Hunter Coats Walton was about 4 when she and her father started making stir-fry together.

"He'd put some in my Barney cup so I could be the first to taste it," says Walton, now an 11-year-old sixth-grader at the International School of Prague.

Such childhood memories can shape entire careers. For Zdeněk Pohlreich, the little Czech pub his father owned unleashed a lifelong fascination with commercial kitchens.

"It was one of those ugly places I loved as a child," he recalls. "Watching the men tapping the beer, that was an amazing thing to me."

Now the chef at the Renaissance Prague and Marriott hotels, Pohlreich is making kitchen memories for his son, Jan. They work side by side in their home kitchen, with Jan dicing vegetables and crumbling bread for schnitzel. The 8-year-old is developing a sophisticated palate and can already recognize the tastes of different virgin olive oils.

More than memories are stirred when Tony Schepers steps into the kitchen. The 22-year-old cooks to relax and can whip up a prawn curry or glazed duck on a moment's notice.

"Cooking with my mom when I was younger, as Frank Sinatra played in the background, is something I will never forget," says Schepers, whose familiarity with the kitchen earned him a position with Nestar, a Prague importer of Argentinean wine and beef.

He remembers meal preparation as a family event that built memories and strengthened parent-child relationships. "We did crazy things while cooking," Schepers recalls. "Like wear pots on our heads and scrub mussels with a toothbrush, or crush anise seeds inside a pillowcase with our shoes."

That creative release is what the young Miss Walton likes most about being in the kitchen. "You can be free to invent something new, even if you make a mistake," she says, confessing to the brownies she botched by using vinegar instead of vegetable oil.

Kids in the kitchen learn math when they measure ingredients, conversions when they change pounds to grams and history when they listen to Czech chefs, like Pohlreich, who remember when restaurants here were state-owned.

"Under communism, there was one recipe book for hot foods, one for cold foods and one for pastry," recalls the 49-year-old chef. "Every restaurant followed those books. Anything else was illegal."

That would be anathema to Walton, who likes nothing better than to experiment in the kitchen. At the moment, she's busy perfecting a recipe she plans to enter in an Independence Day brownie bakeoff sponsored by the U.S. Embassy.

"They're going to be red, white and blue," she says.

As for the vinegar?