Life Desk :
THERE’S a photo from 1978 of my daughter Kate, taken at about six months old. She’s sitting in a highchair, waving a stalk of broccoli in the air and grinning.
I’d forgotten that shot, but looking at it recently – Kate, who has become the family historian, frequently pulls out pictures for the rest of us to enjoy – I recognise how unusual it was then and remains now: a baby eating not only normal food but a food that kids normally despise.
Though my then wife Karen Baar and I must have consciously decided to teach our daughter to eat real food, I don’t remember ever discussing it.
I moved in with Karen and her roommates in 1970, and between student strikes, demonstrations and the occasional class, we made dinner. We shopped in our Little Italy neighbourhood of Manhattan and used recipes from Craig Claiborne, The Settlement Cookbook, Julia Child and Paula Peck.
By the time Kate was born seven years later, I had become the parent doing most of the cooking, mainly because I liked it.
And when I started freelance writing, there was only one subject I was invested in enough to interest editors: cooking. This set up a productive cycle, because the more articles I wrote, the more I had to cook, and the more I had to cook, the better the articles – and the meals.
Because Karen and I were making dinner almost every night, it seemed only natural to feed Kate – and later Emma – the same things we ate. That meant meals ranging from Japanese mixed-rice dishes and salt-grilled mackerel to eggplant and tomatoes with pasta; from pork with cabbage or rosemary or potatoes to roast chicken with vegetables. I spent long stretches focusing on cookbook authors including Marcella Hazan, Julie Sahni, Shizuo Tsuji, James Beard, Pierre Franey and scores of others.
Even given my limited skills, the results were not only somewhat exotic, especially by the standards of the day, but unusually varied, even by today’s. When I recently asked my daughters what they liked to eat as kids, some of it was surprising: Kate said, “Risotto with parmesan rind”; Emma, “Roast cod on potatoes” (which I named “Emma’s Cod” in cookbooks). But much of it was mundane, like “steak with ketchup” or “baked mac and cheese” – though Kate said pointedly, “You hardly ever made that.”
Today my daughters – 36 and 29 – are healthy women who, as far as I can tell, have healthy relationships with food. They both eat at home more often than not, they both shop for real food and they both cook. (My daughters cook in quite different styles, which – perhaps not surprisingly – mimic my own style when each was young; that is, Kate follows recipes while Emma improvises.) They have even gotten their partners into cooking. Each will eat almost everything, including the occasional bacon cheeseburger, though Emma refuses to acknowledge that she likes chocolate; I’m working on that.
The way I cooked for my daughters was a reaction, at least in part, to how my mother cooked for me. Like the mothers of my friends, mine made dinner almost every night, a predictable rotation of lamb chops, steak, hamburgers, beef stew, meat loaf (with an impossibly dry hard-boiled egg in the middle) and overcooked chicken, all served with potatoes, usually mashed; canned vegetables; an iceberg lettuce salad; and fruit, sometimes fresh but more often canned. (I will also add that my mother made some of the best french fries imaginable.) I used to make fun of her food, but with cooking, showing up is half the battle, and she always showed up.
The other meals of the day were the real problem. Breakfast was an “at least eat something” situation, so when I took up a daily regimen of a glass of milk and a handful of cookies my mother was grateful that I wasn’t leaving the house with an empty stomach. (The most recent research suggests that skipping breakfast does not quite guarantee you’ll be a failure in life. Regardless, it’s safe to say that if you’re going to feed your kids breakfast, you should steer clear of pure sugar, which means much of what’s sold in the cereal aisle.)
Tasty truss tomatoes are picked on the vine, which means the nutrients are still received after picking.
Between breakfast and dinner, my own tastebuds ruled. Candy cost either a penny or a nickel, and pennies and nickels were plentiful, so I could easily get my fill of treats, not to mention Manhattan street food. There were hot dogs (kosher, of course), griddled and served on toasted buns; pizza with a crisp crust; fatty corned beef on rye bread with spicy mustard; and burgers cooked rare and served with fries. Then, if I was home after school, I pretended to do homework while “snacking” – a roll of Ritz crackers, a bag of chips or pretzels, some more cookies or whatever junk food I had persuaded my mother to buy for us.
Current research shows snacking and grazing are perfectly acceptable styles of eating, but much of the “snack food” I consumed was hyperprocessed junk. And my binges inevitably spoiled my appetite for my mother’s relatively healthful if uninspired dinner, ultimately damaging my relationship with both my parents, who were incredulous that I could leave so much food on my plate – food I would have eaten if only I had not gorged on junk food all day.
I’ve had struggles with diet and health, about which I’ve written plenty, and I’m sure they stem – as they do for many people – from my undisciplined, eat-everything childhood. Given the problems I had, I think it was easy for Karen and me to see that the key to getting our daughters to eat well was to offer a broad variety of foods, let them discover what they liked, put few restrictions on when and where they ate (though there was no eating while watching TV) and keep junk food out of the house. We didn’t base these rules on any science or research, but everything I’ve read since then on the subject makes me think they’re still worth following.
