Recipe For Young Chefs

By Coeli Carr

In just a couple of weeks in kitchens across America, kids will make their annual cameo appearance beside the Mixmaster, the flour sifter and the (Careful! Don't burn yourself!) oven. They will savor batter, stamp out cookies, sprinkle colored sugar and manage to grease and flour just about every square inch of the kitchen. Parents' nerves will be baked to a crisp.

But in other homes, the scene will be a little different. In El Paso, Texas, Bridget Martinez, 15, will be expertly filling tamales and frying up bunuelos--crisp, sweet fritters. Bridget adores holiday time, but she cooks all year long. "On the weekends, I experiment with desserts," she says. "It's like a hobby for me."

Meanwhile, in Los Alamos, Calif., Sunita Williams, 8, and her sister Anita, 7, will be kneading the dough for vasilopita, a sweet yeast bread that belongs to their mom's Greek holiday tradition. Cooking and baking with their parents are part of the sisters' daily routine. "We chop up dates and strawberries and fruits from the garden," explains their mother Theo. "It's like they're the artists. We make a game of it."

That, in a nutshell, seems to be the key to guiding kids into an ongoing and lusty love for cooking that lasts well beyond the holidays. The parents who succeed at this are the ones who make both the kitchen and the pleasures of food focal points of family life all year round. The benefits are huge: there's more help in the kitchen and quality time together, kids acquire a skill with long-term payoffs, plus there's good food for all.

How do these parents do it? Generally, they start early, and "we make it fun," says Bridget's mother Gina Martinez. A supervisor at Sam's Club, she started letting Bridget and her sister Brittany, 16, roll dough and press cookies onto cookie sheets when they were 4 and 5. Because she believes that kids too often see cooking as a punishment, she keeps the mood light and inviting: "I have a lot of recipe books, and I'll say, 'Let's try this one.'" She also looks for ways to make her kitchen teen-friendly. Both girls love listening to music while they cook. Their mom lets them pick the tunes, "so they won't feel it's like a job."

The girls' father, computer consultant Charles Martinez, is equally encouraging. He began cooking with his parents at age 7 and learned to accentuate the positive. "Smell it, taste it, move the dough around--if it tastes good to you, it'll taste good to everyone," he says. But equally important is to eliminate the negative. If a child makes a mistake, he follows his mother's example. "She's not the type of person who says, 'Oh, no, you messed up,'" he explains. "It's more of a 'Don't worry about it, we'll just throw that batch away, but now you know what to do.'"

A relaxed attitude and eagerness to experiment are key ingredients in the Williams' kitchen as well. After adopting the girls in Nepal, Theo and Joel Williams began using Asian spices and encouraged their daughters to dabble. "If we put curry on just about anything, they would eat it. That's how we all got to try a lot of new flavors," says Theo, who with her husband owns Global Gardens, an olive-oil and specialty-food-products company. She likes to leave an array of condiments, sauces and herbs on the counter to encourage creativity. She got the idea from watching Sunita experiment during a dinner party: "She put some garlic spread on a cracker and then a tortilla, and then added a piece of sausage to the tortilla. This was her little concoction."

Parents of some budding chefs begin to involve them almost as soon as they are old enough to sit up and hold a spoon. Christine D'Amico, a personal life-transitions coach in San Diego, got her sons started in the kitchen when they were just 18 months old. "They'd scoop something, and I'd help them pour," she says. Her younger boy, now 3, loves to peel garlic, "so he'll peel three heads for me," she says. "We have garlic papers all over after he's done." D'Amico has a high tolerance for disorder: "Clearly, we make a mess, and then we clean it up."

That attitude goes a long way toward keeping kids happy in the kitchen, says cookbook author Kathy Gunst, who believes that the very tactility of food invites play. "Most people don't want young children in the kitchen because of the mess," she observes. "We live in this Martha Stewart world where a lot of what we see on television and in magazines is perfect."

Being too aggressive and controlling is the biggest error parents make, according to Sara Moulton, a cookbook author and Food Network chef. She advises parents to relax and, as her daughter Ruthie, 17, puts it, "let the kids really get in there and do it." Says Moulton: "You have to set up a situation that's appealing to the child, let the child take the bait and then let the child be successful." The bait that she has often used with her two kids (her son Sam is 13) is a chance to prepare a favorite food for a birthday or other special occasion. "Both of my kids like to cook because they want to have a good meal," she says.

Moulton is also keen on the cross-curricular aspects of cooking. "You could teach just about everything through cooking--culture, geography, reading, writing, arithmetic," she says. Rosita Thomas, of Manassas, Va., uses food preparation to teach her daughter Carmen, 6, about numbers, sequence and quantity. "At the grocery store, I'll say, 'We need one leek for matzo-ball soup and 10 jalapenos for tacos,'" she says. "When we're actually cooking, especially if we're baking, where measurements are really important, I'll show her how to measure."

More challenging for kids--and the nervous parents who teach them--is learning to slice, dice and chop. M'Lou Caring, a developmental psychologist in New York City, showed her daughter Sofia-Jeanne how to cut with a plastic knife when she was 1 1/2. "I started with bananas and ripe peaches, things that could be cut fairly easily," she says. "She couldn't hurt herself, and yet she was cutting."

Abigail Johnson Dodge, a cookbook author who oversees cooking classes for 8-to 12-year-olds, cautions against giving kids knives that have grown dull. Instead, she suggests table knives for young children, then paring knives and, finally, the sharper tools of the trade. Parents must supervise closely, she says, and "it's important that the knife fit in their hands well." Having and handling the right implements is one of the joys of cooking. "If the tool isn't going to get the job done, it's going to be frustrating," says Dodge. "We want to turn children on to cooking, not turn them off."

Kids who do get turned on say the kitchen is a great place to learn life lessons. Persistence is one. Bridget Martinez still remembers the time when she was 6 and her baked goods exploded in the oven, but that was just a temporary setback. Confidence is another benefit, she says, especially "if your parents inspire you and they know you can do it."

Alexandra Guarnaschelli, executive chef at Butter, a New York City restaurant, grew up with food aficionados for parents. She fondly remembers how her mother, a noted cookbook editor, helped her gain confidence in the kitchen. "She'd say, 'Oh, you're so good at this' and 'You've got a real, natural inclination for this stuff.'" But just as important to Guarnaschelli--as it is for other families who cook together--was the opportunity for parent-child bonding. "We built a strong, emotional connection from cooking together," she says. "My mother and I were able to talk about everything and anything in the kitchen."