I remember cooking scrambled eggs when I was about 7 or 8. Around 9 or 10 I remember cooking a lot of rice, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what I was cooking all that rice to go with!
My teen years, it was all about spaghetti, Hamburger Helper, and hamburgers. (Lots of throw down soup as well)
Bacon and fried eggs when I was 11.
My father’s mother was an awesome grandmother, whatever her failings might have been in other parts of her life. By the time I was four, and could read well enough to follow directions, Grandma would let me prepare cakes from mixes, or we’d bake pies together - I always made the crust. Grandma was there to give me advice or clarification, or to get things into and out of the oven. Grandma also had a very early toaster oven, which consisted of a tray with a grate and handle, which slid into a “garage” with heating coils - it had the old cloth-wrapped electric cord. That little oven made zillions of pieces of toast and cinnamon toast! (And the margarine always lived inside the refrigerator, so the prep method was always 5 thin squares of Fleishmann’s, at each corner and in the middle, then with the sugar and cinnamon. Anything else would have just looked and tasted “wrong.”)
When I was eight years old, my father was in and out of the hospital a lot, and my mother’s cousin Virginia took me in for several stretches of time. Virginia worked overnight as a police dispatcher, so I tried not to disturb her while she slept. I made lots of Cream of Wheat cereal for myself, and Virginia thought I was an awesomely self-reliant little kid.
After my father died, the summer I turned nine, my mother really, really needed a mental health break; so there was a stretch of time where we had live-in babysitters. The sitters mostly traded child supervision for room and board, and had other jobs as well. I did a fair bit of cooking and grocery shopping during that time span. I remember lots of boil-in-bag side dishes from that time span, although I’m sure I cooked other things.
And I’ll never forget my first attempt at making biscuits. My maternal grandfather was in the hospital 80 miles away, so I did a lot of cooking during my eighth-grade year. One night, I had a yen for biscuits. I had watched my mother and grandmothers and great-grandmother make a metric ton of biscuits through the years, so I figured I could certainly replicate that. My very drunk uncle “supervised,” while I made the ugliest biscuits south of the Mason Dixon Line. They were tasty, though!
Burgers when I was maybe 8 or so. I really didn’t learn to cook until high school, when I took “Cooking for jocks” as one of my electives.
My dad’s an Irish immigrant - when I was eight or nine, he taught me how to make “Irish scrambled eggs”. It’s like American ones, but you whip up the eggs with milk in a bowl, then pour them into a pot instead of a frying pan. They come out beautifully light and fluffy - they’re still my favorite breakfast food.
Definitely by the time I was 10, maybe when I was 9, my mother taught me to put salt and pepper and dried onion and worcestershire sauce on a chicken and put it in the oven to roast. And to wash and prick potatoes and put them on the oven racks to bake, too. And to open a can of green beans and put it on a saucepan on the stove with salt, pepper, dried onion, and a pat of butter.
When I was more like 13 she began to give me recipies to put together before she got home from work. There was a Moroccan chicken one that had like 15 spices, but no tricky techniques.
Pancakes from a mix, probably around age eight or so.
I can’t pinpoint the first because I was “helping” to cook from the time I could stand on a stool in the kitchen. I suspect the first thing that I actually completed on my own was either cookies or a grilled cheese sandwich. Those were my go to favorites and the ones I always wanted to cook. Other recipes required encouragement.
Tacos. I was maybe 14 when my cousin showed me how to make them. He probably picked it up from his dad, my uncle, who was a mechant marine.
Fry the corn tortillas in oil and flip them to form a shell. Cook up some hamburger and melt the cheese into it, then douse with hot sauce. Stuff into shells and top with lettuce and tomato. Simple, but they were so tasty I had to regularly make them at home and at friends houses. I can’t believe I started out with something that required frying, something I rarely do today because it’s such a pain to clean up.
This isn’t real “cooking,” but I was making Campbell’s soup and boiling my own hot dogs at 11 or so. Right around the time my Mom had to give up the soft easy life of a housewife and go to work!
Around 8 or 9 - hot dogs, mac & cheese from the box, ramen, grilled cheese sandwiches, stuff like that. Not real cooking but it kept body and soul together.
In my family, you were expected to be able to cook a meal once a week starting around grade 6 (age 12 give or take).
My “specialty” was tacos, but there were also staples like scrambled eggs and spaghetti. Taco night basically involved cooking the ground beef; everything else was just chopped, shredded or warmed up.
I know I started cooking earlier than that, though. I don’t have any clear memory of the first time. Starting at least as early as 2nd grade (age 7?), I was frying up an egg and toasting a piece of bread for breakfast. That stopped as I got older and decided that I’d rather trade breakfast for another 20 minutes in bed. It was entirely up to me to make breakfast and lunch for myself starting from around 2nd grade.
probably rice crispy treats. Those were the earliest and it was probably when I was 10 or so.
The summer I was 11 or 12 I decided it was time I learned to bake brownies. I tried six times to get brownies to turn out correctly. My mom had a stove with an upper oven as well as a smaller oven, and I seem to remember the upper oven falling victim to one of those failed attempts.
By the time I was junior in high school I was adept enough at following directions I was given the chore of cooking dinner for the family every night. My mom would sit in her chair with her feet up (she has swelling issues and would come home from work desperately in need of rest) and tell me how to make whatever was on the menu. She always cooked simple things so it wasn’t hard and it was good training for when I had a household of my own.
Dutch babies (taught to us by our summer babysitter). Around 9 or 10.
I’m sure I’d cooked things before then (and if we include cooking beverages there was the Saturday morning shout of “kids! make a pot of coffee” that would come out of the parents room at some point going probably almost back to when I was tall enough to reach the coffee maker) but don’t have solid memories of it.
The first self invented food item I remember is from around the same time:
Slice of white bread. Slice of American cheese. Microwave. Eat within seconds before the bread dries into a hard puck.
Couldn’t pay me to eat that now but I did love it as a kid.
I remember making fried tomatoes when I was still primary school age, but probably late primary school so maybe 10? I also remember grilling tomatoes with cheese on top at the same age.
I was making buttered toast for myself in the 3 1/2 to 4 age range (hey, for someone that young it qualifies!). At about 6 it was scrambled and fried eggs, and french toast.
Eggs at 7, burgers on the grill at 8, Hamburger Helper at 10, then moved on to “real food” from there. I cooked my first full meal–lasagna, garlic bread, vegetables–at 12.
Kraft mac and cheese at age 7 ish. My older sister showed me the way! She always told me never say I did not give you anything #lifeskillzzz
For me it was probably fried baloney and then I moved up to basted eggs. I don’t remember how old I was but it was probably around 10 because I can only really remember the kitchen we had around that time and none of the previous ones.
Hot dogs speared with a big two-tined serving fork and cooked over the gas burner on the stove.
Age ten maybe.