The things I cook for work...
...and what my children actually eat, by Rukmini Iyer. Photos by David Loftus.
Welcome to Vittles Kids, a special series of features, essays, opinion and a guide about feeding children at home and in restaurants. In today’s essay, Rukmini Iyer shares that while readers may love her recipes, her own children are less easily convinced.
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This picture was taken for my latest cookbook. How lovely, you might think, a little child eating a bit of toddler muffin. But is she eating a toddler muffin? Or any of the food in her bowl? No. She is not. She’s reaching for a cube of cheese in my hand – I had a plentiful supply out of shot. Bribery, ladies and gentleman, so she’d pose with a plate of food. The curtain drops! Chef’s child eats … nothing. Does buttered pasta count?
As the children of a working food writer, the girls are surrounded by fresh food. They grow their own vegetables in little pots, ask me to buy raspberry canes and blueberry bushes, and last week, perhaps anticipating her future as a chef patron, Alba threw a toy saucepan at her sister. So far, so promising. On the downside, it’s uniquely painful when they don’t eat any of the fresh food I cook for them, fall on packets of Pom- Bears at parties like tiny savages, and respond to the information that they’re allowed only one Peppa Pig vitamin gummy per day by eating just one bean, one pea, and one piece of pasta for dinner. ‘I’m only allowed one of these per day too, Mummy.’ Alba is three. It’s even more painful that she had tricked me into thinking she was a fantastic eater for her first 18 months.
During my first maternity leave I read Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J Ryan Stradal (a nice antidote to all the Jilly Cooper and Philippa Gregory ). In the novel, the main character’s father is a chef who plans elaborate dinners to develop his newborn daughter’s palate, and – like a fool – I was inspired. I made Alba’s first purée from garden produce: I harvested and podded peas, picked fresh Russian tarragon (not too much, I’m not a monster) and sautéed the peas and herbs in butter before blitzing them with crème fraîche, seasoning it with a little lemon juice in lieu of salt. Did I pass the mush through a chinois? Why yes, I did! Did I make that much effort over an infant meal ever again? I did not. A week later, with my kitchen covered in splotches of saffron risotto and unidentifiable blobs that even the dog wouldn’t eat, I realised why it’s only fictional characters who attempt Michelin-style meals for babies. The mess – the goddamn, unholy, unhinged level of mess in feeding a creature just over two feet long! The chinois went back into the cupboard.
I turned instead to the books that people have assured me saved their sanity through baby-lead weaning – the Roasting Tin series. (I have the entire eight-book set, as I wrote them.) I made one-tin Roasting Tin meals for all of us without salt, mashed a portion (my life’s work, destroyed in a blender!), salted the rest, and dished it up to husband and baby. One-tin oven risotto, one-pan chickpea curry and roasted tomato orzo were received with appetite. All-in-one berry ricotta pancakes with lemon butter, three-bean chilli, harissa-spiked pasta and kimchi fried rice disappeared. Crispy tofu with peanut dipping sauce and miso butter noodles with tomatoes and spring onions not only became weekly staples, but made it into the next cookbook.
Encouraged, I took Alba on trips to the fishmonger, coming home to make butter-fried John Dory, garlic prawns and meticulously pin-boned fried mackerel. She loved it. The dog loved the ensuing mess so much that the vet put her on a diet.
But! Foolish, foolish smug chef-mother-woman that I am, fate waited, quietly plotting my downfall. She paused, just until Alba turned 18 months old, just as I published a book with a cheerful ‘cooking for children’ section (with the promise that my own child had taste-tested all the recipes), and then hubris hit. Hard. Suddenly, Alba’s food compass flipped – from ‘Yes, more!’ to looks of absolute disgust (tomato pasta), tears (noodles with peanut butter) and screams (porridge for breakfast.) It was a flat-out no to anything with sauce, also a no to the thinnest, crispest buckwheat crêpes (a useful byproduct of dating a Breton before meeting my husband). It was even a no to basmati rice, which was particularly agonising, because basmati rice forms the backbone of my – and now half of her – cultural inheritance.
Anyway, as if leaning towards her solidly Anglo Saxon-Cornish-Irish heritage, overnight Alba’s diet shrank to just buttered toast, buttered broccoli (but only tenderstem, and only the stems), buttered pasta, or indeed, just butter, supplemented with fruit (but only expensive fruit), and chocolate cake at the weekly rounds of children’s birthday parties. I despaired.
Then I produced another child, waited another six months, and watched in astonishment as she – like her sister before her – ate everything on her plate, showing no interest in plain buttered anything. Now, I thought. Now is the time to bring the family meal together, so I’m not cooking three separate meals every night – one for work and one for each child. Peer pressure will surely bring Alba back around to the balanced diet she used to enjoy!
What follows is a snapshot of everything I cooked in a week as a professional food writer, compared with everything my children ate.