By the time you pack them off to university, a good tomato sauce and a roast chicken are a must. The perfect hollandaise? Not so much
Recently, I came home to find the remnants of a hollandaise sauce smeared across the inside of a kitchen bowl. I ran my finger through what was left. It was perfect: foamy and rich with that necessary acidity. Apparently my 17-year-old son had knocked it up from watching YouTube videos. Not long before, I had introduced him to the glories of eggs benedict. (Look, he’s a restaurant critic’s child. What do you expect?) He wanted to eat one so Googled the instructions for the sauce. He had no idea that it’s tricky to get the temperature of the bain-marie right, so the eggs don’t curdle as you whisk them. He just did it. Sometimes ignorance can be a wonderful thing.
Nobody needs to know how to make the perfect hollandaise. But it got me thinking. My son is preparing for his A-levels. If all goes to plan, he’ll be off to university come the autumn. Surely good parenting, albeit of the belly-obsessed kind, demands that you send your progeny out into the world armed with some key recipes? Partly it’s about survival. You need to know how to stretch a budget. But it’s also about providing comfort, both for yourself and others.
Related: Teenage cooks: a minority?
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