and dried apricots, they will forever understand that the chocolate they make tastes better - and subsequently you need to eat less - than if it is Cadbury. If you show them how to make pink pudding4 and they will treat it as both a jelly and a cream5. They get it. More importantly the brains they have are absorbing information so quickly and so thoroughly, they want to get it.
Teaching kids to cook here in Australia and having them be interested and invested in food from a young age, will not only help to provide them with a skill for life but also offer them an understanding of place and landscape and identity and family. Who knows, they might go on to win Kids’ Masterchef. Or they might just set up an Anzac cookie and brownie stall on the side of the road. But at the end of it all they will be able to sit around a table, eating food they have learned how to make with people they have learned how to love. And it’s pretty hard to criticise that.
A tiny bit of honey through the butter on toast with Vegemite and cheese is a game changer. Some people, who I doubted until I tried it, engage with Vegemite - or marmite - peanut butter, and cheese. It’s truly a mouthful.
If you have no idea who these people are - just… well, I mean either click the links on their names or google them. Christina Tosi redefined the accessible cookie and cake market in the US and Cedric Grolet is considered to be the best pastry chef in the world. Check instagram.
When he was in year 7 a water circulator was a big deal. Fresh off the closure of El Bulli every man and his dog was interested in Modernist cooking. Great, great, great. Sure. Sous vide machines - otherwise known as immersion water circulators) a - and Vac pac machines were terrifyingly expensive. Now, you can buy a great circulator for $100 - while it’s not the best, it is cheap - and while this one isn’t cheap, for the home it is the best.
If you haven’t had pink pudding, well you are in luck. Recipe coming next week.
I will also recommend freezing it for 3 hours before eating to make it some kind of weird marshmallow ice cream thing.
Words by Daniel Wilson
Daniel has a Masters in Food Culture from The University of Gastronomic Science in Pollenzo, Italy. He is a writer, a chef, and a recovering restaurateur.
Photo is taken from Eater here.