Great post!

My earliest is standing on a kitchen chair and helping mom make cookies. I loved to be involved in everything. She would let me stand on a chair to "help" her do dishes and I remember the floor would be soaking wet but she just smiled and cleaned it up and said good job honey. I remember how proud I always was that I got to help. Once when I was about 6 she was making jelly and I was not allowed to be in the kitchen as it was too dangerous so I had to stand across the bar and watch. She was explaining the process to me as she filled the jars and she looked at me and spilled some of the boiling jelly on her hand. she grabbed a towel and wiped it off but did not stop until all of the jars were filled. she had a horrible burn that left a really bad scar but she told me years later that it was worth it to spend time with her girls in the kitchen. My mom died last year but I am so happy that I have wonderful memories of her that will last forever and the jelly making that we did had been continued with our own wild blackberries in the last few years. My sister and I will continue the blackberry jelly making tradition this year without mom its what she would have wanted.

Melissa

I think my first memory of helping was shaping little dough balls into a muffin cup for clover leaf rolls.
My early years were during WWII and sugar and butter and even crisco were rationed. But as soon as the war was over I was into cookies big time.
I remember there was a mix called "Duff's Gingerbread" and if you added less water and a bit of extra butter, they made wonderful rolled and baked crisp cookies...I suppose I was 9 or 10 when I was doing that.
I pretty well always gave my kids free reign in the kitchen. My son learned to cook his own lunch because he was an awful eater, but would eat what he cooked. So he would experiment....stuff things into a hot dog and put it into the oven, put "interesting" things between 2 slices of bread and put them in the sandwich grill.
Kids NEED to be able to help in the kitchen. Both of my kids married people who couldn't boil water....my SIL is still pretty much that way, but he cleans up really well!
I have another friend who just moved back to town, about the only thing she can cook is potato salad, and I have no idea where she learned that.
She has a friend, a woman who has nothing but a couple of bad marriages behind her, and she lives with her and does the cooking and laundry and waters the plants etc.
But my friend's idea of what to do if you are hungry is not to make a sandwich, but to go to subway or KFC or Culvers and bring something home.
I asked her one time, didn't your mother show you how to make stuff? She said mother never cooked, they ate out or brought stuff home....and guess what.....the daughter and grand daughter are the same.
If my friend got snowed in with a house full of eggs and bacon and raw veggies, frozen meats....she would eat peeled carrots....and that's all....maybe a hard boiled egg...but that's it!
Keep those kids helping!
Linda C

I remember decorating the Christmas cookies. I brushed them with egg white and sprinkled on colored sprinkles. Of course every reindeer got a red nose.

Someone gave me the Betty Crocker Cookbook for Boys and Girls and I was fascinated with it. I still have it! My favorite mac and cheese recipe comes from it. I made Whiz Cinnamon Rolls and Sloppy Joes (hamburger, tomato soup and ketchup on a roll). It was published in 1957!

Here is a link that might be useful: Cookbook for Boys and Girls

When my mother got married she couldn't boil water but over time, became a pretty good cook. She was determined that her only child wouldn't be like that, so by the age of nine I was in the kitchen really cooking with her. I think I made a roast for dinner that night. My next memories are of seventh grade home economics class (1/2 year was cooking the other half was sewing---too bad that's gone by the wayside)and loving to make at home what we learned in class and critiquing the recipes, because they were too blah!

Finally, I cooked a bit during my teens and definitely during college when I lived in a sorority house and helped out in the kitchen during periods where we didn't have a housemother who cooked! I remember my roommate taught me to make a white sauce, but the one thing I never worked with was dough. When I was sixteen, I surprised my boyfriend with his favorite, a cherry pie, but I didn't realize that the crust had to be pre-baked! He was such a good guy, he choked it down anyway!! LOL

When I was in 7th grade, back in the days when Home Economics was a required course for girls in junior high, we had semester of cooking.

My parents went out Christmas shopping one Friday evening and I told them I would have dinner prepared when they got home. I made a dish we had learned to make at school - white bread slices with the crusts cut off, buttered and placed in a muffin tin. Then a mixture of eggs with chopped ham and cheese was poured in and baked. They came out sort of like mini quiches....I served a salad with it.

I don't remember how they tasted as much as I remember how pleased and proud my parents were. I felt so happy and gratified to have been able to create something that brought so much pleasure to people I loved.

Working in the kitchen serves as a creative outlet for me, and it's not just frivolous - we all need good food and nourishment. Nothing else I do for family and friends gives me the satisfaction that I get from cooking and baking. They may not ever notice when I scrub the toilet and wash the floor.....but put a warm, home cooked meal, or a pie or cake, in front of them and I am golden! And the best part is, I have a ball doing it -

The first dinner I made was a meatloaf! I was 10 years old and had watched my Mom cook and she let me make it myself..I've been cooking ever since! My Mom always let us watch and then we were allowed to cook as we grew older. I used to love making Christmas cookies too.

