How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  Because as adults we want—at some time or other—to eat as much as possible for as little caloric spend as possible, many parents think the same virtues hold for their children. This couldn’t be further from the truth. No child under the age of five should be given skimmed or low-fat milk. They certainly shouldn’t be afraid of big bad fats. They should eat fruit, vegetables, cereals—of course—but don’t fill them up with whole-wheat pasta and brown rice and don’t weight their diet toward the bulky, the burlap weave, and the stomach-bloating. Children don’t have a huge capacity, but they need lots of fuel. In other words, they need food that ounce for ounce is heavily stoked in calories. They eat and run, so you want to make sure that what they eat keeps them going for as long as possible. (Which is why I, nearly every day, thank God for pasta, without which I would be hard-pressed to find food that is maintaining, full of everything that is considered these days dietetically virtuous, and a useful vehicle for high-fat, calorie-boosting sauces and cheese.) Muesli malnutrition, the term that doctors apply to the low-fat starvation diet on which many well-meaning, affluent parents keep their children, is a tellingly growing concern.

  Of course, it doesn’t follow that the higher the fat and the lower the fiber in a child’s diet, the better. Even diehard opponents of food faddists and anti-fattists have to accept that huge amounts of saturated fats, day in and day out, are on the whole unwise. But I believe that animal fats in moderation are good and, in occasional excess, unharmful. (And we know that some other fats, such as olive oil, are positively beneficial.) I think it’s more important, anyway, to make sure every day that children eat fruit and vegetables, even if they accompany foods that have been fried or sauced with butter. It’s what’s missing from a diet that makes the crucial difference.

  What you feed your child will go toward forming lifetime habits. It makes sense now not to stoke up trouble for them later. Much as I detest that specious smug and superstitious demarcation between “healthy” and “unhealthy” food, I accept that there is such a thing as a healthy diet. Be vigilant, but not obsessive.

  For the first months of solid food—which in truth is hardly solid—you are just giving babies slops and purées and beginning the process of giving them food that resembles the food you eat yourself. And you absolutely have to stop yourself minding about the mess; in the first days I wiped my daughter’s mouth after each spoonful, but I soon stopped. I had to. You have to learn to live with spilled food and stained clothes or you’ll never teach your children to relax around food.

  I am not a pediatrician or a nutritionist and, given the fanatical leanings of most parents, I am almost bound to be a deficient teacher. When we had the builders in, I took out a subscription to Interiors and House and Gardens; when I was pregnant, I spent sofa-bound evenings reading through parent-and-baby magazines. We are all child hobbyists now, we late-spawning parents of the consumer age, so I take it for granted that somewhere, some if not all of you will have a book on the subject of babies’ and children’s food, complete with timetables, graphs, nutritional indices, and medical advice. If not, trust me, they are widely available. But here, just in case, is a weaning timetable.

  BABY-WEANING CHART

  Do not add salt to your baby’s food until he or she is 1 year old or over.

  4–5 months

  SEMI-LIQUID PURÉES OF: apple, pear, banana, papaya, carrot, cauliflower, potato, zucchini, squash, green beans, sweet potatoes

  5–6 months

  dried fruit, peach, kiwi fruit, apricot, plum, melon, avocado, peas, tomato, spinach, celery, leek, sweet pepper

  6 months

  chicken, dairy products, parsnip, foods containing gluten

  6–7 months

  MINCED OR MASHED FOODS, WHICH CAN INCLUDE: citrus fruit, berries, mango, corn

  6–12 months

  other meats

  8–9 months

  CHUNKIER TEXTURES, WHICH CAN NOW INCLUDE: split peas, butter beans, lentils, eggs, fish

  over 2 years

  shellfish

  SOLIDS

  * * *

  Many parents start infants off with baby rice. I understand the reasoning—that it is midway between milk and solid food—but in practice it didn’t work for my children. One of the fascinating things about how babies and small children eat is that they regulate their intake themselves—they eat as much as they need; if they eat less one day or for several days, they will make up for the deficit in calories later. Whenever I added baby rice to fruit or vegetable purées, my babies would eat as much as they felt they needed, as if what they were eating was just fruit or vegetables. They couldn’t, it seemed, detect the rice. For when the grain swelled in their stomachs later, it transpired that they had eaten too much; consequently, and efficiently, they vomited the excess up. This isn’t harmful, but I felt it unhelpful to interfere with the fine calibration of their digestive systems.

