Melissa Clark

Let the Kids Cook

Melissa Clark gives gives kids the keys to the kitchen

BY TARA Q. THOMAS

cheesy skillet black beans CLARK WITH DAUGHTER DAHLIA AND HUSBAND DANIEL GERCKE

Yessssssss please

This was my 13-year-old texting me from her bedroom about “Kid in the Kitchen,” a new cookbook out from Melissa Clark. My kid has never texted me about a cookbook before. She’s barely ever even glanced at the shelf of kids’ cookbooks we have accrued since she was a toddler, even though she passes it on every trip to the kitchen. In fact, despite the fact that she lives in a house filled with cookbooks, she’s never had any interest in making lunch or dinner. In one afternoon, “Kid in the Kitchen” changed all that.

At some level, this should come as no surprise: Melissa Clark has such a reputation for writing good recipes that The New York Times has tasked her with the job every week since 2007, in a column called A Good Appetite. She’s the face of the cooking section, too, putting out weekly videos, and did a podcast, Weeknight Kitchen with Melissa Clark, with The Splendid Table in 2019. She’s also the go-to writer for chefs, helping restaurateurs such as Daniel Boulud, David Bouley and Claudia Fleming translate their recipes for the home kitchen. And while Clark had never written a book for kids before now, she has written 42 others since her first in 1993.

Most importantly, she has an 11-yearold—Dahlia. And, it turns out that even a world-famous cook who works out of her home kitchen finds inspiring her kid in the kitchen nearly impossible. “She’s like, ‘Mom, get OUT,’” Clark says, commiserating over the phone and a cup of tea one morning. “I can’t be in the kitchen with her, probably because I’m a know-it-all, bossy mama cook—I’m her mother! I wrote it so I could leave her in the kitchen with the book and she could just figure it out.”

That might sound a little rough, but Clark means it in the most supportive way possible. “Most kids’ cookbooks are written for young ones, and it’s all about ‘be careful, be careful,’” she says. “But by the time your kids are tweens, they can absolutely handle it.”

Okay so far my favorite thing about the cookbook is the way the colors make parts pop and make it make more sense

“Kid in the Kitchen” doesn’t actually read that differently than an adult cookbook. The presentation is fairly traditional, with a recipe on one page and a photo facing it. And while the recipes have fun names (“OMG, I Smell Bacon!” or “Wrap Artists” for a section on tacos), Clark doesn’t talk down to her readers. There are notes on how to cook pasta perfectly “al dente,” how to separate eggs, and how to peel fresh ginger with the edge of a spoon—things you would encounter in an adult cookbook. “With the kids’ book, I just added one more layer, to ask myself, ‘Where would Dahlia need the extra hand-holding?’” Clark says.

Those places are highlighted in bright colors and boxes—helpful for people with short attention spans or too impatient to read through an entire recipe before launching into cooking (issues not unique to kids, Clark quickly points out). “Every recipe starts out with what you need to do for thinking ahead, especially for baking recipes—taking the butter out of the fridge, taking the eggs out of the fridge,” she says. “I want to give them every tool I have so they can make the perfect popovers or an amazing pan of brownies or yummy ramen for the whole family. I want them to feel like, ‘OMG, I made this thing!’”

Wow I just found the brownies with candy canes

Like many kids, Clark’s earliest attraction to the kitchen was through sweets. “I was a baker,” Clark says. “I baked a lot of things because, although my parents were great gourmet cooks, there were no cookies in the house, ever. I would have to go to my friend Abby’s house, where it was like the cookie aisle in the grocery store. Snack at my house was a buttered rice cake. But my mom respected my sweet tooth. It was just that, if I wanted to fill my larder with sweets, then I had to do it myself.”

Clark’s first attempts weren’t always successful. She tells a story about attempting a purple layer cake all by herself at age eight, and ending up with lavender-hued fingers and a flat gray disk. But she had enough fun in the process that she kept at it, expanding her repertoire to savory dishes by high school.

By the time she was in graduate school at Columbia (where she studied writing, including the university’s first food writing class taught by food historian Betty Fussell), she was parlaying her cooking skills into jobs. “I cornered the dissertation wine and cheese market,” she recalls. “When the professors had celebrations, they could either go to the deli down the street, or to me, and I was cheaper and fancier, because I did things like purple potatoes with smoked trout dip,” she says, laughing at the memory.

Her big break in the cookbook world came when a small publishing house asked her to create a bread machine cookbook. Released in 1993, at the peak of the breadmachine craze, the book was an instant success, and to this day remains a favorite among bread-machine acolytes.

