Cookery Classes in Venice: Dea Birkett's Eating with Kids

by Dea Birkett

Venice is for courting couples, not cavorting kids. Every few paces, there are more stepped bridges to fall down and dirty canals to fall in. You rarely spot a Venetian child, and the city has the oldest average age of any in Italy. Sometimes I think my own three are the only non-adults in the whole province.

But the food is made for families. Venice and my seven-year-old twins share the same staple diet – pasta and ice cream. Simple tagliatelle and pesto followed by gelato is our perfect meal. Apart, that is, from posh biscuits.

We’ve been staying at the Molino Stucky Hilton Hotel, a massive red brick converted flour factory on Guidecca island. The hotel has just introduced cookery classes for kids, held in the main kitchens and led by real chefs. Today’s class was making Krumiri and Osso da Mordere - very grown-up, small, round biscuits that taste a little like shortbread, to be taken in mid-afternoon with a small cup of strong coffee. There couldn’t be a more appropriate item to make in a building that was once Europe’s largest mill.

The Pastry Chef Massimo was a rare creature – a native Venetian. He wore thin white rubber gloves throughout the biscuit making and dough cutting, as if conducting a complicated surgical procedure. The twins were in awe of his seriousness. Massimo carefully explained how it he was engaged in not just a craft, but an art. ‘You can be creative. You can use flour, butter and sugar and do something new everyday,’ he exclaimed, holding up one of his uncooked bite-sized masterpieces.

The twins watched the perfect circles harden in the electric oven. Even baking biscuits had a story attached. The mill’s founder, Giovanni Stucky, had been the first to change over from gas. Eventually, Venice became the first electrified city in Italy by tapping into the system built for his mill. But Stucky didn’t profit for long. He was found murdered in Palazzo Grassi. In 1955, the mill finally closed down and was left to sweet decay. Last year, it reopened as Venice ’s largest hotel. It’s so huge and so red, we had easily spotted it from the plane as we circled over the city before landing.

More and more hotels like the Molino Stucky are opening their kitchens to kids, demystifying fine food and, as a result, making it far more likely kids will actually eat it. Once the twins had rubbed their hands in the Krumiri mixture, they just had to lick it off their sticky fingers, even if it was made with almonds and polenta flour and didn’t look remotely like the jammy dodgers that drop out of their crackly cellophane packets at home. To get a child to eat something unusual, it’s not a bad idea to get them to cook it first. I’m delighted that more and more hotels, however upmarket, are beginning to realise that children don’t only belong in the dining room, but in the kitchen.

Next meal: Theme Park food

Dea Birkett
November 2008

Dea Birkett and family stayed at the Molino Stucky Hilton Hotel on Guidecca island.

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