to beleive that a lot of people in the UK don't actually know how to cook.

[OrmIrian]

They know how to follow recipes. And it isn't the same thing.

I am quite old. I was brought up with a mum who had been through the war and was totally intolerant of waste. So left over meat from Sunday roast was always used up - cold with salad and baked potatoes, or made into cottage pie or a stew. Whatever was left over in the fridge got made into something and if you were a half-decent cook it was delicious. For example last Sundays lamb shoulder leftover were taken off the bone and slow-cooked with some pearl barley, lentils, sweet potatoes and the remains of the red wine gravy. On Tuesday there was half a pack of sausages in the fridge - they were chopped and cooked with some chorizo, garlic, passata, basil, chilli and onions and served with pasta. Dh was about to get a load of mince out of the freezer and cook spag bol - the sausages would have stayed there till they were ready to walk out of the fridge on their own.

When my children cook at school they always seem to learn how to cook specific dishes - not the general techniques that would serve them well for general day-to-day cooking. DD loves cookery programs - when she decides to cook she comes out with a huge list of ingredients that would cost a small fortune because someone on Masterchef did it! They are learning to do it my way, but it's slow progress.

Cooking is being able to make something good out of whatever is available. Not just being able to make something good out of a trolley load of expensive ingredients.

sorry-teach-not teacher!

omg, my MIL has the worst waste! I once threw out 4 pots of coleslaw from her fridge!

I eat what is sensible due to bbf date etc and it really pisses me off when DH buys something new rather than eating what we already have and is going off like I do!

I was brought up to not waste food and it upsets me, although DH thinks I'm mad!

ps. grag my dad taught me to cook, not my mum.

My mother and my school focussed on the chemistry of food - why you blend the ingredients in a certain order, why egg emulsifies, why freezing 'cooks' some foods and so on. It's a very useful grounding and, when I want to buy a cookbook for a novice, I make sure it includes that info.

But I didn't really learn about flavours until I went to live in France after school. That was where I 'learned to cook'. Since then I've had the privilege of eating a lot of delicious food in ace restaurants, and always try to work out how a particularly good dish was made. If I'm stuck, I ask the chef - never met one who wasn't delighted to be asked!

I think food knowledge has improved since my youth. My nieces and nephews are all VERY good cooks; some follow recipes while others are confident to make up their own: one of the nephews, I would say, is gifted.

I don't have any problem with the fact you can get a pre-cooked shepherd's pie for 99p. It's real food, inexpensive, and plenty of people lack the resources to make stuff from scratch. What does make sad is seeing young mums buying overpriced crap like microwaveable burgers (in bun) Somebody should show them how to scrunch up a handful of mince!

FeatureWall - I WASTE FOOD WITH GLEE! My war-raised parents were over the top about saving every scrap. At around 16yo I realised there is no longer a prison sentence for throwing out food - and it can go "in the waste bin or on your waist line"

Mind you, most of it still goes on my waistline.

For anyone who wants to become a freeform baker try Ratio by Michael Ruhlman

I think there's a lot to be said for having the ability to conjure up a decent meal without resorting to a recipe every time - but ime this results, too often when DH tries it in an amorphous mass.
I have far more success from following recipes; I've been cooking for much longer than the 25 years of my marriage, and most of my best meals are the result of recipe-following.
That said, I do sometimes think, what was the point of all that chopping, stirring and mixing, spending god-knows-how-long on my feet, getting an achey back, when it hardly touches the sides some nights?

Recipes better - cooking on the hoof more convenient.
Neither one is morally superior to the other, but a mixture of the two approaches works best imo.

I wish I could just whip up meals but as my mother was a god awful cook and we lived on m&s ready meals, I never learned.

I do follow recipes now and I have a bank of them learning new ones every few weeks. It is hard to use leftovers from one on to the other though as they are all completely different types of food IYSWIM.

I don't think anyone self learns to cook the way you mention.

I never cook bubble and squeak! DH loves it so I religiously keep leftover veg for him to use. But I think it's vile - no veg deserves to be cooked twice. Yuck.

It isn't just about leftovers per se. It simply about being able to see what's in the fridge and cupboard and make something with what is there. I probably plan about 3 meals a week - but usually the planning consists of 'well, we've have something with fish, something with chicken and then we'll make pizza on saturday night' The rest of the our meals are made from fridge/cupboard staples which may or may not include leftovers.

Re buying smaller joint and not having left over - that is tricky to do unless you ensure you buy exactly the right size joint and that everyone eats as much as they usually do, no more and no less. Anyway a bigger joint cooks and tastes better.