  So for those with small babies who are about to start eating solids, I advise some fresh, cooked, cooled, puréed pear (peeled, obviously) as a first food. I used to cook it by putting chunks of the fruit in a container in the microwave for a few minutes. Bananas, briefly microwaved, then mashed with milk—breast or formula—are also a good first food. The microwave is very good for cooking most fruits. (Vegetables are better steamed or boiled, I think, as microwaved vegetables have a spooky texture.) Of all fruits, both my children liked papaya best. I’d cut them in half, scoop out the seeds, and then blitz them briefly in the microwave. The smell of them, thus nuked, is sickly sweet, almost to the emetic point of putrefaction, or so it seemed to me after pulping too many of these honeyed and puce fruits, but children love the sweet, soft, aromatic flesh.

  But ordinary fruit and vegetables are just as good. Variety is important, but a baby’s diet doesn’t have to include one of every foodstuff known to man. Remember that for a baby, all foods are new; stewed apple is just as exotic as steamed papaya.

  For my first child I went into food processing overdrive, filling the freezer with as many different purées and pulped meals as possible. If you’re going to peel, cook, and purée some carrots, you may as well do it once and have enough in the freezer for the month’s meals ahead. Apart from anything else, the amount a baby eats is really tiny; even one carrot makes enough for quite a few meals. The only reason I relaxed (rather than abandoned) my bulk preparations of food with my second child was that I was cooking anyway for one child, so fiddling about with an extra bit of fruit or vegetable or handful of baby pasta at each mealtime didn’t seem much trouble.

  You do need, however, to be able to feed small babies promptly. If you can prepare baby food in advance, freeze it, and then microwave when needed, you reduce the time you are subjected to outraged, hunger-crazed screaming. But the practical advantage is the least of it. If you slave away cooking from scratch, trying to create some perfect morsel for your baby’s edification, you will inevitably take it much harder when she spits it out in disgust or wipes it all over the walls. It isn’t wise to put so much emotional pressure on either yourself or your children at mealtimes. If you slave and then freeze the product of your stove-bound slavery, the memory of the effort will inevitably recede and you won’t take rejection so badly. This goes for feeding older children, too.

  PASTINA

  Once a baby has got used to solid food, knows what it’s for, and enjoys eating it, baby pasta—pastina—is a useful way of making meals. It takes a few seconds to cook (I tended to cook it in milk, defrosted packages of expressed breast milk when they were very little and whole cow’s milk once they were past six months) and all you need to do is toss it in some butter and grated Parmesan. If the baby in question is younger than six months, then you might feel happier adding nothing more, but otherwise use pastina in vegetable purées, too. It’s very fine (or the smallest size is) but the grains retain their separateness—it doesn’t become a gluey mass. I rather love it as well and, I think, as far as possible, you should try to give your babies food that
you could bear to eat too. This is one of the reasons I cannot bring myself to serve up much bottled baby food. I just feel it must constitute the worst sort of culinary education. I am not neurotically and intolerantly bound to the preciously homemade, however; I always kept a supply of Beech-Nut baby foods on hand and often give myself up to the cool but welcoming embrace of the supermarket fridge case.

  BARLEY MEAL

  OATMEAL

  Indeed, Beech-Nut packages a fine-ground barley meal that I find preferable to baby rice. I gave it to my children for breakfast for ages, before they moved on to Weetabix, a shredded wheat cereal now available in America, and then to proper oatmeal (funnily enough, the baby oats that Beech-Nut also does weren’t as popular). I mixed the barley meal with milk (first breast, then cow’s) or sometimes fresh orange juice diluted with water, especially if either of them had a cold.

