How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  BEANS AND OTHER LEGUMES

  BACON

  SHRIMP

  TUNA

  PINK FISH AND BEANS

  SMOKED MACKEREL

  Children seem to like all legumes. Canned chickpeas, cannellini, pinto, any bean you want, are worth keeping around for them, and if you do mind about salt, then buy canned organic ones without salt added. Just stir some cooked chopped bacon into any of them or some shrimp or fish into the cannellini. Shrimp and beans happens to be an actual contemporary Italian reworking—i ricchi e i poveri as it’s known—of the traditional tonno e fagioli; indeed, tuna, drained, mixed in with a can of beans, and bound with a few drops of good olive oil is another meal worth bearing in mind, as canned tuna seems ideally suited to childish palates. Trout fillets, just poached, then roughly chopped and added to cannellini—or Pink Fish and Beans—are a particular favorite in my household, as my daughter is going through a deeply pink stage that shows no signs of abating. You could use smoked fillets if you want to avoid any cooking whatsoever, or substitute smoked mackerel; this is something of a radical substitution—the taste is much stronger, the texture much oilier—but can be successful.

  PASTA

  EGG NOODLES

  VAGUELY JAPANESE SOUP

  Pasta is another obvious staple, as are Asian noodles. I live near a Thai shop, so buy bagfuls of fettucine-thick, egg-yellow-and-paler thread-thin noodles (which need a minute’s cooking) and fresh rice sticks, which don’t need to be cooked at all—you just steep them for 5–10 minutes in boiling water. (It doesn’t hurt to keep some cooked, cold-water-spritzed, and drained egg noodles in a covered bowl in the fridge, either.) Any of these, with some soy sauce (as I say, I’m not salt-sensitive) lightly sprinkled over, are among the lowest-effort meals I can think of. Supermarkets sell various forms of Asian noodles now, so you don’t need access to exotically stocked, stall-sized shops, shelves piled with dried shrimp and sour pastes. But going to specialty stores makes shopping so pleasurable, and it’s cheaper. Sometimes I make small bowls of vaguely Japanese soup: stock, some chopped greens, manageable lengths of noodle. This, for my daughter, signals special food, partly because it’s food I make for myself (see pages 382–384) and partly because it has seemed a treat ever since I took her to a Japanese restaurant and she ordered noodle soup and was given chopsticks to eat it with. She couldn’t really manage them, except singly as a kind of load-bearing punt, and I ended up feeding her, ferrying food, noodle by fat noodle, from bowl to hungry open mouth like a mother bird feeding her gaping-beaked young with worms.

  For ordinary pasta, keep bottled tomato sauce on hand and containers of pesto, both good quality. Pesto might not sound like children’s food, but they like much stronger flavors than adults give them credit for. But don’t buy phony cut-price versions. How are children ever going to know how to eat well if they’ve been reared on inferior ingredients or ersatz foods? I don’t mean—and I can’t stress this enough—you must always provide them with comestibles shipped over from Peck or Fauchon, but don’t pretend that an inauthentic article is the real thing. By all means cook rice and stir in peas and corn—just don’t call it risotto. I speak as someone who gives her children canned ravioli as a special weekend treat when I feel too tired even to put a pan of water on to boil, so I’m not claiming rarefied or superior status. But I don’t pretend it’s the real thing or that the difference doesn’t matter.

  COUSCOUS

  Just as children love pasta, so they seem to love couscous. This is even easier. Put some quick-cooking couscous in a bowl and pour over some boiling water (about 2⁄3 cup water for ½ cup couscous). Leave, covered, for about 10 minutes. That’s it. Stir in some soft butter and give it to them to eat.

  That’s the basic, baldest method. Mostly I tend to bolster couscous with vegetables and use stock rather than water; my regular standby involves chopping 1 carrot in the baby processor until it is in tiny cubes and shards, and then boiling it for 2 minutes in a saucepan of bubbling water to which I have added 1 vegetable bouillon cube for every 2 cups of water. I then shake in some couscous, bring it all back to the boil, take the pan off the heat, and cover, leaving it for about 10 minutes. You can fork in some olive oil or butter, as you wish, but I think you do need some fat; small children find it easier to eat when the grains are sticking together rather than fluffily and otherwise desirably separate. You are not making couscous a Moroccan would be proud of, I admit, but nor are you setting out to. If you want to be really brazenly out of context, you can use frozen peas and corn in place of the carrot. Drained, canned chickpeas are the easiest option. Consider cracked wheat also; my daughter loves tabbouleh (see page 236) as well, astringent and onion-spicy as I make it.

