Feeding other people’s children
Nell started being invited places, and then people started being invited here, and I discovered I had no idea what I was doing — including a fairly frightening twenty minutes about a peanut that turned out not to be a peanut.
The invitations started in the spring and I was completely unprepared for the food part of it.
Not the cooking. The responsibility. There is a difference between feeding your own children, whose entire dietary history you carry in your head, and feeding somebody else’s, about whom you know one fact, which is her name.
The twenty minutes
A girl came for tea and I’d made something with a satay-ish sauce in it, because I was showing off, and about four minutes in her friend said — cheerfully, as an item of news — “she can’t have nuts”.
There were no nuts in it. It was made with a seed butter, for entirely unrelated reasons, and I knew that with complete certainty within about eight seconds.
I did not feel certain for another twenty minutes. I sat with a jar in my hand reading the same label four times, and I rang her mum, and her mum was lovely, and it was fine, and it was fine because of a coincidence.
That is not a system. I had built no system at all.
Asking properly
Now: a message, the evening before, every time. Including for children who have eaten here before, and including for children whose parents I know well.
And the crucial bit — I say what I’m planning to give them. Not “any allergies?” but “I was going to do pasta, cheese, cucumber and bread, is that alright for her?”
The difference is enormous. “Anything I should know?” asked at the door gets “no, she’s fine” from a parent who is halfway into a car and thinking about something else. A named list gets “actually she doesn’t do dairy” or “she’ll only eat the bread, sorry”, and twice it has produced a “hang on, let me check” that ended somewhere important.
The safe tea
Pasta, plain. A bowl of grated cheese. Cucumber cut into sticks. Bread and butter. Fruit after.
All separate. Nothing assembled, nothing sauced, everything visible. It is beige and it is dull and in about three years no child has failed to find two things on that table they were willing to eat.
I learned this from watching what happens with our own three-year-old, which is that food in components is a completely different proposition from food that has been combined by an adult and presented as a decision.
Saying it out loud
When I put it down I say what it is. “That’s cheese, that’s cucumber, the bread’s got butter on.”
Six seconds. It has caught something twice — once a child who said “I’m not allowed butter” in a small voice, which turned out to be true and had not been mentioned by anyone.
Children will not volunteer information but they will confirm it, if you give them something to confirm.
When they eat nothing
It happens, and the answer is toast and no comment.
I had an instinct early on to encourage — to do the gentle thing I’d do with my own — and it is completely wrong in somebody else’s child. She has been brave enough to come to a strange house. She is not going to also be brave about a courgette.
Things people email to ask
- What should you feed other people’s children on a playdate?
- Something plain, familiar and served in parts rather than assembled. A child in an unfamiliar kitchen has already used up a lot of courage getting there and is not in the market for a new dinner. Ours is pasta, a bowl of grated cheese, cut cucumber and bread, all separate, and in three years nobody has failed to find something they will eat.
- How do you ask about allergies before a playdate?
- In writing, before the day, and every single time — including for a child who has eaten here before. A message the evening before saying what you plan to serve gets a far more accurate answer than “anything I should know?” at the door, which almost everybody answers with “no, she’s fine” while getting into a car. Naming the food is what prompts people to remember.
- Should you ask the child about their own allergies?
- You can ask, but you cannot rely on it. Small children mix up allergies, dislikes and things they have heard other people say — one told me with complete confidence that she was allergic to Wednesdays, and another failed to mention a genuine dairy allergy because at home nobody offers her milk so it does not come up. The parent is the source; the child is a useful cross-check.
- What if a child won’t eat anything you’ve made?
- Let it go and offer toast. A playdate is not the place to hold a line about food, and a child who has eaten nothing for two hours at somebody else’s house is a child who goes home unhappy and probably does not come back. Toast, fruit, and a cheerful lack of comment. Nobody has ever been harmed by an unexciting tea.
Where we checked
We are not experts in any of this. Where an entry touches something that has a proper answer, here is where the proper answer is.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
Packed lunches, after two terms of getting them back
For two terms I made a nice lunch and it came home. Not some of it — the same three things, every day, in the same box, having travelled to school and back untouched.
The lentil soup we’ve made forty times
It is not a good recipe. It is a repeatable one — four things we always have, one pan, and a texture that survives being reheated on a Tuesday by a man who is not paying attention.
The traybake that covers three dinners
One tray, one oven, forty minutes, and no attention required in the middle of it. It is the only thing I cook that produces a second and third meal without me having decided to make a second and third meal.
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