Gordon Ramsay passed down his culinary talents to his daughter Matilda “Tilly” Ramsay (she joins him on this season of MasterChef Junior) — and it seems his son Oscar, 4, has a taste for cooking, too.
Tilly, 22, tells PEOPLE about the similarities between her younger self and Oscar.
“I remember watching [Gordon] work in the kitchen at home because he used to film quite a bit there,” says the psychology student. “And then he slowly started giving me the whisk or giving me the spoon and saying, ‘You need to measure something.’”
“I just remember having so much fun in there with him,” she adds. “And at this point I was like, ‘Wow, I really want to be like you one day.’”
Gordon and his wife, Tana also share daughter Megan, 25, twins Jack and Holly, 24, and son Jesse, 3 months. Tilly says that all of her older family members are “great” cooks, but she’s passing on the training Gordon gave her to her younger brother Oscar.
“I’ve got Oscar cooking already and he’s only four,” she laughs, recalling an instance last summer when she asked him to help her make pancakes. “I was teaching him how to do it, making him measure it out. It’s so great to start young and I think he really enjoyed it.”
Tilly is now bonding with her father over food in a whole new way.
“We are constantly sending each other new recipes on Instagram that we see and discussing them,” she says.
Their shared interest brought the pair together for MasterChef Junior‘s 9th season. The FOX cooking competition — which sees amateur chefs between the ages of 8 and 13 test out their skills in a series of culinary challenges for a $100,000 prize — airs on Monday night with Gordon hosting and Aarón Sánchez, Daphne Oz and Tilly as judges.
Gordon has been hosting the competition series since it first premiered in 2013, so he was able to show his daughter the ropes.
“We laugh, he makes me laugh all the time,” she says about their time together on set. “We annoy each other, don’t get me wrong. We tease each other constantly.”
The pair would commute home together and “chat about everything about the day,” says Tilly, who released her Tilly’s Kitchen Takeover cookbook when she was 15.
Tilly has been on camera plenty of times throughout the years. She starred as a guest on Gordon’s numerous shows, like Hell’s Kitchen and The F Word. Plus, from 2015 to 2019, Tilly had her own cooking reality show, Matilda and the Ramsay Bunch, on CBBC. Plus, Tilly was a contestant on Celebrity MasterChef Australia in 2021.Now she’s happy to be on the judging side of the show.
“Being on the other side of it was such a relief,” she laughs. ”I love being a judge. I feel like I was learning constantly from the kids, from the other judges, just everyone around.”