My mother was second oldest of nine kids growing up on farm near a small Kansas community in the 40s and 50s. She was helping in the kitchen by the age of five or six and cooking full meals on a wood fueled stove for her family before she turned thirteen.
Dad worked in his mother’s bakery as a child and eventually became a cook in the National Guard. Feeding a good, hot meal to hungry, well armed people that just spent the last two weeks living on C-rats tends to focus your cooking skills.
Both my parent had good, broad based cooking skills and they thought it was important to pass these on to their kids. Now they wouldn’t have considered themselves to be great cooks by any stretch of the imagination but they knew how to turn out a very nice table. They weren’t fancy and by modern standards, not very adventurous in their meal selection. To be fair, they also took full advantage of the thinking of the day in that it’s easy to produce tasty meals when you don’t give the slightest XXXX about limiting your salt and fat intake.
When I came along, I was the youngest of five kids so I never really had to cook for the family. According to house rules though, you either helped cook or you helped clean up and I’d rather chop veggies than wash dishes. So, I learned, my parents were eager to teach and the most important lesson it learned was “try”. You’re going to burn a chicken, turn out a few brick-like bread loaves and maybe even poison the entire family reunion with lukewarm potato salad. Everyone does this and good cooks do better next time.
I’ve talked to so many people that will not even try to cook. They’ll make a sandwich, nuke some frozen veggies and consider it a success. This makes absolutely no sense to me. I’m not saying everyone needs to study to be a gourmet chef or that you’re a bad person if you choose to spend your time and talents on other pursuits but I would consider a well rounded set of cooking skills to be a basic life skill. If I’m honest, some of my most successful dates involved me showing up at my girlfriend’s place with a bag of groceries and a bottle of wine, cooking a fine meal for us and then doing the clean up. Don’t leave a stack of dirty dishes in her sink and then wonder why things didn’t go as well as you hoped. That’s just ignorant.
Did your parents want you to learn to cook? Did they push you into the kitchen or expect you to be able to feed yourself? Could they cook or did they mainly make reservations? Say you’re trying to impress someone with a meal. What’s your go-to menu?
Small family just my brother and me. No one pushed me to cook, I wanted to do it myself.
One thing that really got me into cooking was when I had a second shift job. I’d get home at 11pm when my roommates where in bed. I needed to find something to do that wouldn’t disturb them. I started cooking.
And for the last 26 years, I lived in a house that does not get any type of delivery. There is one bar/restaurant about 4 miles away. Next closest is 15 miles. I usually make a big pot of something on the weekend that my wife and I will eat during the week. When you can’t order a pizza or anything delivered, and there are no handy restaurants, you learn to keep food on hand pretty darn fast.
It was VERY important to my mother, who was an all-around New England farm cook (nothing too fancy…but good at the basics). She told us that no daughter-in-law of hers was going to have grounds to complain that her three sons couldn’t cook. I NEVER saw my father cook a thing, or even make a sandwich.
This was a darn good thing, because my first two wives couldn’t/wouldn’t cook a lick. Even my current wife, whose father was a chef in NYC, doesn’t know many of the basics I learned from my mother.
My mom was kinda-sorta a single mom for a good handful of years and wasn’t much of a good (nor did she particularly enjoy it) so we went out to eat a lot growing up.
I inherited her horrible cooking skills and do very, very little cooking in my life.
I was actively *discouraged *from cooking. I was an only child and my mom was a bit of a control freak who always figured it was easier for her to do things herself than to put up with trying to teach me.
The upside was that I almost never had to do household chores. The downside was that I didn’t *learn *to do household chores or cook, which made college a bit of an adjustment.
Apparently not very much, at all. When I was little, I’d help my mom with baking cookies, but that was the extent of her exposing me to any sort of cooking or baking education. I can’t even blame it on her not enjoying cooking, because she enjoys it a lot, but she clearly never considered it to be something I should know how to do.
(For the record, my dad knows how to cook about 3 things.)
My college girlfriend was stunned to learn that I didn’t know how to cook, and in fact, she gave me a cookbook as a gift.