The first thing to note about this “system” was that even though it was accepted, it wasn’t entirely popular. Kate and Emma like to claim that when they were around 13 and six and I was working on my first cookbook, Fish, I fed them squid every night for two weeks. (This is ridiculous; it couldn’t have been more than three or four times a week.) But they eventually became squid connoisseurs, and looking back, I find it remarkable how few foods they resisted. I recently brought up this Fish period with Kate, and she said, “I do remember you coming home with octopus and putting it in the sink for dinner and me being like, ‘Oh, hell no!’ I ate hot dogs that night.” Emma also refused to eat octopus until she became an adult. But other than that, I can’t think of a single ingredient the kids really detested for long, and neither can they. On the occasions when they refused to eat what we prepared, we simply told them to make something for themselves. They had to choose from options you might call “healthful” – a sandwich, a yoghurt (maybe with honey) or some cheese and crackers. They were not free to ask for special treatment or substitute junk food for the real food I had cooked. (Their friends got special treatment, though; for a time Kate’s friend Alex ate only cereal and milk, and Emma’s pal Abbie could demand white rice. I wasn’t going to deal with tantrumming children who weren’t mine.)
But there was essentially no junk food in the house. We did not even buy sweetened breakfast cereals. More often than not, I made our granola or bought some lightly sweetened stuff at the health-food store, which Kate and Emma didn’t like all that much. (Often their first request when we went on vacation was whether we could buy “vacation cereal”, which meant something like Froot Loops.) We didn’t fill our freezer with pre-made dinners, though we did have hot dogs, which remain a personal weakness. We always had bread and peanut butter and cheese, so no one starved, and by a very young age, they had each learned to prepare simple pasta and bean dishes. (Emma still makes for herself what I call Tuscan-style beans, white beans with loads of olive oil, a little garlic, salt and sage.)
Though there was a brief period during which Emma ran a “Tuesday Night Cafe”, putting together a short menu in the morning and coming home in the afternoon to prepare dinner with me, there were no formal cooking lessons. It was simply a house where cooking was the norm. The girls were expected to help clean up, and sometimes we asked them to do something while we were getting things ready. Really, though, we just fed them. At least occasionally, they’d come home from school complaining about lunch. “I actually remember being embarrassed by my school lunches,” Kate told me. “It would be serious wheat bread – like hard – with all-natural PB&J. Totally dry and not at all gushy like everyone else’s.
THERE’S a photo from 1978 of my daughter Kate, taken at about six months old. She’s sitting in a highchair, waving a stalk of broccoli in the air and grinning.
I’d forgotten that shot, but looking at it recently – Kate, who has become the family historian, frequently pulls out pictures for the rest of us to enjoy – I recognise how unusual it was then and remains now: a baby eating not only normal food but a food that kids normally despise.
Though my then wife Karen Baar and I must have consciously decided to teach our daughter to eat real food, I don’t remember ever discussing it.
I moved in with Karen and her roommates in 1970, and between student strikes, demonstrations and the occasional class, we made dinner. We shopped in our Little Italy neighbourhood of Manhattan and used recipes from Craig Claiborne, The Settlement Cookbook, Julia Child and Paula Peck.
By the time Kate was born seven years later, I had become the parent doing most of the cooking, mainly because I liked it.
And when I started freelance writing, there was only one subject I was invested in enough to interest editors: cooking. This set up a productive cycle, because the more articles I wrote, the more I had to cook, and the more I had to cook, the better the articles – and the meals.
Because Karen and I were making dinner almost every night, it seemed only natural to feed Kate – and later Emma – the same things we ate. That meant meals ranging from Japanese mixed-rice dishes and salt-grilled mackerel to eggplant and tomatoes with pasta; from pork with cabbage or rosemary or potatoes to roast chicken with vegetables. I spent long stretches focusing on cookbook authors including Marcella Hazan, Julie Sahni, Shizuo Tsuji, James Beard, Pierre Franey and scores of others.
Even given my limited skills, the results were not only somewhat exotic, especially by the standards of the day, but unusually varied, even by today’s. When I recently asked my daughters what they liked to eat as kids, some of it was surprising: Kate said, “Risotto with parmesan rind”; Emma, “Roast cod on potatoes” (which I named “Emma’s Cod” in cookbooks). But much of it was mundane, like “steak with ketchup” or “baked mac and cheese” – though Kate said pointedly, “You hardly ever made that.”
Today my daughters – 36 and 29 – are healthy women who, as far as I can tell, have healthy relationships with food. They both eat at home more often than not, they both shop for real food and they both cook. (My daughters cook in quite different styles, which – perhaps not surprisingly – mimic my own style when each was young; that is, Kate follows recipes while Emma improvises.) They have even gotten their partners into cooking. Each will eat almost everything, including the occasional bacon cheeseburger, though Emma refuses to acknowledge that she likes chocolate; I’m working on that.