From a parent’s perspective, the most remarkable element of the book might be the recipe selection. “Kid in the Kitchen” is entirely devoid of English-muffin pizzas

I’m texting it to you so I don’t forget: I want to make ramen and grilled cheese

with vegetable happy faces or avocado halves dressed as small animals. “I wrote it thinking about stuff I want to eat,” Clark says. “So much of the stuff in kids’ cookbooks just doesn’t sound good. I don’t recall what book it was, but I remember these kabobs with cherry tomatoes, broccoli and mozzarella. It’s pretty and it pops on the plate, but it doesn’t sound appealing.”

Clark also wanted the book to reflect kids’ tastes today. “Growing up in Brooklyn, I knew Chinese food, but not Thai, not Vietnamese,” she recalls. “Our kids know this stuff. And it’s not just kids in New York; kids across the country are a lot more sophisticated than they were. And kids, once they get over that picky phase, are excited to try new things, especially if they make it themselves,” says Clark. “Even my picky Dahlia, who literally wouldn’t let her food touch a couple of years ago, now loves a bahn mi.”

This means that “Kid in the Kitchen” includes ingredients you won’t often find in kids’ cookbooks. There are calls for chile peppers (and directions on how to handle them), curry powder, shiitake mushrooms and seaweed. There are recipes for farro bowls, pork carnitas and panjeon, a Korean scallion pancake. These aren’t just wishful thinking on Clark’s part; she cleared the recipe list with Dahlia and her friends before committing to it.

The important thing, she found, was helping them see how they could make a recipe their own. “I wouldn’t even have thought to put in a recipe for grilled cheese—I’d thought that’s not something you need a recipe for—but they wanted it, and they wanted to know how do you make it special?” Clark says. The “Tips and Tweaks” were a gamechanger for my kid, who immediately noted how they allowed her to make choices. “I want kids to look at a recipe and say, ‘this sounds yummy to me, this doesn’t, and you know what? I can make that change.’”

But also, Clark firmly believes that kids can handle more than many of us expect. “My parents lied to me all the time. They told

“I want to give them every tool I have so they can make the perfect popovers or an amazing pan of brownies or yummy ramen for the whole family. I want them to feel like, ‘OMG, I made this thing!’”

—Melissa Clark

RECIPE AND PHOTOS REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM “KID IN THE KITCHEN: 100 RECIPES AND TIPS FOR YOUNG HOME COOKS” BY MELISSA CLARK AND DANIEL GERCKE © COPYRIGHT 2020. PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT © 2020 BY DAVID MALOSH. PUBLISHED BY CLARKSON POTTER, AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE. me rabbit was chicken, frogs legs were chicken; horse steak was just steak. There were so many lies,” she says, remembering back to family trips they took to France. “When I would find out about it, I felt betrayed. I was so mad about it for so long. So I vowed not to ever lie to her. But sometimes I don’t mention everything.”

What about the garlicky, crumb’y pasta p 99? Anchovies?!?!?”

Like, say, anchovies. “Dahlia still thinks she doesn’t like anchovies even though I make her anchovy-breadcrumb pasta all the time,” Clark says. “And it’s not like she doesn’t know that they are there. It’s almost like she has two minds: On the one hand she knows that she loves mommy’s garlicky breadcrumb pasta, which she knows has anchovies in it, and on the other she knows she hates anchovies. I’m not going to disabuse her of it, I’m not going to lie to her, and I’m also not going to say, look, you love anchovies! Because that doesn’t work. When kids don’t like something they have to figure it on their own.”

Cooking, she thinks, is one way kids can get over their fear of some foods. “It’s not like the pasta tastes like anchovies; it just adds umami to the dish,” Clark points out. “Seeing that transformation can be powerful.”

I witnessed this power firsthand when my daughter made the pasta including the anchovies (at my urging)—and everyone ate it up. She’s not going to be putting anchovies on her pizza any day soon, but she now gets the idea that you don’t have to love every ingredient in a dish in order to love the dish.

That said, Clark admits that the anchovyinfused garlicky breadcrumb pasta is one of the few dishes in the book that Dahlia hasn’t made. “Maybe if she did, she’d stop at the anchovy. But it is one of our absolute family favorites, so I wanted to include it here.”

Can I make the cornbread too?

As absolutely wonderful as it is to have my kid suddenly cooking—actually preparing meals!—in my kitchen, I have to admit I fought a degree of discomfort with it, too. While she read the instructions on how to dice an onion, she can’t actually do it very well yet, and while she knows pot handles get hot, she can get flustered and forgetful. What if she hurts herself?

“Videos are great, especially for knives,” Clark says, speaking directly to the oniondicing worry. “Every parent should watch a knife skills class with their kid; I know my knife skills improved after watching one with Dahlia. And you as a parent can’t teach them how to use a knife as well as somebody on YouTube can, because they trust them and they think, ‘oh, Mom, get outta here.’”

