London - My new flatmate’s face went rapidly from curiosity and confusion to terror and panic.
In trying to grill a chicken leg while it was still frozen, I had set the kitchen of our rented house on fire. There was nothing for it but the extinguisher.
“What were you thinking?” a furious landlord asked later in disbelief. I wasn’t thinking anything - I’d just left home in Cornwall for London, aged 16, and I had no idea what I was doing because my mother’s a terrible cook.
Mom won’t mind me saying this because her dislike of the culinary arts was widely acknowledged. She once threw a burnt Christmas dinner at our back door in a fury.
We weren’t religious but my dad would say a humorous “fake grace”, apologising for what we were about to eat and what had happened to it beforehand.
My stay-at-home mom came from a generation of women who were told the kitchen was “their room”. I reckon her awful baking was a subconscious daily rebellion against the patriarchy.
It didn’t bother my sister or me, though, because in a sea of food disasters the good stuff stood out: Dad’s brilliant breakfasts, the chocolate cakes Mom made on birthdays. Plus, I had an Italian schoolfriend whose mom introduced me to the garlic clove (the avocado of its day) and an exotic dish called spaghetti bolognese.
Mom had more enjoyable things to do: gardening, reading, ferrying us to activities and rescuing all manner of abandoned pets. And she had more important life skills to pass on, ones that made it possible for me to leave home at 16 and move 320km away in pursuit of a dream career.
Michel Roux Jr doesn’t think so though. The two Michelin-star chef is disappointed in women like my mom: “The two generations of women who haven’t taught their kids to cook.” Shame on them, he says. The irony of a male chef making this pronouncement is, apparently, lost on Roux. He laments working moms’ reliance on supermarket ready meals. Frankly I applaud any woman making enough money to live on the overpriced things.
But that’s not the point. Does he think working men don’t know where the oven is? That somehow their man parts stop them from chopping vegetables? Is he fearful they may lose focus in the boardroom if they indulge in cake-mix spoon-licking with their toddlers? Would he expect Jools Oliver rather than Jamie to teach their four kids this vital skill?
Thoughtless and ridiculous sexism aside, I have to admit Roux is right about kids not cooking, because from 16 to 33 I mostly lived on Pot Noodles. That’s not something I aspire to for my eldest, now 13.
I ate so many of those salty monosodium-glutamate-laden pots that colleagues once gave me a 12-pack of them as a leaving present. When I met my husband, I proudly told him I had bought an open-plan studio flat specifically because it didn’t have a kitchen. If friends came over, we had toast.
But then we married and started a family. I woke up one day in 2002 caring for a hungry newborn and realising I had no idea how to mash a banana.
It was a dilemma – and soon I was frantically trying to keep four children alive in a healthy and inexpensive way. Around the same time a new wave of domestic goddesses – brilliant authors such as Annabel Karmel - were on the trail of “can’t cook, won’t cook” women like me.
I slowly progressed to making lasagne, shepherd’s pie and our particular family favourite, “tuna meltdown”, as it was once accidentally labelled by my toddler son.
It took a while for me to twig that I might one day produce edible adult food. But when your evening meal is all you have to look forward to after a marathon Mr Men bedtime story session, Pot Noodles just don’t cut it.
So I bought all Delia Smith’s books and worked my way up. Mr Candy dips his toe in the culinary jus occasionally, but frankly he is a better tidy-upper than me so he clears while I cook. He pitches in with the kids’ meals, especially now we have a teen and a pre-teen who don’t want to eat with their younger siblings, aged eight and four.
The other reason I learnt to cook - Roux should be glad to hear - was that baking is the cheapest, easiest way to occupy little ones on a rainy weekend. We have a collection of cupcake decorations to rival Tesco.
My eldest made her own birthday cake, aged 11. A giant, three-layered chocolate sponge with elaborate icing that took a week to eat. And my son’s cooking triumph was the fortune cookies he made with his dad. He’d put a note saying “I didn’t wash my hands” in one of them for a joke.
But I don’t consider it my job to teach the children to cook, any more than I consider it my husband’s job to teach them to ride a bike - so don’t try to hit me with that particular working mom guilt stick. The division of duties is not by gender any more, it’s by who has the time and the skills. It’s 2015, “for goodness snakes”, as my son says.
I still don’t know more about cooking than Mr Candy, whose mom actually did equip him with some culinary know-how. Like everything with children, though, you pick it up as you go along.
One thing I am sure of is that none of my offspring will ever grill a frozen chicken leg. I can claim credit for that.
* Lorraine Candy is editor in chief of Elle magazine
Daily Mail