The way I cooked for my daughters was a reaction, at least in part, to how my mother cooked for me. Like the mothers of my friends, mine made dinner almost every night, a predictable rotation of lamb chops, steak, hamburgers, beef stew, meat loaf (with an impossibly dry hard-boiled egg in the middle) and overcooked chicken, all served with potatoes, usually mashed; canned vegetables; an iceberg lettuce salad; and fruit, sometimes fresh but more often canned. (I will also add that my mother made some of the best french fries imaginable.) I used to make fun of her food, but with cooking, showing up is half the battle, and she always showed up.
The other meals of the day were the real problem. Breakfast was an “at least eat something” situation, so when I took up a daily regimen of a glass of milk and a handful of cookies my mother was grateful that I wasn’t leaving the house with an empty stomach. (The most recent research suggests that skipping breakfast does not quite guarantee you’ll be a failure in life. Regardless, it’s safe to say that if you’re going to feed your kids breakfast, you should steer clear of pure sugar, which means much of what’s sold in the cereal aisle.)
Tasty truss tomatoes are picked on the vine, which means the nutrients are still received after picking.
Between breakfast and dinner, my own tastebuds ruled. Candy cost either a penny or a nickel, and pennies and nickels were plentiful, so I could easily get my fill of treats, not to mention Manhattan street food. There were hot dogs (kosher, of course), griddled and served on toasted buns; pizza with a crisp crust; fatty corned beef on rye bread with spicy mustard; and burgers cooked rare and served with fries. Then, if I was home after school, I pretended to do homework while “snacking” – a roll of Ritz crackers, a bag of chips or pretzels, some more cookies or whatever junk food I had persuaded my mother to buy for us.
Current research shows snacking and grazing are perfectly acceptable styles of eating, but much of the “snack food” I consumed was hyperprocessed junk. And my binges inevitably spoiled my appetite for my mother’s relatively healthful if uninspired dinner, ultimately damaging my relationship with both my parents, who were incredulous that I could leave so much food on my plate – food I would have eaten if only I had not gorged on junk food all day.
I’ve had struggles with diet and health, about which I’ve written plenty, and I’m sure they stem – as they do for many people – from my undisciplined, eat-everything childhood. Given the problems I had, I think it was easy for Karen and me to see that the key to getting our daughters to eat well was to offer a broad variety of foods, let them discover what they liked, put few restrictions on when and where they ate (though there was no eating while watching TV) and keep junk food out of the house. We didn’t base these rules on any science or research, but everything I’ve read since then on the subject makes me think they’re still worth following.
The first thing to note about this “system” was that even though it was accepted, it wasn’t entirely popular. Kate and Emma like to claim that when they were around 13 and six and I was working on my first cookbook, Fish, I fed them squid every night for two weeks. (This is ridiculous; it couldn’t have been more than three or four times a week.) But they eventually became squid connoisseurs, and looking back, I find it remarkable how few foods they resisted. I recently brought up this Fish period with Kate, and she said, “I do remember you coming home with octopus and putting it in the sink for dinner and me being like, ‘Oh, hell no!’ I ate hot dogs that night.” Emma also refused to eat octopus until she became an adult. But other than that, I can’t think of a single ingredient the kids really detested for long, and neither can they. On the occasions when they refused to eat what we prepared, we simply told them to make something for themselves. They had to choose from options you might call “healthful” – a sandwich, a yoghurt (maybe with honey) or some cheese and crackers. They were not free to ask for special treatment or substitute junk food for the real food I had cooked. (Their friends got special treatment, though; for a time Kate’s friend Alex ate only cereal and milk, and Emma’s pal Abbie could demand white rice. I wasn’t going to deal with tantrumming children who weren’t mine.)
But there was essentially no junk food in the house. We did not even buy sweetened breakfast cereals. More often than not, I made our granola or bought some lightly sweetened stuff at the health-food store, which Kate and Emma didn’t like all that much. (Often their first request when we went on vacation was whether we could buy “vacation cereal”, which meant something like Froot Loops.) We didn’t fill our freezer with pre-made dinners, though we did have hot dogs, which remain a personal weakness. We always had bread and peanut butter and cheese, so no one starved, and by a very young age, they had each learned to prepare simple pasta and bean dishes. (Emma still makes for herself what I call Tuscan-style beans, white beans with loads of olive oil, a little garlic, salt and sage.)
Though there was a brief period during which Emma ran a “Tuesday Night Cafe”, putting together a short menu in the morning and coming home in the afternoon to prepare dinner with me, there were no formal cooking lessons. It was simply a house where cooking was the norm. The girls were expected to help clean up, and sometimes we asked them to do something while we were getting things ready. Really, though, we just fed them. At least occasionally, they’d come home from school complaining about lunch. “I actually remember being embarrassed by my school lunches,” Kate told me. “It would be serious wheat bread – like hard – with all-natural PB&J. Totally dry and not at all gushy like everyone else’s.