But you also need to set them up for success. “Before the kid goes into the kitchen to start cooking without you, you need to give them a safety tour,” Clark stresses. “You need to show them how the oven works, how to make sure the stove lights; that this is where it gets hot, these handles are hot.”

Well-prepared doesn’t mean infallible, though. “They are smart, they’ll get it—and they’ll forget, because they are kids, and because they’re human—I am queen of forgetting that I put the skillet in the oven and then grabbing it,” Clark says. “The worst that’s going to happen is they’re going to cut themselves, and they’re going to bleed. But they are not going to set the kitchen on fire or chop anything off. We’re not talking little kids.”

Plus, a little fear on both your parts isn’t a bad thing; it will help keep you aware. But you do have to give them room to make mistakes, even if it means a little physical pain. “You let them cross the street, right?,” she says. “You have to let go, too. And the more they do it, the more secure they’ll get and the more relaxed you’ll get.”

What’s sometimes more challenging than a fear of physical injury is the fear of failure. Anyone, any age, who’s tried to make something for the first time, and with great hopes for the outcome, knows the fear of failing, and how it can distract from doing something well. For that fear, Clark says, the best thing you can do is simply be there. Not in the kitchen, but within ear shot. “Even though kids want independence, the second things go wrong, they want you to fix it,” Clark says. “Dahlia wants to do it herself—she says, ‘Mommy, get out of the kitchen, I want to do this,’ but when she runs into a roadblock and then I’m there, that’s a really nice togetherness moment for us. That is where you get to cook with your kid.” 

Garlicky, Crumb-y Pasta MAKES 4 SERVINGS

This pasta is my daughter Dahlia’s all-time favorite, and we make it together two or three times a month. Its beauty is in the crunchy, garlicky topping on the springy, buttery noodles—so we keep this pretty plain, though sometimes I’ll add sliced olives or an egg (see Tips and Tweaks). Anchovies add a subtle, savory flavor that’s delicious and not at all fishy.

kosher salt, as needed ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil 6 garlic cloves, minced 4 to 8 oil-packed anchovy fillets, chopped pinch of crushed red pepper flakes (optional) 1 cup panko or other unseasoned breadcrumbs 1 pound spaghetti, linguine, or other pasta 4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter ½ cup chopped fresh parsley leaves lemon wedges, for serving flaky sea salt, for serving freshly ground black pepper, for serving

1. Fill a pot with water for the pasta, then stir in enough kosher salt to make it taste like seawater (nicely salty, but not too salty). Place the pot on high heat and let the water come to a boil while you start to make the topping (it will take a while to boil). 2. Meanwhile, in a large skillet set over medium-high heat, heat the oil for about 20 seconds. It will thin out as it heats, but it shouldn’t get hot enough to smoke. Stir in the garlic, anchovies and red pepper flakes if using. Cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Keep an eye on it—garlic burns really quickly. If the garlic starts to turn brown, pull the pan off the heat to let it cool down for a few seconds. The anchovies will have mostly dissolved in the oil. 3. Stir in the breadcrumbs and continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the breadcrumbs are golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Using a large spoon, transfer the breadcrumbs to the plate. 4. When the water is boiling, add the pasta and cook until it is just shy of al dente, about 2 minutes less than the package directions. To test it, grab a piece with a fork and run it under cool water before tasting. Using a measuring cup or a mug, scoop out about a cup of the pasta water and put it aside to use in the next step. Carefully drain the pasta in the colander. 5. In the same pot you cooked the pasta in, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Whisk in ¾ cup of the reserved pasta water and bring it to a simmer. Simmer for 1 minute to reduce the sauce, then turn off the heat. Add the pasta and the parsley, and toss to coat. Let simmer for another 30 seconds to 1 minute to heat through and finish cooking the pasta. Add a splash more pasta water if the pasta seems dry. 6. Right before serving, toss about three-quarters of the breadcrumbs with the pasta until well distributed. Divide the pasta among four bowls, and top with the remaining breadcrumbs, a squeeze of lemon juice, a sprinkle of flaky sea salt and lots of black pepper.

Get it Set

• Put a colander in the sink. • Put a plate next to the stove for the breadcrumbs. • Set out all your ingredients.

Tips and Tweaks

• If you want to work ahead, the breadcrumbs will keep in the fridge for up to 1 week. Put them back in a skillet and warm them over low heat until they get crispy again. They’re ready when you can smell the garlic. • Sliced olives make this even saltier. Add 2 tablespoons to the pan along with the parsley. • If you must leave out the anchovies, okay fine. Just before serving, sprinkle the pasta with lots of grated Parmesan cheese or a little extra salt. • Top each serving of the pasta with a poached or fried egg. The silky, runny yolk is fantastic with the crunchy breadcrumbs.