Learning to Cook (Properly) at 43

I could cook before children in the way that a reasonably intelligent adult can cook: competently, occasionally well, never with any particular intention. I had a rotation of about eleven dishes I could produce reliably. I had a recipe book I consulted once a year. I treated cooking as a logistics problem — inputs, process, output — rather than as a thing in itself.

This was fine. The eleven dishes were good dishes. The logistics approach produced meals.

What happened after Ellie arrived was that the eleven dishes proved insufficient, for reasons that were partly obvious and partly not. The obvious part: children do not eat eleven dishes. Children eat approximately four things, which rotate on a weekly basis and are subject to sudden, unexplained revision. The less obvious part: cooking for a family is a different activity from cooking for two adults. The timing is different, the constraints are different, the stakes of a meal that fails are higher when one of the people who will not eat it is going to need feeding again in four hours regardless.

I needed more dishes. I also, it turned out, needed to actually learn to cook rather than to simply produce food.

The specific moment

It was a Tuesday. Sam was eight months old, Ellie was two and a half. I had been awake since 5:30am. I had a client call at 3pm. It was 6:15pm and I was standing in front of the hob with a very clear sense that I did not know what I was doing and that three people were going to need to eat within the next forty-five minutes.

I made pasta with a jar of sauce. Nobody complained. It was fine.

I stood at the sink afterwards washing the pan and thought: I need to be able to do better than this, more times than I currently can, without it taking the mental load it currently takes. The bottleneck is not time. The bottleneck is repertoire.

What I actually did

I bought one cookbook, specifically: Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. I bought it because someone I trust recommended it not as a recipe book but as a book that teaches you how cooking works — the underlying logic rather than the specific instructions. I was suspicious of this framing when I read it, because I am someone who learns by understanding mechanisms, and cooking had not previously presented itself to me as something with learnable mechanisms.

It has learnable mechanisms. This was, genuinely, new information.

The book changed my relationship with the hob in a way I did not expect. Understanding why things work — why fat carries flavour and therefore the order in which you add ingredients matters; why acid balances richness and a squeeze of lemon at the end of a heavy dish is not a garnish but a correction; why the temperature you add protein at determines the texture you get — meant that I stopped following recipes as procedures and started cooking as a sequence of decisions.

The repertoire expanded. The mental load reduced. The Tuesday pasta still happens. But it is now a choice rather than a defeat.

The children's food problem

Sam will eat: pasta (three shapes only), cheese (two types only), any fruit, scrambled eggs, toast, rice crackers, and a yoghurt he has decided is the correct yoghurt. He will not eat anything green. He approached a green bean last month with the expression of someone being asked to interact with a hazardous material.

Ellie will eat a broader range of things but applies an inconsistency principle that I have not been able to model: a meal she ate enthusiastically on Monday may be refused on Thursday with no changes to the recipe. I have stopped trying to understand the principle and started cooking things I know she will usually eat, accepting the Thursday refusals as variance rather than feedback.

What I have found is that cooking food I am genuinely interested in — using the techniques I have been learning, making things that are better than they need to be — makes the Thursday refusal less dispiriting. The meal was worth making regardless of whether she eats it. This sounds like rationalisation. It is also true.

The practical setup

The thing that made actual cooking possible in a household with two small children and a full-time freelance career was batch cooking on Sundays. Two or three hours on Sunday afternoon, usually while both children are occupied by Claire or by each other, produces enough cooked components — grains, roasted vegetables, braised protein, sauces — to construct meals quickly on four or five weeknights. The weeknight cooking is then assembly rather than creation.

I use a large Dutch oven. I use a sharp knife — a genuine revelation; I had been using a blunt knife for years, which is both less effective and more dangerous, and the upgrade to a decent chef's knife changed the experience of preparation significantly. Both are in the Toolkit now.

The Sunday cooking is, I have found, one of the things I look forward to in the week. There is something in the sustained, physical, sensory activity of it — chopping, heat, smell, the immediate feedback of things working or not working — that is a different register of attention from the screen-based work that occupies most of the rest of my time. It is, in a small way, the antidote to the desk.

What Sam thinks of all this

Sam ate a piece of roasted butternut squash last week. He did not know it was a vegetable. He ate it because it was orange and approximately the same colour as something he already likes.

I considered this a significant development and did not mention it to him.