  I used to freeze baby purée in ice-cube trays. Just empty the thickly colored frozen cubes into plastic bags, label, tie up, and throw back in the freezer. I can’t advise labeling these too strongly. Every time I thought I couldn’t possibly forget what this luridly colored food was, I ended up being mystified at some later date and would defrost apricots when I was after carrots. The brain does go in the aftermath of childbirth—better accept that now.

  SPINACH AND CORN

  BROCCOLI AND CARROT

  I quite like pottering about kitchens, so made up quite a few different foods, but you soon realize that more than five or six can be superfluous; babies inevitably favor certain ones over others and you, as inevitably, choose to defrost the favored. After the first month or so of plain fruits and vegetables, I got into the habit of creating certain mixtures, and they’re useful ones. The compound I was most pleased with was a mush of spinach and corn—the spinach, with its metallic, almost bitter hit, is sweetened, and somewhat deslimed by the corn. Another—broccoli and carrot—also works well. Though broccoli has a definite sweetness of its own, it also has a cabbagy mustiness that babies, and adults, can warm to less. Carrots intensify the sweetness and seem to neutralize the otherwise enduring Brassica-family brackishness. You will create a sludge of particularly unattractive khaki, but your baby will be able to live with that. When my babies were beyond purées, they ate the broccoli florets whole, a small green tree clasped in each fat pink fist.

  I started off in fear of salt; indeed, medical advice is that you shouldn’t add it to food for a child under 1 year (now I let my children pour rivers of soy over their noodles, but there’s nothing like having more than one child for easing one’s principles, dietary or otherwise). I did succumb, however, to salted canned spinach, but drained it and processed it with drained unsalted canned corn, in about equal measures, before freezing it in cubes. You can, of course, use fresh vegetables, not frozen, or buy organic canned stuff from the health store, which won’t have salt added.

  I didn’t add sugar to any food I gave my daughter and didn’t get into the habit of giving her desserts or cookies either, and she isn’t interested in eating them much now. My son, who has the advantage in this respect of being the second child, loves cake and anything sugary. But maybe (she said a trifle defensively) this isn’t entirely because I have relaxed, giving him foods that normally I might not have fed to a baby, but because they have very different palates to start off with.

  And that can’t be underestimated. Neither I nor my children like baby rice. Your child might adore it. Babies have their own tastes, and to try to change them by force is as idiotic as the once-accepted practice of making left-handed children write with their right hands. Respond to your child but, at the same time, encourage him or her to experiment, to recognize, to enjoy.

  One way to encourage your child is to give him or her a small taste of certain foods gradually. I wanted my children to enjoy eating spinach, so I tried to find ways of insinuating spinach into their diet without actually giving them, until they were older, a whole iron-resonant plate of the stuff. I therefore get for my freezer little packs of puréed spinach frozen in lots of tiny spheres, which I defrost one sphere at a time to stir into some other purée or foodstuff. These spheres exist throughout Europe and you might badger (gently) your supermarket to carry them. In the meantime, you could cook large amounts of spinach, drain, chop it in a processor, then freeze it in ice-cube trays. Defrost and add to food as I do. That way, your child will get used to the taste of spinach and will therefore like it. Children respond to the familiar, the known. Just don’t make a big thing about it; don’t let children know you expect them not to like something before they actually eat it, or show your surprise if they happen to love it.

  Pasta sauce, most often pesto, ground meat, cheesy mashed potatoes, omelet or frittata, puréed peas, cheese sauce—you don’t need me to list all the baby foods into which you can stir a cube of thawed and warmed spinach, but, trust me, it is invaluable later when your child is eating meals rather than slops. But do it before he has reached the stage of looking out suspiciously for green bits.

