How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  So, even though you should not tell children that if they eat up those horrible vegetables they will be allowed some lovely dessert, neither should you give them any dessert if they won’t eat any of their main course. (All this, of course, is so much easier said than done.) I wouldn’t want to make a child clear his or her plate for the sake of it, but I’m always enchanted when it’s done voluntarily. Remember that a power struggle about food is one that your child will always win and that turning the lunch table into a battleground is asking for grief. When I was young, I was so often made, to the point of torture, to eat up every cold, congealing thing on my plate, that I now can’t help but finish up everything in sight, on my plate or other people’s. This might be a polite party trick, but it doesn’t make for a serene life or stable weight.

  COOKING WITH CHILDREN

  * * *

  The more that children are encouraged to help with the cooking, the less likely they are to become picky eaters. I don’t say there’s a magic formula to ensure they’re never faddy or fussy or hampered by bizarre prejudice, but you will improve your chances of having children who enjoy food if they are part of the enjoyable process of making it. Most children like eating what they cook and are proud of doing it.

  My own early memories are of wobbling on a wooden chair pushed up against the stove, stirring my mother’s white sauce. I often cook one-handed, with my daughter on a chair stirring or inspecting and my still-just-baby son on my left hip, licking a wooden spoon or doing a bit of stirring with it himself. My daughter, age three, would come into the kitchen and say, “Lovely! Garlic!” when she smelled the cooking, or detected by the smell that a chicken had been put in the oven or some pea pods were being simmered into a stock. That’s not genius, but a feeling for and interest in food—much more important.

  Doing ordinary, everyday, real cooking with children is more to the point than making any amount of chocolate Rice Krispie Treats. If you want to cook with your children, let them help cook lunch. There’s something so companionable about actually cooking with your child rather than just letting him or her play with food as a toy. But of course there are times when it’s nice to cook something specially, not for lunch or because you’re cooking it anyway. Try to let your children do as much as possible. The results don’t have to be perfect; the point of the exercise is the process.

  CHEESE STARS

  If you haven’t got a star cutter, do not even begin to worry. You could just as easily use a floured glass to cut out small rounds. But I find anything made out of stars beautiful, and my children do, too; I like as well the evocation of the cheese straws of my childhood—which these, in effect, are anyway.

  If you use a 1½-inch star cutter and roll out the dough to the bitter end—clumping together, reflouring, rerolling till more or less every last cheesy scrap is used up—you should get about 28 stars out of this.

  ½ cup all-purpose flour

  ½ teaspoon baking powder

  pinch salt

  pinch cayenne

  2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter, softened

  2/3 cup finely grated orange Cheddar

  ¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan

  Preheat the oven to 400°F. Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. Just using hands is most fun for children, but a food processor (let them ceremoniously press the on-button) is fine if you prefer it. You shouldn’t need any liquid to bind this. When it first comes together (at least in the processor) it looks crumbly, but after a few kneads it comes together smoothly. What I tend to do is divide the finished orange-glowing dough in two, then keep one in the fridge wrapped in plastic film while I roll out the other. I do this partly because I’ve only got enough pans to bake half the dough at a time. But from the dough’s point of view, it is fine without leaving it to rest in fridge. Dust a surface with flour, roll out neither very thick nor very thin—about ½ inch if you were to measure, I suspect—then cut out the stars. Put them on nonstick or greased or lined baking sheets and bake until beginning to puff on top yet hard underneath, about 10 minutes. Look after 8. The stars continue to crisp up while they’re cooling on a rack.

  DIGESTIVE BISCUITS

  As you will be required to eat whatever’s cooked, you may as well try to make sure it’s something you like. Although it might seem crazy to make digestive biscuits at home, I rather like them—a case of life imitating artifice. I’m not a great cookie buyer, simply because I’m not a great cookie eater, but when I get the urge for one of these sandy, oaty, wheaty biscuits, which are a cross between cookie and cracker, I brightly, in the manner of a dangly-earringed children’s television presenter, suggest we make them.

