Eat Up: Food for Children of All Ages. Mark Hix

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       Cooking

      At school, when it came to the crunch at the end of the fifth form, I was completely clueless about what to do with my life. All my mates became golf pros and if I had been serious enough about it I could have followed them. I had a seven handicap by the time I was 15 and played three times every weekend and as often as I could during the week.

      In our last year at school we had to choose between metalwork and domestic science. I couldn’t see the point in filing away at a bit of metal for weeks to end up with a key ring, so I opted for cooking. I was teased a lot, but once I got into making pineapple upside-down cake I started to enjoy it. When I beat all the girls and won the school domestic science prize, the careers officer suggested that I apply to catering college. I never imagined that making that small decision would turn into my big career opportunity but once I got to college I never looked back.

      My lecturer at Weymouth College, Laurie Mills, became an inspiration. We hit it off immediately and his passion for food was contagious. He had worked at the Dorchester and Grosvenor House hotels in London, where I was later to follow in his footsteps. His approach was very relaxed and he taught me that cooking for a living was not only great fun but also socially acceptable.

      My style of cooking still reflects the things I learned when I was growing up, and it’s a style that works well at home, too. I use the best seasonal ingredients I can find and stick to natural combinations of flavours. Maybe snacking on my friend Mark Hawker’s dad’s queen scallops in the school playground taught me this lesson at an early age. I don’t believe in fussy, complicated techniques or presentation, and the older I get the less I try to create new combinations. The main ingredient should always be good enough to speak for itself. If you find a really great piece of fish, why try and complicate the dish and end up masking its flavour?

      When I was training to be a chef we studied classic French cooking because the French seemed to own cuisine in a way that we British never could. French cooking was difficult, intimidating and sophisticated. Cookery books were all the same – everything came with tricky sauces or had to be braised with a hundred different flavourings. We learned the French term for every single ingredient, and even now, when I eat out in France, I can order in immaculate French but I can’t ask for directions to the loo. Though some people still believe that proper cooking involves complicated sauces and pyrotechnics, I find that most of the best dishes I come up with have no more than three complementary main ingredients, and I like to be able to taste all of them.

      This doesn’t mean that I always play safe when I’m cooking. I enjoy creating dishes and I’ve got to the stage where I don’t need to worry too much about culinary correctness because, after years as a chef, I have developed a reasonable understanding of what works and what doesn’t. This is the key to good cooking, yet there’s no mystery about it. If you like food and you are keen to learn, you can do the same. Just keep practising and always be open to ideas – magazines, books, television and restaurants are all excellent sources of inspiration and will help you refine your culinary sensibilities.

      If you want to cook for your children but lack confidence in the kitchen, remember that preparing food for a small child is a great way of developing an understanding of ingredients and flavour. It’s fascinating to witness small children trying foods for the first time and it can help you to rethink tastes you’ve taken for granted for years – all those simple purées, for example, reveal how sweet many vegetables are and how surprisingly acidic fruit can be.

      Don’t make the mistake of thinking that flavour is unimportant to small children. Given a choice between boiled vegetables or the significantly more tasty vegetables roasted with herbs and olive oil, most adults would automatically choose the latter – and, not surprisingly, most children would, too. As soon as they are old enough (around eight months) you can begin to add small quantities of flavourings such as herbs, ginger and garlic to their food. If, like me, you prefer to keep things simple when cooking, you will find that flavour is determined largely by the quality of the ingredients you use (unless, of course, you cremate them during cooking). You don’t need to overdo flavours, especially when cooking for children – just trust the ingredients to do their work. Even the subtle flavour of the oil a food is cooked in will add to the taste of the final dish – particularly with Italian food, which is one of the best examples of culinary simplicity and also one of the most appealing cuisines for children.

      Nowadays no one needs to cook in order to survive but there’s so much more pleasure to be had from cooking than from choosing a packet out of the chill cabinet of the supermarket. And if your children grow up surrounded by the sights and smells of cooking – a soup simmering on top of the stove, a roast chicken being taken from the oven, fruit being puréed to make a smoothie – they are far more likely to appreciate good food and the effort that goes into making it.