There is a kind of family blog post about cooking with children that the writer has come to distrust. It involves clean countertops, careful aprons, a child grinning while measuring flour. The flour, in the photograph, is not on the floor.
This piece is about what happens when you actually cook with a small child. The writer spent three Saturday mornings in three Halifax kitchens, with families who agreed to be observed for the full duration of one shared cooking project. She brought a notebook and a small kitchen timer. She did not help.
Saturday one. Eli, age four. Banana muffins. Estimated time: 25 minutes. The writer arrived at the home of the Whitfield-Acharya family at 9:15 a.m. Eli was at the kitchen table in a dinosaur shirt, watching his father Manish put a bowl on the counter.
9:18. Manish reads the recipe aloud. Eli interrupts to ask if dinosaurs ate bananas. Manish, after a pause, says some of them probably did.
9:23. The first ingredient is mashed bananas. Eli is given two ripe bananas and a fork. The fork is too long for his hand. He mashes with great enthusiasm. Banana flies onto the wall behind the toaster.
9:29. Eli is finished mashing. Manish examines the bowl, which contains about sixty percent of the original banana mass. He scrapes the wall.
9:34. Eli is given a measuring cup and a bag of flour. The instruction is to scoop the flour into the cup. Eli, attempting to fit the cup into a partially closed bag, dumps approximately two tablespoons of flour onto the floor. He apologizes. Manish says it is fine. Manish's tone suggests it is mostly fine.
9:41. The wet ingredients are combined. Eli stirs with a wooden spoon held in both hands. The batter is mixed past the point of optimal. Manish considers stopping him and decides not to.
9:48. The muffin tin is lined with paper cups. Eli puts a paper cup in each well. Two of the cups go in upside down. Manish flips them.
9:54. The batter is spooned into the cups. Eli does this with great seriousness and uneven volume. One muffin will be enormous. One will be tiny. The rest are roughly the same.
9:58. The muffins go in the oven. The kitchen looks, the writer notes, like a small disaster. Manish does not clean it. He sits at the table with Eli and reads a book about a moose.
10:23. The muffins come out. They are good. Eli eats one in three large bites. Total cooking time: 65 minutes. Estimated cooking time without Eli: 22 minutes. The writer's notebook records, in Manish's words: that's the math.
Saturday two. Hana, age seven. Tomato sauce from scratch. Estimated time: 45 minutes. The writer arrived at the home of the Tanaka-Reeves family at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday in late May. Hana, in a striped apron, was already at the counter with a small knife and a cutting board.
Hana's mother, Aoife, had agreed in advance to let Hana use a sharp paring knife. Hana had been using one, with supervision, for six months. The writer watched with held breath. Hana cut a clove of garlic into small even pieces and did not cut herself.
10:14. Hana chops half an onion. Her eyes water. She blinks fiercely and keeps going. Aoife stands at her shoulder but does not intervene. The pieces of onion are not uniform. They are also not, the writer notes, terrible.
10:31. The sauce is simmering. Hana stirs it with the wooden spoon. She tastes it with great seriousness and pronounces it needing salt. Aoife asks her how much salt. Hana says, after a moment of consideration, a pinch.
10:48. The sauce is done. Hana has been at the counter for nearly an hour. She is tired but proud. The pasta water is boiling. She drops the pasta in.
11:07. The family sits down to eat. The sauce is, by the writer's assessment, properly seasoned and slightly more garlicky than an adult would have made it. Hana eats two bowls.
Saturday three. Marcus, age nine. Bread. Estimated time: three and a half hours, mostly waiting. The writer arrived at the home of the O'Reilly family at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday in early June. Marcus was at the table with his grandmother, Margaret O'Reilly, who has been making bread on Saturdays for fifty-one years.
Margaret had agreed to teach Marcus the family recipe, which she had inherited from her own grandmother in County Mayo in 1959. Marcus had asked, at Christmas, to learn it.
The dough is mixed by hand. Marcus, who plays piano, has unexpectedly good hands for the work. Margaret watches him knead for ten minutes without interrupting. When he stops, she shows him how to check the windowpane: stretching a small piece of dough between his fingers until it is thin enough to see through.
It takes three tries. On the third, he sees through.
The dough rises for two hours on the counter. Marcus reads a book. Margaret folds laundry. The kitchen smells, by 11 a.m., of yeast and warm flour.
The bread is baked in a black cast-iron pot Margaret has owned since 1974. It comes out at 12:35 with a deeply cracked crust and a hollow sound when tapped. Marcus carries it carefully to the cutting board.
Margaret cuts the first slice. She gives it to Marcus. He eats it with butter. He does not say anything for a moment, and then he says, I want to make this every Saturday.
Margaret, who is seventy-three, says, you can. We can do it together.
The writer left at 1:15 with a slice of bread in a paper napkin. The cooking, in all three kitchens, had taken longer than it would have without the child. The cooking had also, in all three kitchens, been something else entirely. Not just food made, but a relationship deposited. The math, as Manish said, is the math. The other thing is the other thing.
