Editor’s Letter

W o u l d y o u s e r v e t h e s e w i t h s p a g h e t t i ? Getting schooled

My 10-year-old nephew, Dax, came home from school last year with this math problem in his homework:

Your family is having a delicious spaghetti dinner this evening! The chef needs to cook 16 potatoes. He has already cooked seven. If each potato takes five minutes to cook, how long will it take him to cook the rest?

This question completely stumped Dax, and not because of the math. He wanted to know why someone would cook potatoes to serve with spaghetti (a fair question, unless maybe this family was planning to eat several pasta courses for dinner and one of them was gnocchi). He also wanted to know why this person would want to cook potatoes individually (was he using the world’s smallest pot?). And incidentally, how was this chef able to cook a potato through in only five minutes? That was the real stumper, and when Dax’s dad, a food-technology expert, posted the homework question on Twitter, some of the world’s great culinary minds chimed in to guess the cooking method.

What’s most fascinating to me is that the school so wildly underestimated how much kids know about food these days. I make the same mistake myself sometimes, but then my 5-year-old will tell me to remember the crumb coat on her birthday cake before I add the fondant (she watches a lot of cake-decorating shows), or a 13-year-old Chopped competitor will reveal that he keeps crêpe recipes in his head, “just in case.” Seriously. (The interview with him is in our kids issue at the back of the magazine.) I don’t remember exactly what I was doing at age 13, but I know I wasn’t memorizing recipes. I wasn’t figuring out how to give royal icing an ombré effect, either, which is what another 13-year-old demonstrates in the same special issue.

I would have posed the homework problem to these young culinary stars, but I’m sure that, like my nephew, they would have found it impossible to answer. Dax did end up writing the appropriate “45 minutes” on his paper, but being a kid of the culinary generation, he also included a suggestion in the margin: “Cook all the potatoes at once!”

Maile Carpenter Editor in Chief @MaileCarpenterr

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