  POTATOES

  Mashed potatoes is a good way to fill up a child. The easiest way to do this is the extravagant one. In other words, don’t peel, boil, then mash the potatoes, but bake the potatoes instead. Bake them (½–1 per child, about 60 minutes in a 400°F oven), eat the skin yourself (young children don’t seem to cope with this) sprinkled with a good pelt of coarse salt, crunch on crunch, as you fork some butter through the fluffy-cooked flesh in a bowl for your child.

  As children get older they seem to prefer the potato kept separate from other things on the plate, but up to the age of two they accept various things to make the mashed, baked potato pulp into entire, distinct meals. Add more or less milk, depending on age. Obviously, the nubblier purées are not suitable for gummy-mouthed babies. Some of the ingredients I used may sound unappealing, but they didn’t appear so to my children, so may not to yours. You can add chopped ham, minced meat, strips of chicken, or crunchy vegetables to the side.

  WITH CHEESE

  When the mashed potato is still at its hottest—don’t pour in the milk to thin it first—grate in whatever cheese you want. I started off, when my children were babies, with Gruyère and then went on to Cheddar or Parmesan or a mixture of both. Fork potato and cheese vehemently together until the fine strands of cheese start to melt. (I find a hand-held Mouli cheese grater, with drum and handle, the easiest way of doing this, but then I hate those knuckle-shaving punctured metal box graters.) Then stir in milk or milk and butter to make the mixture more liquid. If you want to boost the caloric value of this meal, add a dollop of mascarpone (or cream, of course). I sometimes beat in a raw egg yolk for this reason, too, but I am confident about the healthfulness of my eggs (see page xx). I know the accepted wisdom is that babies and small children shouldn’t be given uncooked eggs to eat, but it is not a wisdom I have accepted.

  WITH PESTO

  From a very young age, both my children loved pesto and ate anything with it in. I add about 1 tablespoon to the flesh of each potato (½ tablespoon per child) and beat it in till smoothly amalgamated. Add 1 tablespoon or so more oil. If you’re being echt, which could mean being fancy, you should use Ligurian olive oil to dovetail, culinarily speaking, with the pesto. I do happen to keep this in the house and because it is milder than Tuscan oil, with less of the throat-hitting pepperiness, it is probably more instantly palatable for small children anyway. Sometimes I mix in a bit of quick-thawed and cooked finely chopped spinach; go cautiously with the pesto and spinach, but you can add more than the amount I’ve suggested if it turns out your children like this purée even stronger and greener. I’m not sure I’d try this on children before they’ve eaten pesto on pasta, not because I think they may not like the taste (I’ve not met one who doesn’t) but because all children have an inbuilt caution about mixtures.

  WITH EGG

  If you don’t like the idea of introducing raw egg (and I would recommend always using eggs that are checked for salmonella, anyway), you can just soft-boil or poach 1–2 eggs, stir in the oily yolk, and then the finely chopped white. If you’re worried about albumen, hard-boil the eggs and then push the dense globes of yolk through a sieve onto the potato, and think of this, archly, as mashed potato mimosa. Add milk as required and butter as desired.

  W
ITH VEGETABLE PURÉE

  A few gloopy tablespoons of puréed butternut squash, orange-fleshed sweet potato, or carrot stirred into the potato will make a good orange bowl of mashed potatoes for babies; for older children, you could grate over some Cheddar and shove the purée under a grill for a minute until scorched and almost crunchy. Substitute puréed corn, if your child doesn’t mind a few rough bits, and whole corn kernels if they are beyond even gravelly purées. You could use peas (frozen peas, cooked, then puréed with a knob of butter and a tablespoon of Parmesan are wonderful with potatoes, whether you’re a child or not), but I’d avoid other grassier green vegetables here. In all cases, consider a dollop of mascarpone for ballast and perhaps the merest, sheerest grating of fresh nutmeg.

