Chef Stefano Borella with Ben at Cucina Caldesi cookery school

We know that children need to eat more healthily but the message will be useless if they don’t learn to cook – and enjoy doing so. Sadly, a generation has already grown up without learning to cook at school: when the National Curriculum was introduced into UK state schools in 1990, practical cookery was sidelined in favour of “food technology”. Children learned to design logos for pizza boxes, rather than to make a pizza.

This gaping hole in our children’s education is something Katie Caldesi, director of Italian cookery school Cucina Caldesi in Marylebone, London, is keen to correct. She has two sons aged seven and nine, and says: “It’s criminal that we dropped cookery from the curriculum. Italian food lends itself to cookery for children as long as they don’t just have white carbohydrates; in Italy you have pasta first, then meat, vegetables, then fruit.”

To help get children cooking their favourite Italian dishes, Cucina Caldesi runs classes for those aged six and over alongside its adult programme. It also has a holiday workshop for teenagers, “La Cucina dei Ragazzi”, led by Caldesi head chef Stefano Borella. I went to observe, while my 13-year-old son Ben, a keen eater and occasional cook, took part in the class alongside five others.

Borella, whose teaching style is informal but authoritative, won over the young cooks from the start. The aim of the session, he said, was to prepare, cook and eat a three-course meal: gnocchi with walnut pesto, fish skewers with lemon couscous and basil pannacotta served with berries.

The class started with the fish. “What’s the worst day to buy fish?” asked Borella, to baffled silence. He explained the problem with Mondays – that fishermen don’t traditionally work on a Sunday, so Monday is the day when fishmongers are closed and any fish on sale is likely to have been lying around since Saturday. “What do you look for when you’re buying fish?” he persisted. “The sell-by date?” suggested one of the young cooks. Snorting, but undeterred, Borella said: “It’s the smell. Fish should smell of the sea and feel firm.”

KITCHEN DREAMS

Cookbooks for older children

The Silver Spoon (Phaidon, £24.95) is the English language version of the 2,000-recipe, authoritative tome on Italian cuisine Il Cucchiaio D’Argento, published in 1950. Later this month, Phaidon launches The Silver Spoon for Children: Favourite Italian Recipes (£12.95). Amanda Grant, who specialises in nutrition and food writing for children, has adapted 40 simple recipes from the “adult” book so that children of 10 and over can prepare and cook them with good results. The book covers basics such as how to make risotto, pizza dough and fresh pasta but also some bigger challenges, such as Tuscan minestrone soup and rigatoni with meatballs.

It’s all beautifully presented, and the effect is that of a rather lovely textbook. Pencilled notes and typography emphasise key points – such as “stretch” above a drawing of pizza dough being kneaded or an exhortation to “keep stirring” from a pan of béchamel sauce. Children’s cookbooks need to be fun and practical, and this works on both levels. It would make a good Christmas or birthday present for a budding – or reluctant – young cook.

Children who can already cook might also like Katie Caldesi’s The Italian Cookery Course, also published later this month (Kyle Cathie, £30). Caldesi describes it as “a step-to-step guide, making it really simple for people to cook Italian food. I’ve cooked a lot of these dishes with my own kids, which they have really enjoyed.”

He held up an odd metal gadget – to the puzzlement of the participants. “This is a passatutto, which means ‘pass all’ and we’re going to use it for the potatoes. We’re going to make gnocchi – has anyone here had them? It’s easier than making pasta, but things can go wrong. We’re using King Edwards to get the best results.”

The session includes advice on holding and cutting with a sharp knife. “There’s nothing wrong with kids using knives as long as you’re careful,” says Borella. “It’s a good thing to learn how to use them.”

The teenagers divided into groups and set to work. Two girls pulled out the pin bones from the salmon – “so you don’t get them stuck in the throat” – and cut the fish into pieces. The children threaded the fish and seafood on to skewers, choosing the combination they wanted and adding lemon slices and bay leaves alternately.

One boy chopped herbs for the couscous while another soaked gelatine for the basil pannacotta (“That looks so weird!”). Ben peeled the potatoes, pushed them through the passatutto (“Fun”), and mixed potato, flour and eggs together to form a soft, “really sticky” dough. Borella showed the group how to form gnocchi. “The trick is to keep them light. The ones from the supermarkets are like bullets; you could shoot people with them. Take a bit of flour, roll out a piece of dough – the key thing is to make them the same size.”

The children shaped slender tubes of potato dough and chopped them into evenly sized pieces. Then Borella demonstrated how to pass them over a fork to put a ridge on each one.

Next it was on to the walnut pesto. “With walnuts you have to taste them first. Do you know why? Because they can go rancid. Taste them – if you’re going ‘euch’, then don’t use them; get fresh walnuts.”

After a morning of hard work, everyone, including Borella, sat down to a wonderful three-course lunch. The unusual basil pannacotta got a mixed reception. Ben said: “That was an interesting flavour. You wouldn’t think of basil as being good in a sweet but it was. It went well with the berries and tasted fresh.”

Afterwards, Ben was enthusiastic about Borella’s teaching: “He was funny and chatted to us, which I thought was good. He didn’t just tell us what to do.” The morning had been a huge success. “I’d like to go back. It was really good fun; it didn’t feel rushed and it was nice to sit down and have a proper lunch together and chat.”

We are now the proud owners of a passatutto and Ben has made gnocchi with walnut pesto for a family dinner. So that’s a resounding si for the Italian way of life, and for the benefits of teaching children to cook a proper meal.

Cucina Caldesi classes for children and teenagers cost from £40 per session. Book at www.caldesi.com, tel: +44 (0)207 487 0750

Jenny Linford is the author of ‘The London Cookbook’ (Metro, £14.99)