LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (Kids)
As a parent, you are blessed with the greatest creative challenge and joy of all: the unadulterated palate. Through cooking for your child, your own sensual expression, you are helping to form a new sense of taste, probably for life. However, nuances of flavour also come from our sense of smell; the largest part of the brain is related to smell, and it is our longest-term memory. By letting him or her smell good food cooking, and tasting it, your child will retain those early memories for ever.
Babies have to learn to enjoy tastes. This is wonderful for you and baby, and you can experiment and create! From about five months, puree ‘whole’ fruits, vegetables and selected grains, organic where possible. Try gravies of beef or other meat, but restrain your urge to regale them with buttery, wine infused sauces. Food must not be too rich, and flavours should not be too strong. So use little salt or sugar: a baby’s kidneys cannot metabolise the former, and the latter is completely empty in a nutritional sense. And cook in healthy ways – steaming, poaching etc., rather than frying. Until at least nine months, most babies cannot tolerate too much fat, egg white, whole nuts or hot spices. From nine to twelve months you can introduce cheese, beans, yoghurt, fromage frais, whole-wheat bread and pastas, casseroled meat and well-cooked egg white. Cow’s milk could be drunk after one year, and never offer skimmed or low-fat dairy products; children need the fat as well as the calcium.
By the age of five, most children have fixed ideas of what they like and dislike. They also need a lot of food (they could be a restaurateur’s dream), three times as much, per unit of weight, as adults, which makes for three meals and two to three snacks a day. Exploit this opportunity to introduce an enormous variety of healthy snacks. Encourage them, as I do all my friends (of whatever age), to use their hands. Let them communicate with food with all their senses, which is real enjoyment and understanding of food. Let them dip bread into cold-pressed olive oil, which has a similar calorific count to, but less cholesterol than, butter.
My peasant childhood was gloriously free of today’s relentlessly chemical environment and culture. Animal studies have shown that certain food colorings frighteningly accelerate the release of certain brain chemicals; other studies demonstrate that some children react dramatically to food colorings. Science also now recognizes that hyperactive children are suffering from exposure to lead from car exhausts and pollution, leading to learning and behavioral problems. Inner-city children are obviously most at risk.
These risks are exacerbated by poor nutrition and by a lack of vitamins and minerals. As I have always feared (I refuse to enter any form of hamburger bar), diets high in junk food are a poor source of Vitamins B1 and B6, as well as zinc and magnesium.
In my experience, all children love nutritious food. It is very refreshing to share in their enthusiasm, and I find them a wonderful audience. Children appreciate beauty as much as, if not sometimes more than, jaded adults. Always garnish their meals, if only with the most basic fresh herb sprig. Most of all, I think it is sinful to make healthy food boring for children.
