A few weeks ago David Atherton, winner of series 10 of the Great British Bake Off, posted a recipe to his Instagram from his forthcoming children’s cookbook.1 Accompanying the recipe were gorgeous watercolor illustrations of the ingredients, how to bring them together, and what the end product should look like.2 Ever a bold one, I immediately slid into David’s DMs, writing that “The illustrations here really took me back to the first ever cookbook I used as a kid.” He kindly replied, “Yay, that’s the idea <3”
The comforting familiarity of these illustrations made me wonder if my folks had kept that childhood cookbook, and, if they had, where it might be. My parents, while packrats, are at least predictable in their accretion, and I found what I was looking for amidst the other second-rate cookbooks in their mudroom, sandwiched between The Fondue Cookbook and Recipes from the Ladies’ Guild of the Church of St. Anthony.
On the cover of Kids Cooking: A Very Slightly Messy Manual, a spiral-bound book of glossy card stock pages, two anthropomorphic brown bears dressed in identical amber aprons chop celery together.3 The parent bear, wearing pince-nez glasses on their snout and wielding a sharp knife, chops the celery into uniform chunks. The excitable child bear hacks into the celery with abandon with what looks like a butter knife. Both parent and child seem happy to be in the kitchen together, absorbed in their shared task of making a meal, whatever it may be.
As this cover promises, the book encourages intergenerational collaboration, albeit with a cheeky twist. Kids are in control within the pages of Kids Cooking, and throughout the book adults are framed as “helpers” or “assistants” to the child chef. An early page on “Kitchen Rules” reminds the chef to talk to their “grown-up assistant” about the recipe they’re preparing and to consider delegating the more dangerous tasks, like retrieving something from the oven, to their assistant. It’s a clever way to keep kids safe without disempowering them. The parent should be a happy helper, and the child should be happy for their help.
Unfortunately it seems like seven-year-old Chris didn’t quite get the memo about the joys and duties of collaboration, because the recipes I most remember making from Kid’s Cooking are the ones for eggs, the only ones that don’t require an adult helper in any capacity. In fact, I’d prepare these dishes precisely so I could make them for my parents, carrying them up to their bedroom on a tray so they could enjoy breakfast in bed on Sunday morning.
It’s not that my parents ever made me feel unwelcome in the kitchen. Some of my earliest happy memories involve helping my mom make oatmeal raisin cookies from the back of the Sun-Maid box, or smashing fried green plantains on their way to becoming tostones. So why this insistence on independence, especially from an only child who already spent so much time on his own?
Part of it, obviously, is an early manifestation of expressing love through service. From the media I consumed as a kid I understood breakfast in bed to be a treat, an act of gratitude designed to reverse the duty of parents cooking for children. It also certainly helped my ego that this act of service maintained my reputation as a Very Good Boy™️, the kind of boy who wakes up early and makes breakfast for his parents because he loves them so much. What a briar of self-serving selflessness.
Yet what also brought me back week after week was the fact that cooking on my own was a time of joyful experimentation. I’d dutifully make the eggs following the recipe, but I’d make something else with a splash of my own patented flair. I’d bring a sauce together using whatever condiments we had in the fridge and whatever spices I could reach in the cupboard. I’d unwrap Hershey Kisses into a bowl and put them into the microwave, dipping berries into the melted chocolate and then letting them set in the fridge. There was never any fear of fucking up, no anxiety that the meal would be disappointing.
I wish I could find a way back to these mornings making eggs. When I cook for myself now I still enjoy the freedom I experienced as a kid, but the prospect of cooking for someone else immediately introduces the pressure of perfection. What I serve to others is never good enough in my eyes, and no amount of reassurance can convince me that it is.
Why is it so easy for me to assume I’m a disappointment, rather than posture myself with pride? Why do I refuse to trust the praise of those who love me?
Here, as in so many corners of my life, I’m so focused on the product that I’ve overlooked the joys to be found in the process. It’s all about the immaculate meal on the plate, not whatever messiness happened in the kitchen. Is this the millennial curse? As the first witnesses and participants in new technologies of self-publicization, we found acclaim and gratification in our outward projections. All it cost us was our sense that some things could be just for us, that the judgments of others could be weighed and considered before taken as universal truths.
I’m working on recapturing the un-self-consciousness of my youth — I’m sure we all are — but it feels like a quixotic task. Most of the time I feel like one of the anthropomorphic Humpty-Dumpty egg people from Kids Cooking, particularly the one in the alpine hat. Perched atop the wall, his mouth a neutral line, his eyebrows raised in concern, he seems to sense the precarity of his position. All it would take is a strong breeze blown the wrong way and his self would shatter.
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I wish I could tell you what the recipe was for, but the post has since disappeared into the graveyard of expired Instagram Stories.
Illustrations by Harry Woodgate, who is also the author and illustrator of Granddad’s Camper and Granddad’s Pride.
The book was first published in 1987 by Klutz, a company that specialized in introducing crafts and hobbies to children. Other books advertised on the last page of the cookbook include Create Anything with Clay, Kids Gardening: A Kids’ Guide to Messing Around in the Dirt, and Simple Sewing. It seems that the company still exists in some capacity.
I had a Klutz joke book friendship bracelet book. The nostalgia! 🥚