What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [62]
“The Boy Scouts,” one young man points out, “do have a merit badge in cooking.” But parents shouldn’t depend on the Boy Scouts to teach their sons how to cook. Yes, they have the merit badge, but among its lengthy requirements is not one word about goodness, pleasure, or food being something to enjoy, whether eaten alone or with others. Boy Scout cooking is a sad, dreary document concerned mostly with dietary requirements and hygiene. And besides, why wait until boys are of Scout age for them to start cooking?
To ward off the inevitable questions one can’t answer while your teeth are being cleaned, I asked my hygienist to tell me how her eight year old was doing.
“He is so excited about cooking!” she answered. “We have this wonderful program in school called Cooking with Kids, which he loves. I’ve copied all the recipes from their classes and made a little book for Jared. He cooks eggs and oatmeal for breakfast for himself and his sister, and he helps me at night cutting up vegetables. He’s so proud of what he can do. We all love this program.”
But there are other aspects to Jared’s cooking adventures that don’t have to do with actual cooking. “It seems to have given him so much confidence,” his mother explains. “When he’s cutting up broccoli with a knife he feels in charge, and he feels creative as he tries cutting it one way and then another. Being in the kitchen has given him his own area of expertise that he’s very happy to have.”
Fran, whose children are long grown, writes that when her kids were ten and twelve, she had them make dinner one night a week. “They had to plan it, buy it, cook, serve, and clean up, but just for one night. On Ben’s first night he made French fries out of the Joy of Cooking—perfectly,” she recalls.
“I just did what it said,” Ben explained to his mom, then foraged onward, eventually making crêpes his specialty.
“This lasted only about a year, until the kids were too overbooked,” she recalls, “but it made a lasting impression. They’re not scared of the kitchen, and they had already learned the hard way that you can’t start cooking brown rice fifteen minutes before you want to serve it.”
There were some advantages for Fran, too. “I was going crazy every night, coming home late from work and then having to plunge into the big meal, which I usually hadn’t even thought about, much less acquired. It took away that stress and I had the delicious feeling of walking into my own kitchen and saying, ‘What’s for dinner?’ But it turned out that the lasting benefit was involving the kids in the real life process of feeding people—it was just invaluable.”
Brooke Willeford, a young man who writes dialogue for computer games in Seattle, told me that he started cooking “partially because my parents thought it would be good for me and partially because they told me I could cook whatever I wanted to eat.” That can be pretty exciting for a teenager. “There were a few meals of theirs that I didn’t much like, but with a few tweaks I could get something I found very tasty. So my cooking started with pulling stir-fried beef out of the wok before the sauce was added or shifting some other portion of dinner into its own pot so that I could avoid some part of the meal that I didn’t like.”
Today, as the cook in his household of two, Brooke admits that their menus aren’t always ideal. With his wife working on her Ph.D. and Brooke working fifty-hour weeks, there’s the occasional frozen lasagna or the tendency to skimp on vegetables. “Still,” he says, “we do a whole lot better than many of our friends, especially our bachelor friends, who tend toward takeout.”
When Brooke finds himself cooking alone, he turns to foods that are as simple as possible—black beans, burritos, and quesadillas being favorites, along with his signature dish: chicken fajitas cooked on