My parents taught me to do All the Things around a house, and cooking was definitely one of them. I can remember getting taught the family method of cooking rice and, from my memory of what house I was in and how tall the bench was, I think that must have been about 8 or 9. I was definitely cooking full meals by eleven or twelve, because I remember being given the money to swing by the shops on my way back from school, to get the ingredients
The skills have been passed on. My kids get a privilege I didn’t - being allowed to choose the menu (within reason) in exchange for cooking it.
I can’t remember if I’ve ever actually seen my parents order takeaway food. Only go to a restaurant - occasionally. It’s pretty rare that we’d have it either - maybe three or four times a year? (I’ve just realised I might never in my life have actually ordered a food delivery - pizza and Thai are an easy walk away)
My dad doesn’t know his way around the kitchen other than how to heat something in the microwave. My mother was a good cook, her mother was a good cook and her grandmother ran a boarding house and catering business, so she knew how to cook. Neither of them pushed or encouraged me to learn how to cook in any way.
I guess it was my stepmother who encouraged me when I showed some interest. At some point I started helping her when she cooked and that really helped. I still help her when I am visiting and we share recipes and what things.
We weren’t forced into it in my family, but I figured out early on that the cook doesn’t clean. Being the youngest, I always had to do the dishes after dinner. So that incentive combined with a lifelong “me do” attitude and the desire to do something none of my older sibs were doing or had done, yeah, I learned to cook dinner for the family. In fact after about 2 years of fried eggs and hashbrown dinners, I was gifted a set of Jeff Smith cookbooks for christmas at age 12 with the decree that I had to prepare dinner using them once a month.
Not even a little. Mom was a working mom cook, and I don’t think Dad could boil water. The best classes I took in high school were Bachelor Living and Bachelor Foods. A bunch of jocks set loose in a kitchen…what could possibly go wrong?
But that’s where I learned the basics. Friends, cousins, girlfriends and the like taught me the rest.
We were poor and my mom was really good at cooking for 4 on a budget. Never anything fancy but always stuff that was good. We rarely went out to eat. I don’t remember her specifically making us learn but I did come out the other end knowing how to feed myself. My dad can cook too. Mom definitely has more skills but dad can feed himself and sometimes they cook together.
In my late teens I started working for her cousin’s restaurant as a prep cook so I gained a lot of skills. Since then her and I have done a lot of holiday meals together. We watch a lot of cooking shows together too.
I completely forgot about my Bachelor Living course in high school, mainly because it was complete useless and forgettable. They didn’t trust fifteen year olds with needle and thread so we had to simulate sewing a button on a shirt. It did teach how to make my first short pie crust though and I’m using that skill at least once a week. Thanks Ms. Frankie!
They just sort of made me start cooking for myself, but they didn’t put any thought or effort into it. In fact they made fun of me for being afraid to light the oven. But then, they pretty much made and ate different food from each other, so. My grandmother did make a genuine attempt, but unfortunately her method just didn’t take with my learning style.
My sisters did pretty much all the baking when we were kids. I picked up cooking from them plus home ec in middle school; a half semester was required each year in that district. The other halves were art, shop, and music.
My mom never really learned how to cook for similar reasons.
Just me & my sister. Both parents cooked and yeah they expected us to learn; they expected us to want to learn. When I was in high school both parents worked fulltime and we were paid (decently, btw) to do household chores incuding laundry, sewing / garment repair, vaccuuming, and definitely cooking, i.e., to have supper waiting when they came in.
I was the oldest of six. I was cooking my lunch when I came home from school at lunchtime (grilled cheese and such) when I was in grammar school. My mother was a good cook, though nothing fancy, and I learned to make meatballs and spaghetti and things like that before I went to college. I still enjoy cooking.
My mom bought me the Betty Crocker Cookbook For Boys and Girls when I expressed an interest in learning how to make meatballs. I think I cooked dinner for the family a few times after that, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly. The experience did give me enough of a rudimentary understanding of how to follow recipes to be able to put together meals later in life.