  WITH TOMATO

  I don’t like tomato purée—I find it invasively metallic; everything to which it’s added tastes instantly, however fresh, however lovingly homemade, as if it had come out of the tinniest of tins. This, Anna del Conte tells me reprovingly, is because I don’t cook the purée long enough; it needs slow, insistent simmering before that front-of-tongue dried-blood taste subsides and the flavor builds to fill the whole mouth with sweet and actual tomatoishness. This makes sense, and I take the point and will act on it from now on, with sauces and stews—but with this kind of cooking for children, which isn’t really meant to be cooking, I am not proposing to tend any pan for devoted hours. You have a choice: you can use canned purée made both more gentle and more liquid by the addition of a little warm milk, or a good-quality tomato sauce, strained or not as you wish. And do not hesitate—consider your constituency here—to add a good squeeze of tomato ketchup. Add grated cheese or mascarpone if you want to provide more fuel or some protein.

  WITH PEANUT BUTTER

  Peanut butter should be smooth, of course. Yes, I know peanut butter and potato mixed sounds disgusting and, to be frank, even I, the greediest person alive, sitting vulture-like and fork in hand, impatient to snatch the food out of my babies’ mouths, manage not to pick when they’re eating this. The point is that children like it (and some grownups do too, I’ve found) and it gets in extra calories and protein at the same time. I have been known—don’t gag—to stir in a little coconut cream dissolved in warm milk and this went down very well. It’s the sweetness, I suppose, and the fact that we all do seem to have an innate, inbuilt capacity to appreciate fat. Once I’ve gone this far, though, there’s nothing to stop me throwing in a few corn kernels, too.

  WITH TAHINI

  As long as you don’t use too much, children seem to love pungent, soft-clay tahini, diluted with a little milk or olive oil and stirred into the potato.

  WITH GARLIC

  Children love garlic. Bake the potato as advised on page 418 (I like potatoes really cooked: one grain of unyielding crystalline flesh and they’re ruined for me) and, 10 minutes or so in, take a whole head of garlic, lop off the top so the cloves are revealed in cross section, place on a square of foil, pour over a little oil, and wrap up the garlic so that you have a baggy but tightly crimped parcel. Cook for about 50 minutes, then take out and let stand in its foil. When you mash the potato, unwrap the garlic package and squeeze in the sweet, pulpy cloves. Whip with a fork to incorporate smoothly and add butter, milk, or cream to make the sort of purée you want. Heaven.

  WITH FISH

  You can use tuna or salmon; with the salmon, make sure you’ve removed any lingering bones or slimy strips of oil-immersed skin. Add anything else you think would enhance—tomato sauce, mayonnaise, corn. And, with this, you’re really halfway to fishcakes (see page 442).

  OTHER EASILY-THROWN-TOGETHER MEALS

  * * *

  If you hate the very idea of cooking, no one’s stopping you from opening packages or buying ready-prepared meals. And if you’re worried about salt and sugar and other additives, you’ll probably be able to find more virtuous though not necessarily more palatable precooked meals at health stores. You don’t want to foist your hysteria at the stove onto your offspring. Nor do you, on the other hand, want to make a cult out of cooking everything yourself, so that your children either become afraid of any alien meal or develop a terrible longing for microwaved junk food. We all know about the thrill of the illicit. Besides, it’s worth keeping a stash of ready-made meals on the grounds alone that it will make your life easier. But low-level cooking needn’t feel too demanding. The following suggestions occupy a culinary territory somewhere between the ideas above and the full-blown recipes below.

  RICE

  Rice is, in my household, just as popular as pasta and couscous. It’s popular with me, too, as I’ve got an electric rice cooker and it is therefore one of my hands-free options. Naturally I am not presuming your possession of such a machine, but basmati rice, cooked in a pot on the stove, is relatively low-effort. Providing you’re giving the children a moderately balanced diet as it is, you don’t need to add much to rice, though by all means throw in chopped meat or something that makes you feel this is more of a traditionally complete meal, if you want. I have entirely corrupted my children by letting them see how I eat my rice, which is doused in soy, so this is now how they require theirs. There’s a tradeoff: I happen to eat my soy-browned rice with steamed or boiled broccoli and so this is, without fuss, introduced as part of the deal.