My Mother was a good cook, by my Mammaw was the best. She made the best cinnamon rolls, hot rolls, banana nut bread, carrot cake, well the list could go on and on. I remember asking Mammaw to teach me how to make rolls and she said to dump some flour on the counter top, more, more and then it was to much. She didn't measure anything, she had a tea cup in the sugar and flour bins for measuring. LOL! Needless to say she never taught me to make rolls because I couldn't get the amounts right.

She also made the best pies. I think because she had arthritis in her fingers she could just go around the edge of the pie tin and have the prettiest fluted crust.

I loved to have breakfast at her house because she would split yesterdays rolls and toast them. Oh, they were so good.

I remember one Saturday a friend and myself were at my house, we were probably 5th. or 6th. grade and we made brownies. I don't know what we did but we put to much butter or oil in them. We cooked that pan of brownies and cooked and it still had oil covering the top and I don't mean just a little. We finally poured off the oil and cooked them some more, they were awful. The dog wouldn't even eat them.

This same friend and myself were at her house and we were going to fix lunch for her parents and have it ready when they came in. We floured round stead and fried it and she said she wished she knew how to make gravy. No problem, I knew how, it was easy. Just pour off some of the grease and add flour and milk and mix it together on high heat. Needless to say it wasn't gravy, but the lumpiest mess that you have ever seen that got as hard as concrete and that was about the time her parents walked in the door. I remember her Mom as not being very happy with our cooking skills.

Stacie, this is a great thread. Thanks for the memories!

My 4 yr. old grandson loves to help me in the kitchen and he is pretty good at it. Cupcakes are his favorite to make and ice.

Both the Grandkids "help" me in the kitchen and my girls were with me when they were so small they sat on the counter with a spoon in their footie pajamas.

My first memory was helping Grandma stuff a turkey, so it was either Christmas or Thanksgiving. I must have been two or three, because I remember everyone still being asleep and me hearing Grandma in the kitchen. I happily joined her and she let me tear up the bread while she prepared the onions and celery. We had an old wooden cookstove and I wasn't allowed near it, but she put the turkey in the roasting pan and let me stuff it, then she made hot chocolate and we had that together while we were waiting for everyone else to get up.

I still remember smelling the wood smoke and the roasting turkey and that hot chocolate made with Hershey's cocoa and fresh milk from the cows. We never skimmed the cream off, just shook it up until it was mixed back in, LOL, and that's probably why hot chocolate today just doesn't taste as good.

Makayla loves the big KitchenAid mixer and "needs" a bread machine of her own, so her memories will be different than mine, but both my girls remember getting up early on holidays and helping me stuff the turkey.

Annie

I had a totally different experience. My Mom, and my Nana's were all ones to shoo us outside as they worked their wonders.....but then again there were a lot of us! LOL

I recall all the smells, and bustling, the flour all over and the mess! I learned by what I saw and heard . Other than making lunches for 6 kids each night I don't recall being directly involved in the cooking but they did pass on to me their love of feeding a family and I thank them because it gives me such joy.

The only exception to that would be my Grandfather. He and my Nana owned several authentic English Style Fish and Chip shops here in Toronto.

Grandad would let us work with him, peeling potatoes, sifting the flour.with an old fashioned sifter..my favourite job....making batter, wrapping up the fish and chips in newspaper or putting the chips in paper cones...and telling us about how he lost his three fingers in WW! !!!! LOL

chase, did that old sifter have a handle that turned? Grandma's did.

And I realize that we didn't really have a wooden cook stove, we had a wood burning cookstove. LOLOLOL

Annie

I still have two sifters with handles that turn and I use both of them. What are people using these days -- what have I missed?

I remember helping make dill pickles, and I know that my sister and I baked to enter things in the fair when we were Camp Fire Girls in grade school...So we must've been baking before that. My mom always let me make the biscuits and certain cookie recipes, because she believed in letting us have our 'specialties' so that our skills were valued in the kitchen. My grandmas were amazing bakers, like Mom, and none of them were ones to shoo helpers away.

My mother-in-law's mother is reported to have been the most excellent cook, but her daughters don't even know how to cook pasta. I'm thinking the kitchen was their mom's domain and she handled it all herself, so the girls never learned. My friend, who was hesitant to let her daughter interfere with the efficiency of working alone, was happy to have her kids work along side her after hearing that story.

Yes it was a metal sifter with a crank handle and a thingy that went 'round from a post in the middle as you turned the crank. It was so neat!

Annie my Nana O'Grady had a wood burning cookstove and she made the most amazing baked goods in it, rolls, cakes pies you name it. I can;t even begin to imagine how she managed the oven temp...

chase, that sounds just like Grandma's. As for the heat, she tried to teach me that if you held your hand at a certain height for a certain amount of time, it was a certain temperature, then it needed more wood or more coals. I never did get it perfectly, like she did.

Annie

I remember always wanting to help mom shape Frickadellen, meatballs, etc. It was just a way to sneak some of that ground meat before it was cooked. I guess I liked tartare before I even knew what it was, or before I learned to fear it and then love it again!