  Spelt flour is available in health stores and from baking ingredients suppliers. Please don’t give in to the temptation to use all butter in place of the shortening and butter specified. The biscuits don’t work without the shortening; they don’t taste like digestives. This makes about 23 biscuits.

  ½ cup old-fashioned rolled oats

  1½ cups spelt flour

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  2 tablespoons demerara sugar

  ¼ cup lard or white vegetable shortening, cold and cut into ½-inch dice

  2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold and cut in ½-inch dice

  about 1/3 cup milk

  Preheat the oven to 400°F.

  Place the oats in a food processor and pulse to make the flakes finer in size. Put the oats, flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar in a bowl and, using your hands, mix well. Add the diced cold shortening and rub in, using your fingertips or a freestanding mixer. When the shortening is about half rubbed in, add the butter. When all is rubbed in and you have a floury, bread-crumby texture, add cold milk slowly and cautiously, by the scant tablespoon, until the mixture begins to cohere into a firm dough.

  Flour a cold surface—and I use plain flour, not spelt, here—and roll the dough out, but not too thinly, about ¼ inch. Make the biscuits using a 2½-inch round cutter—this makes about 23 of them, I repeat—and place on a nonstick baking sheet (I prick the center, in clumsy imitation of those produced by a venerable British brand with the tines of a fork) and bake for 10–15 minutes. When ready, the biscuits should be golden with faintly browning edges. Watch out because they can quickly overcook, turning dusty and slightly bitter.

  Transfer to a couple of wire racks: store in an airtight tin when you’re done.

  FAIRY CAKES

  I haven’t got a heart of stone; I do realize that children sometimes like making children’s food. If we’re going to have tea with friends who have children the same ages as ours, we sometimes make a batch of these British-traditional, simply iced, and cherry-topped cupcakes in the morning to take with us. They go down well with the nostalgia-minded parents; the children just pick off or lick off the icing.

  I use a processor, but if you want to make the fairy cakes by hand, cream the butter and sugar, then add the beaten eggs and flour in alternate tablespoons. Use milk to bind, as usual, and you won’t need the extra baking powder.

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  pinch salt

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, very soft

  ½ cup superfine sugar or vanilla sugar

  2 eggs

  1–2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract, if not using vanilla sugar

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  2 tablespoons milk

  Preheat oven to 400°F.

  Line a 12-cavity muffin pan with paper liners. Put all the cake ingredients except the milk in the processor and pulse furiously. Then pour in the milk and process again till you have a smooth, flowing cake batter. Then, using a spoon and a rubber spatula, fill the muffin cups with the batter. Bake for 15–20 minutes or until golden around the edges, and cool on a wire rack.

  When properly cool, make the icing. You can make an ordinary glacé icing—that’s to say 2 cups of confectioners’ sugar mixed with 3 tablespoons of milk—or you can make thicker, stiffer roya
l icing, whipped up from 3 cups confectioners’ sugar, 2 egg whites (observe the cautions for raw eggs, see page xx), and 1 teaspoon lemon juice. Dye as you wish—we run through the full gamut of pink ranging from ballet pink through Pepto-Bismol to all-out Barbie, depending on the intensity of our mood and heavy-handedness with the bottle of coloring.

  When the icing is still wet, let your child place a maraschino cherry in the center of each. You can make double the amount in mini-fairy cakes if you prefer (and then, when topping them, remember to slice each cherry in half); just use a mini-muffin pan.

  JAM TARTS

  Another old-fashioned British nursery delicacy, which in truth I can’t remember ever having at home when I was a child but am drawn to for the same sentimental reason my own children are—it evokes not the real but the super-real, the world of picture books and nursery rhymes. So you could say that we have a literary taste for them.

  Because children like little things, we make these in mini-tartlet pans. (Though if you find any tiny heart-shaped pans, you will be able to create very girl-friendly pastries.) The pastry rolls out easily—the acid of the yogurt or buttermilk makes it tenderly cohesive—so let them practice. And use cheap jam, the sort without one iota of fruit in it. It saves having to strain it before spooning it into the pastry cases.