  ONE-EGG OMELET

  FRIED RICE

  SHRIMP

  My children enjoy rice with diced carrot, peas, and corn, in any combination that can be bought in bags from any supermarket, even if the mixture makes me shiver. If you want, you can make a one-egg omelet in a nonstick pan and then cut it into shreds and stir this into the rice. And while we’re edging toward it, I should mention that any leftover plain cooked rice languishing in the fridge can be turned into fried rice, which always goes down well. Put some vegetable oil in a relatively deep-sided frying pan or a wok and, when it’s hot (with a wok you should heat the pan before pouring in the oil), stir in 2 peeled, sliced, or chopped garlic cloves and 1 finely sliced scallion, if your children’s digestion will take them, and stir-fry for a minute or so. Add some butter to the pan. Now cook some very, very, finely chopped carrot. Then add some sliced button mushrooms and cook—pushing and prodding with your wooden spoon or spatula—for about 5 minutes. Add cold cooked rice and push around the pan for a bit longer. Cook a one-egg omelet in a nonstick pan separately, cut it into shreds, and then stir it into the rice. Turn into bowls. My children like coriander, so I sometimes add that. And throwing in some cooked peeled shrimp is, as far as my children are concerned, always a good move. In fact, just plain rice and shrimp is a good fallback Saturday lunch.

  RICE AND TOMATO SOUP

  I also make an unfussy rice and tomato soup (for myself, too, sometimes, especially when I’m trying to balance out my characteristic gluttony) by diluting a good, bought tomato sauce with water, adding a handful or so of basmati rice, and cooking until the rice is tender, 8–10 minutes. With children it makes more sense to leave the soup fairly solid, but you can add water from a boiled kettle toward the end of the cooking time if you want a thinner soup rather than liquid tomato-rice stew. Grate Parmesan on top and eat—with bibs.

  GYPSY TOAST

  This is the same thing as French toast. Bread, preferably stale, is soaked in egg beaten up with a bit of milk and then fried in butter. Even though I don’t generally go in for making smiley faces and funny shapes out of food, as we’re all supposed to do to lure a child to eat, I do cut out shapes of bread before soaking them (I normally use a star-shaped biscuit cutter for this, and I’ve got some otherwise unforgivably dinky aspic cutters, mini-hearts, diamonds, spades, and so forth, with which I stamp out shapes from bought packages of thinly sliced Gruyère). The golden stars do look beautiful—until they’re bloodied by the required shake of tomato ketchup. My children are not particularly keen on ketchup (as I say, they’re still preschool), but here they consider it obligatory. I make gypsy toast for a late weekend breakfast or for supper, after bath and just before
bedtime, to keep them sleeping longer in the morning, so that the occasional late breakfast is a possibility.

  Mimi Sheraton, in her wonderful memoir-cum-cookbook, From My Mother’s Kitchen, says that the best French toast is made from slightly stale challah. She’s right, but away from New York you might have to substitute brioche. But whatever you have at hand is just fine. Egg-soaked, butter-fried bread is marvelous with either maple syrup (and bacon, too, both of which I rather love) or sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Cinnamon toast—that’s to say, ordinary toast—made with sliced white bread and spread with a paste made by beating unsalted butter with sugar and cinnamon—is tear-prickingly comforting.

  POUSSIN

  A poussin is about the right size for two children with leftovers or three children without, and has the advantage of not needing any effort to cook. Just smear with butter or garlic-infused oil and sprinkle with salt or soy (or neither) before putting in a 375°F oven for about 45 minutes. Or throw in whole shallots and cloves of garlic, as on page 8.

  LAMB CHOPS

  Chops seem such old-fashioned food now, but they cook quickly and can be eaten in fingers. If you’ve got time and aren’t sure how tender the lamb is, marinate it for an hour or more in the juice of 1 orange and 1 tablespoon olive oil with 1 teaspoon red currant jelly. Preheat the broiler, line a baking pan with foil, and cook the chops for a few minutes each side. I don’t specify how many minutes because it depends on how well done you want it. In my view, it’s never too soon to get a child used to pink lamb and blue beef. Green beans, also eaten with fingers, are good alongside.