To feel that sad that basic cooking skills are dying out

Correct but nonetheless virtually every recipe says "thinly slice".

@gannett I can chop an onion but CBA so I bought a mini chopper
Saves so much time!

amzn.eu/d/bg6LbSW

I do sometimes wonder if I'd have better practical skills if YouTube tutorials for everything imaginable had been around when I was at university.

But I still dispute this though, because cooking isn't just about following recipes like a robot. Even I can do that, though I'd need a few hours more than most people. Cooking is about having the instincts to rescue a recipe that's not going as it should; or adjusting to take into account wonky ovens; or knowing what ingredients you can substitute or leave out if something you need is neither in the cupboard nor the shop; to season it properly to turn something blandly adequate into something amazing; to interpret recipe vagueness like "golden brown" and "season to taste"; to be able to open the cupboard and be able to actually make a meal up on the spot.

The skill of cooking isn't about finding a recipe, trekking round 5 shops to get every named ingredient because I'm not deviating from the list at all, then trying to follow it to the letter and getting frustrated when it doesn't come out the way it should, which is what I am able to do.

It’s more than learning to cook though isn’t it , if you’re talking about people in poverty and debt trying to survive without basic life skills. If you’re living hand to mouth, and you have £2.50 left to feed the family of four kids , you’ll probably buy a bag of pasta and a jar of sauce. It requires ingredients that are available at convenience stores that you don’t have to take public transport/ use fuel to reach. You know you won’t need fancy kitchen equipment that you may not have . It won’t use loads of energy to prepare.
Homemade vegetable soup could be cheaper, but you don’t want to gamble on stuff that the kids may/ may not eat if you know that’s their main meal of the day.
I can cook really cheaply. I buy yellow sticker items and freeze. I visit markets at the end of the day and buy produce on the turn which I process and freeze or puree . I buy cheaper cuts of good meat and make it stretch. I use warehouses where I buy dried goods that are months out of date. But the whole things takes a serious amount of energy, organisation, headspace and equipment , not to mention travel, education, planning etc etc. And to be honest I wouldn’t be able to cook this way at all if I wasn’t financially able to ‘invest’ upfront in things like bulk quantities of grains etc from Asian supermarkets and so on.

You seem to want to just discuss these 'people you work with'

Then they're not that broke. I volunteer for a local charity feeding people who are literally choosing between heat and food, and I've met people for whom dinner would be half a packet of 30p biscuits with the other half saved for morning.

To be fair, the thread wasn't about food poverty, it's about cooking. But I'll maintain that if you're skint as well as trying to work and look after kids it's a lot cheaper and easier to buy the 5 for £5 offer from Iceland and chuck some cheap nuggets and chips in the oven knowing the kids will eat it, and there'll be some left for tomorrow too.

This is just about the people you work with then. A small part of society

Not a mumsnet issue at all

My Ds can cook and cook well . He doesn’t though he is in that teenage stage of biege food been the rightful food .

He will be able to once again when he morphs out to recognise the importance of food .

Virtually no recipe needs that. You can google ways to make it easier, but lumps will do in almost any recipe.

we can cook, my teen DC can cook. YABU

I can cook. DH can cook. My kids can cook.

Taught by me and scouts and DS also does practical cookery Nat 5 at school.

Lots of people can cook.

And with so many cookery shows on tv and foodie shops and products etc we are not alone.

The issue is that people don't necessarily have to learn to cook these days.. we have cheap ready meals, convenience foods and takeaways in a way that was not available years ago. Back then you could only buy basic foods, you HAD to Learn to cook. You had no other choice.

I think most people can put together a meal, it's more household management like how to not waste food, balanced nutrition and a variety of meals, reading labels carefully not just being taken in by marketing, and especially food safety like proper storage and handling of meat and cooked food that people need to learn. Speaking from experience living in various flatshares!

Chopping an onion is my kryptonite!

Obviously I can hack it into big chunks but "thinly slicing" the bloody things eludes me. I don't know how people learn those knife skills.

People who are desperately broke don't have the resources to make soup and curry. You need the basic components plus store cupboard ingredients plus adequate gas or electricity to cook it, as well as usable kitchen equipment and facilities.

They wouldn't be 'amazed' at the sight of home made soup, but when you can microwave a cheap tin of it in about a minute at very little cost, they won't be cooking any either.

@SingleDoubleWhippedClotted - totally agree and I think you sound a bit patronising - perhaps it didn't come across very well in my post

It’s nothing to do with being incapable, it is laziness.

If you can read then you can follow a recipe. It is not hard to boil pasta and cook a sauce from scratch but it is quicker and easier to throw a ready meal in a microwave.

@SingleDoubleWhippedClotted - sorry but I don't agree with this idea that people who 'live hand to mouth' cannot peel a potato and look in amazement at being able to make soup.

Yes. If you can read, you can cook. In fact, I’m not sure you even need to be able to read, now there’s a YouTube video for everything.

I don't think this is true. My gran (born in 1900) couldn't/wouldn't cook. My mum (born 1926) taught herself to cook and taught me. I became a home economics teacher in 1980 - most students not interested in cooking. I think it is much better now - my son is at uni and lots of students cook - I didn't teach him because he didn't want to know but hungry at uni he started learning and taught himself the basics and now he tries lots of different recipes. Really it's just a case of following a set of instructions.

DNeice and Nephew (15 and 17) are all over cooking (especially ‘meal prep’), thanks to TikTok. Much more than I was at their age.

YANBU
When DDs went to Uni, lots of students in the halls couldn't cook. At all. I bet their parents wouldnt admit that tho.
Cooking is a life skill