  1 cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

  4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, cold, cut into ½-inch dice

  5 tablespoons buttermilk or 3 tablespoons yogurt with 2 tablespoons of ice water and a pinch of salt

  12 teaspoons strawberry jam

  1½ teaspoons water

  Put the flour in a bowl with the butter and let stand in the freezer for 10 minutes. Process the two until crumbly, add the buttermilk or diluted yogurt, and process again. If it’s not beginning to form a dough, add some more ice water, teaspoon by teaspoon, with the machine running. When the dough is just beginning to come together, remove from the processor, form into a fat disc, and wrap in plastic film and leave in the fridge for 20 minutes.

  Preheat oven to 425°F.

  Roll out the pastry and, with a 2½-inch crinkly cutter, stamp out 24 little circles. Press the pastry circles into the tartlet pan cavities (if you’ve got only one such pan, divide the dough in two and make one batch up after another) and put back in the fridge while you heat the jam in a saucepan with the water until a syrup liquid. Put about ½ teaspoon of jam into each tart and bake for about 15 minutes or until the pastry is cooked through.

  PERIWINKLES

  This recipe, which we were shown by an American girl who stayed with us for a while and whose mom used to make these for her, is a way of using up pastry scraps.

  You need cinnamon, brown sugar, and honey—and scraps. On each tidied-up, oblonged-off strip of pastry, you—or your children—pour some honey, then sprinkle over cinnamon and brown sugar and roll up, like a jelly roll. With a sharp knife and a firm hand, cut across into slices about 2 inches thick. Place them, lying down, so you can see the sweet cinnamon spirals, on a lined cookie sheet and bake for about 15 minutes in a 400°F oven. You can cook your grownup pie first and then pop in the scraps when the oven’s free, adjusting the heat accordingly.

  PARTY FOOD

  * * *

  I am unhelpfully obsessive about children’s parties; by that I mean I like to cook all the food myself. It gives me pleasure—it feels important. I say “unhelpfully” because I am not as well organized as I am obsessed, so I am inevitably exhausted by the time I have to face 20 overexcited, screaming children.

  I have now got wise to the general setup, though, and there are some things you should know before you get started in this game. My comments concern themselves with small children.

  1. They will be too excited to eat much. Concentrate on one or two star items—the cake, some special cookies.

  2. Your child will be more interested in the cake’s icing than in the texture or taste of the layer itself. Reserve your energies; make an all-in-one Victoria sponge (page 24), flavored or colored as required. And buy roll-out marzipan and roll-out or canned icing.

  3. Build a party repertoire for yourself. I now do the same cookies party after party, but change their shape and their icing. I do the same sandwiches, provide the same cocktail sausages or franks, and buy the same sort of chips. The routine is reassuring to your children (just like the same old Christmas tree decorations coming out year after year) and helpful for you. Add to this repertoire—and see below—but keep it to provide a solid foundation.

  4. Don’t try to please other parents. The party is for your child.

  5. Don’t get agitated about the amount of sugar, food color, salt, cream, or butter. This is not the time.

  Here are some ideas.

  HALLOWEEN PARTY

  • Chocolate cake with green marzipan and orange icing. Put black-hatted witch on top.

  • Cookies (see page 453) shaped like pumpkins and decorated correspondingly; others to look like cobwebs.

  • Jam tarts (by request; the jam to denote blood), recipe on page 449.

  • Monster’s eyeballs: just use a melon-baller (for once! useful!) to scoop out a green- or yellow-fleshed melon.

  • Cocktail sausages or franks. You can’t have too many. For 20 children and 12 or so adults, I make 200. You get about 30 to the round. Roast the sausages in pans in a 350°F oven for 40–50 minutes; grill or broil franks for about 3 minutes per side.

  • Sandwiches; pesto-filled (for the green color).

  • Violently orange cheese-flavored corn-worm crisps.

  • Candy apples.

  A GIRL’S FOURTH BIRTHDAY PARTY

  • Pink-colored sponge cake, flavored with strawberry flavoring, pink icing, with a Barbie sitting on the corner of the cake. (Beware: fire hazard.)

