Harry Potter has provided many services to the parents of school-age kids—the countless quiet hours, growth of vocabulary, even interest in medieval history. Now, Harry has the potential to turn third-graders into expert Cornish pastie makers. In any event, that's the plan at Cooks of Crocus Hill, the St. Paul cooking school that is offering a three-day series of classes (starting June 12) featuring a Harry Potter theme. I talked to the teacher leading these classes, Mary Scheu, and she told me all about it. "We did a Harry Potter themed class for Halloween, and it was such a huge hit that we decided to expand it," Scheu explained. "The first day we get a 'sorting hat' and split everyone into the houses from the books," like Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and so on.Once arranged into houses, the kids make various dishes that are more or less British. The first day they focus on breakfast, making scones to serve with kippers and eggs, then they move on to more complex dishes like pasties, stews, and pot-pies.
"We have lots of room so they can get as messy and crazy dirty as they want to," Scheu told me. "We'll set up a 'scone buffet' so they can add whatever they want to their scones—pecans, pine-nuts, currants, dried blueberries, cinnamon, even gummy bears. It's funny, kids who as a rule won't eat anything weird will eat everything weird if they made it themselves," But it's not all a gummy-bear buffet: "With the Cornish pasties, we talk about how it's a fundamental recipe, and you can tweak it to include your favorite foods, or what your family typically has on hand. The idea is that the recipes are reasonable to make at home by any seven to ten year old with a parent off to the side watching." I took a moment to imagine the (few) 10-year-olds I know setting down their Playstation consoles and taking up cooking knives. J. K. Rowling's books may be known for their potions, spells, and conjuring, but if they turn America's kids into an army of little stew makers, that will be true sorcery.
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