It was 6th or 7th grade before I started actually cooking for the family. Mom would tutor after school, so she'd prepare meals ahead of time. It began with just turning the oven on at a certain time, and evolved to me helping prepare, and finally to me actually cooking a few of the easy staples. It was around that time that I lost my sweet tooth. I got much more interested in tasting what I was cooking to make sure it was to my liking, than to grab a cookie.

i'm not sure how old i was but some of my earliest cooking memories are of learning to peel potatoes. i learned w/ a knife & was struggling to make the peels as thin as i could.

i had to be very young, because by the time i was 11 i was cooking whatever Mom had told me to prepare for dinner everynight. she'd plan it, defrost anything that needed it & leave me notes.

poor woman was working her fanny off as a nurse & getting home at ungodly hours so having dinner cooked for her was a really big deal.

lil.

My mother always encouraged me to 'help' in the kitchen, doing chores ranging from licking the bowls out, to stirring, to washing up, setting or clearing the table, all sorts of things, even from toddlerhood.

But my fondest memories go back to my grandmother. From a very young age it was my job to make the toast every morning while we were staying with my grandparents. This involved attaching bread slices to a large toasting fork, and holding it over the hot coals in the wood stove. I can smell and taste it as I type - the best toast ever! And the best job on a cold winter's morning, sitting on a little stool near the stove!

Then there were the little jam tarts we'd make. Made from the scraps of leftover pastry from pie-making, the pastry would be rolled out with a mini-rolling pin (made just for us by our grandfather), then pressed into metal jar lids, and filled with home-made jam. Thinking back on it now, that pastry was as overworked as it could be, very unevenly rolled, either too 'fat' or too thin, and would turn out as tough as old nails, but they were the best jam tarts in the whole world because we'd made them ourselves!

Some of my happiest memories are of the women (and us kids) sitting around the kitchen table and shelling peas, or top-and-tailing beans. We were allowed to eat as many as we liked as we worked, and to this day I still like raw beans and peas, fresh from the garden.

I remember helping my Mom make pudding for my Grandfather. He died when I was two so obviously I was not doing too much of the actually cooking, but I clearly remember picking out the flavor (it was chocolate from a box) and serving it to him.

My mom always let me make pudding and I started baking in earnest when I was 7 or 8. I always made cakes (from a mix) and cookies (from scratch - didn't even know there were cookie mixes until a few years ago!).

I really wanted an Easy Bake oven. I never got one, instead my mom bought a bunch of Jiffy cake mixes and let me go to town. I still want an Easy Bake oven! They still make them, but I heard they don't cook with a light bulb anymore.

Bread spread with butter, sprinkled with sugar and folded over. Calves liver, which I refused to eat, as my mother fried it hard.

What a great thread! I have two first cooking memories. My first solo cooking concoction was when I was about 8 -- pan fried diced onion, potato, and water chestnut together, and thought it was the most delicious thing on earth. Truth be told, how bad can fried onions and potatoes be? Other memory was from around the same age -- I had a babysitter who loved to bake and whose father owned a bakery. Whenever she would come over we would make some kind of yummy dessert -- I remember making black and white chocolate brownies, and chocolate mousse!

Can't wait to read more of these from others...

Emily

As a little girl, I remember getting the leftover pie crust trimmings. I would sprinkle them with sugar and cinnamon and bake my own treats.

Now that I'm a grandma, I do all sorts of fun things with my 3 year old grandson Eli. We have "Camp Grandma/Grampa" and last time we baked cookies and made dried apple heads. I showed him how to use the peeler, cut with a plastic knife, stick raisens in the face for eyes. Here are a couple fun pics.

I love hearing about all your stories.

OMG I love that picture of Eli looking in the oven, and those pudgy little hands are so adorable!

Yes you are making memories for him but you are getting some pretty great ones too!

Chase, I love those pudgy little fingers too, I might have to make shrunken heads with Bud and Makayla this weekend!

Annie

I am so glad that I started this thread. It is fun to see how many memories we have shared. I think all these shared memories help us to know each other better. Plus I see many of us are working with the next generation on being foodies;)

Stacie

My brother Don making a cake one afternoon. I think I was about 8 him 11. Our mom was off to town in the panel wagon. To be gone most all day helping our aunt. This was about 1952. While being home alone, us building fires was a no no. I helped fire up the wood cook stove. Don had some duck eggs he'd taken from a duck's nest he'd found out in the woods. Big ol' eggs they were.

I helped do some stirring and stuff. The wood stove was ready and he put the pan inside. Told me to watch for Mom coming home [could see long ways down the dirt road.] When I said, "I see Mom comin' down the road." Don flung open the oven door, yanked out the pan, [and it was smelling real good in the kitchen], ran out the backdoor.

With me right behind him, I stopped on the backporch and watched him run to the backfence and fling the cake into the weeds. Even with the excuse that we built the fire to make biscuit toast from morning breakfast leftovers, we got chewed out for building it. Mom had to know we were doing something unusual, but she never questioned us about it.

She's now 94 and I think it was about 4 years about that I told her about Don cooking that Over the Fence cake. I think that was his only foray into cooking. But the smell of the duck egg cake that I never tasted must have lit a fire under me.