  • Cookies, see page 453, but stamped out with cutter in the shape of a 4, covered with bright pink glacé icing, with sprinkles strewn over when wet.

  • Dozens of pink meringues (see page 17 for recipe, adding pink food coloring in final whisk and squeezed through rosette nozzle to make flower shapes about 1½ inches in diameter).

  • Cocktail sausages or franks, see above.

  • Fairy cakes (page 448).

  • Orange cheese-flavored corn-worm crisps.

  A BOY’S SECOND BIRTHDAY PARTY

  • Plain sponge cake, iced white, with animals clumsily made out of dyed, bought fondant icing and marzipan, to form a circle around the edge. To tell the truth, I cannot ice, but I took the precaution of marrying someone who can.

  • Cookies as above and recipe below, chocolate version, with grated zest of an orange added to the cookie mixture, and stamped out with a cutter in the shape, unsurprisingly, of a figure 2. Iced yellow, made with icing sugar, orange juice, and—no sleep tonight—yellow coloring, and sprinkles strewn on top.

  • Lemon tarts, following recipe for Jam Tarts (see page 449) but substituting bought lemon curd in place of the jam. You need neither to heat the lemon curd nor add water to it before spooning it into the little tart cases.

  • Cheese Stars, following recipe above, but doubling the ingredient amounts.

  • Cocktail sausages or franks, see above.

  • Several bowls of stalked seedless white grapes.

  • Orange cheese-flavored corn-worm crisps.

  THE CAKE

  This is the children’s cake I make, easily, year after year. For a single large cake, use a 10-inch springform pan, greased and lined with baking parchment.

  ¼ cups all-purpose flour

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  pinch salt

  1½ cups superfine sugar

  1¼ cups (2½ sticks) unsalted butter, very soft

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  5 eggs

  2 tablespoons milk

  Mix everything together in the processor. (To make a chocolate cake, add 2 tablespoons cocoa powder mixed to a paste with 2 tablespoons boiling water. For a pink cake, add pink food coloring and u
se strawberry icing.) Pour into the pan and bake in a 400°F oven for 20 minutes, reduce the heat to 350°, and continue to bake another 40–50 minutes or until the cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan. You may need to cover loosely with foil or greaseproof paper to stop it burning at the end. Allow the cake to sit on a rack in its pan for 10 minutes, then turn it out, domed side down, so its weight flattens what will be the base and you have a nice flat bottom to present to the world and provide a smooth base for the icing.

  Because of the sheer volume of ingredients (and lack of air in a cake when you mix it in a processor), this cake doesn’t rise much. You could, therefore, also make it in the old-fashioned way, either by hand or with a mixer, creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs and flour, and thus beating a lot of air into the batter. Further, you can do the cake mixture in two layer-cake pans, or you can make two full cakes, one after the other, to create a super-layer cake, particularly welcome when there are 20 or more children to feed. For a pink birthday cake I did this and stuck the cakes together with strawberry buttercream because I felt a tall, more frou-frou-looking creation fitted the particular bill. (For the icing I used 3 cups of that compellingly vile strawberry-flavored confectioners’ sugar you can get now and 10 tablespoons butter, blended.) But in fact the cake, though it looked wonderful, didn’t cut very well. You might decide, after all, that you can live with a not-very-high cake.

  On the whole, that last is the wisest way of approaching it. As I said earlier, the birthday girl or boy is going to be far more interested in looking at and eating the icing. And the all-in-one processor method (see page 25, too) is easier, especially when you’re up against time—as you inevitably will be. D. W. Winnicott, the distinguished pediatrician and analyst, wrote about being a “good-enough mother”; be satisfied with baking a good-enough cake.

  For a chocolate cake—if I may backtrack—I make my own marzipan out of pistachios, but I now see that for what it is: an act of madness. Use ordinary store-bought marzipan and dye it green, or you can buy colored marzipan. You can use black food coloring, available from baking goods suppliers, for coloring a marzipan witch’s hat or similarly sparky design. For the animals, let fancy, imagination, or competence be your guide.