  LIVER

  SMOKED SALMON

  FROZEN PEAS

  Liver is another food that everyone presumes children will have to be forced to eat against their will. I never found this, but it may be that I am irredeemably extravagant because I fed my children calves’ liver and carefully de-biled chicken livers rather than the vile, fibrous, bitter livers I was given at school. People who would never think of asking how much something costs before they eat it themselves get twitchy about expensive tastes in their young. Whenever I gave my children smoked salmon I was mocked by friends, as if I was making them wear tutus and speak French to one another in the manner of that rich-kid stunt in High Society. But children love smoked salmon, which is a very useful meal to bear in mind for hungry, fractious children kept waiting for an inevitably late lunch by an equally fractious parent after a Saturday morning spent shopping at the supermarket. After all, it’s bad enough having to take the food out of the car into the house and then out of the bags into the cupboards. To have to cook any of it would be the final straw. Cut open instead a plastic-wrapped package of smoked salmon, butter some bread, if you must, and grate a few carrots, if you can. (It’s worth knowing, in this regard, that most children seem to like frozen peas, as they are, unthawed, to eat from their own little bowls set out in front of them. It’s not wise to let very small children eat these chokingly unyielding vegetable beads, but vigilance is a better route than dietary censorship.)

  Giving children real food, the sort of food we’d eat ourselves, is important. It’s why the French eat well, and the Italians: their children are not fobbed off with lesser ingredients and different meals in the erroneous belief that good food or expensive items are wasted on them. I’m not saying that you must bankrupt yourself to provide your angels with luxuries and bonnes bouches, but simply that they should not eat worse than you do. If I grate fresh Parmesan onto my pasta, why should I insist that theirs come ready-grated, bitterly musty, smelling of old socks and trapped in a plastic-lidded drum?

  This does not mean that everything your child eats you will want to eat. One of my infant son’s favorite meals was chicken liver puréed with soaked dried apricots. I should not choose to lunch on that. But I added the dried apricots to counter the potentially constipating effects of the liver. Deep within me I must have a fixation with digestive habits; I always feel that the balance between what nannies always used to refer to as the “binding” and “loosening” effects of foods has to be maintained. For example, I serve poached egg for supper on top of a bowl of corn.

  CHICKEN LIVER

  DRIED APRICOTS

  I threw together the apricots and liver in the first place to use up a liver from a chicken I was roasting; real cooking, I can’t help feeling, always starts from leftovers. Thus I concocted the following recipe—I say recipe, but it isn’t really anything as precise. For a start, quantities are hard to gauge at any time, but for children, whose ages and appetites vary, it’s even harder. But when my s
on was seven months old, I’d make up a batch of this and figure it would make 2–3 portions for him. You need a chicken liver (about 2 ounces), which you fry gently in butter, and purée made from dried apricots. I figure about 1 tablespoon of purée per liver. Just soak some dried apricots in hot water from a just-boiled kettleful for an hour or so, then boil till soft, drain, and purée. Most apricots are labeled as not needing any soaking, but I figure they do. Take a slice of dry or stale bread and soak it in some milk until saturated. Squeeze it out and add it to the liver and apricots and blend. Chicken liver, fried in butter as above, and blended with an equal weight of chicken breast poached in milk is another idea; use as much of the poaching liquid as you need to get to the texture you want. If you leave it thick, you can spread it onto toast-and-butter fingers. When I wanted the puréed liver as a bowl-bound meal—with or without baby pasta—I sometimes stirred in some puréed carrot, too.

  QUICK MEALS

  * * *

  What helps most is having a cache of food you can throw together easily. So you must get stocked up first. You don’t need me to tell you to keep a constant supply of canned tuna (which I detest) in the house, but I remind you simply because this is a good way to give children something sustaining to eat. I know people go on about added salt and sugar to canned foods children like, but I can’t get worked up about it. It makes sense to watch for salt when they’re tiny. I never salted any cooking water—of pasta, vegetables, anything—or added salt later, until my children were four years and eighteen months respectively. Then I decided that, if I wanted them to eat like us, it was inconsistent to refuse to allow them to season their food like us.