How to Help Kids Find Joy in Cooking? Hand Them a Book.

My older daughter’s first cookbook was a gift from a friend of mine. She’d come over for dinner, and handed the wrapped package to Sadie.

“So you can help your mom out in the kitchen,” she’d said as Sadie freed the book from its paper and ribbon.

This friend was in her fifties, and her children were grown. I figured she’d forgotten what it was like to have toddlers in the kitchen. I smiled and nodded as she talked about baking with her own kids when they were little. But Sadie clung to her new treasure, The Baking Book by Jane Bull, and I thanked my friend for the gift. Sadie, then four, used it to swat her 2-year-old sister Rosie away. Rosie cried, I took the book from Sadie, and we sat down to dinner and moved on.

But Sadie kept going back to the book. I kept it on a low shelf with her other favorites, and I’d regularly find her curled up on the couch, scanning the banana bread and chocolate chip cookie recipes as if they were the thrilling adventures of her beloved Babar. And finally, one rainy Saturday, I suggested she choose a recipe to bake.

It was a difficult decision. But after much page turning, she settled on chocolate chip cookies. I helped her find the ingredients, and then to my combined worry and relief, she told me she could do it all by herself. And while I hovered in the doorway to help with the oven when the time came, I watched her do just that.

Of course it took ages. Of course she made a mess. But the book, her book, kept her grounded to the recipe and focused on the next step. The Baking Book gives its recipes in pictures, which, along with my occasional help with reading measurements, really let her own the process. And as long as I could take deep breaths, stay patient (the hardest part), and let her find her own successes and mistakes, she made her way through the recipe and ended up with a full batch of cookies baked by her and her alone.

It was a good beginning, and Sadie was hooked. She baked her way through The Baking Book, and then I found Mollie Katzen’s illustrated cookbooks for children. Honest Pretzels started her off on chocolate cake, and Mollie’s Torn Tortilla Casserole was the first dinner project she ever undertook. And as I started to write my own cookbooks and fill the shelves with books that inspired me, stacks of those very same books ended up on Sadie’s nightstand.

Her favorite? Martha Stewart, hands down. She loves the Martha Stewart Living Everyday Food Series for its simple, straightforward dinner options, but I think she loves the tone of them too — the life those recipes convey. She loves the River Cottage Family Cookbook, Mollie Katzen’s books for grown-ups (especially The Moosewood Cookbook and The Heart of the Plate), random cookbooks from the ‘80s she finds at library book sales, and any new book that makes its way onto our kitchen counter. Sadie loves to cook, and now that she’s nearing her teens she takes on dinner nights herself. But for her, each meal starts with a book. Each meal plan comes from a session with a stack of post-it notes and a stack of cookbooks. These books are her inspiration, and they help her visualize the meal, as she’d like to create it. Even more, I think it’s helpful that the books themselves bring an additional adult into the mix. If she’s getting guidance from Mollie or Martha, it means it’s not just the two of us alone in the kitchen trying to figure it out. She has a world of food lovers and teachers right there in the room.

So how do we help our kids find joy and satisfaction in the kitchen? Of all the questions that come to me as a food writer, I get this one the most. Luckily I have a ready answer, as this is one that Sadie taught me.

Give them a stack of cookbooks, and let the pages do the work. They’ll be cooking dinner for you before you know it.

Check out Alana’s latest work of deliciousness, The Homemade Kitchen, a follow-up to her successful debut book, The Homemade Pantry.