Having said all that, I don't think there is any moral superiority to cooking from scratch, cooking a Delia every evening, cooking with leftovers, never buying ready meals or any of it. And in the grand scheme of things it matter not a jot. Personally I couldn't give stuff. I just thought it was interesting how we have changed since I was a child. But from some of the irate responses on here I am guessing some people find it a sensitive subject . .

This lovely idea of children learning to cook at their Mothers shoulders is a fond figment of many imaginations. My mum was and remains a lousy cook. Her Mum was too busy to cook what with working several jobs. My mother hates cooking and my Dad did most of the cooking at home when he was actually there. He was a competent cook but of the meat and 2 veg variety - there was little flair or love there. A Jamie Oliver book frankly wouldn't have gone amiss. When mum cooked it was a fair bet the result would be orange and breaded.

I now regard myself as a good family cook but it's taken me over a decade of amassing recipes and knowledge to now have the confidence and knowledge to "just know" how food behaves in a pan and what favours work brilliantly and what will do if pushed. If somebody had criticised my reliance on recipes a few years ago I'd have probably cried and stuffed the offenders mouth with Findus crispy pancakes.

I think that cooking teaching standards have declined (ref Kormagate) since I grew up in the Eighties and frankly they were shit then as i recall. My mother refused to give me my ingredients money such was the lamentable quality of the results. Coming from her that was pretty bloody rich actually but she had a point. People aren't born knowing how to cook and if parents and schools won't teach them then recipe books are a gift. It's sheer snottery to look down your nose at such people. People like me. The perpetrators are usually engaged in competitive foodie thrift " i can get 14 meals out of a roast chicken" stuff which i find desperately tedious.

I'm glad you started the thread Orm, it's really made me think :)
I am extremely mean. I hate spending money. Almost every day I'll pop into the supermarket and see what's in the reduced section, and buy it for the freezer. Then, my choice is restricted- Dinner has to be pork mince. So then I have to be creative. See, being a tightarse has its rewards :o I use recipes for baking, and if I want to make a new or a more fiddly dish.
I don't think that people who cook in a particular way are superior, but it's something I enjoy a lot, and sometimes I do want to share that joy!
I am all about online recipe sites at the mo... Allrecipes.co.uk is wonderful...

You have a point OP.

However families not cooking at all is more of an issue really than whether people follow a recipe or not...and I think it DOES matter.

I cook like that OP. Most of the time it turns out OK, sometimes it turns out well and sometimes it's blardy disgusting.

YY to DH doing the 'glory cooking' though.

I'm a reluctant cook. I don't enjoy it. I do try but I'm not very adventurous and I'm certainly not someone who can throw something together.
I don'y have a very receptive audience ds (17) will eat more or less anything. DD (10) is very reluctant to try anything new.
My dad is an excellent cook I remember when my mum was alive he'd cook occasionally. She died when I was 13. He'd travelled a bit so was keen to try cooking new things.
Don't remember cooking with either parent apart from a bit of baking.

Yes betsy there are occasional disasters but there are often recipes that don't turn out quite as expected too. In fact the only meal i cooked that dh couldn't eat was a millet and couscous risotto - that's in 20 something years! And that was from a recipe

Real cooks are the ones who can make a meal out of any random collection of ingredients, including leftovers and make it stretch to feed whoever extra turns up.
Anyone can follow a recipe. It's just instructions after all.

Millet and courgette! Not couscous.?

I'm an OK cook. Not so good with british roast stuff as you have to be a much better cook than me to pull it off, but can make very good veggie or italian stuff.

However, now I have a small and fussy kid I find I waste quite a bit of food and that does annoy me. Cooking isn't such a joy as I don't have the time. Ds likes plain food, dh only eats italian food and it's so limiting.

But I can cook. For me it's having a store cupboard with herbs and oils, dried pulses and then it makes everything easier.

The other day I got oxtails and cooked it slowly in tomato sauce (no basil but parsley - the curly sort not that crappy flat leaf stuff). My ds isn't so hot on meats so he got the tomato sauce enriched with the oxtail on his pasta and then dh got the pasta too and got the oxtails as a main course with braised spinach and garlic on the side.

Is that the sort of thing you're talking about?
I wish I could waste less though.

Ha ha! Hello there Orm . I'll be swerving the millet and couscous risotto then. I own a vegetarian cookbook from about 1976 and there are some pretty dicky recipes in there. Never mind how healthy it was, I could have killed someone with the lentil quiche; spinning it discus style, like Oddjob's hat.

I'm interested by the 'couldn't' eat. Like, it was actually impossible to eat? The mind boggles .

When I was a child I used to ask my mother what was for dinner and she used to say 'I don't know yet' and then she would go in the kitchen and make something from what she had, I tend to be similar. My father had to know and shop for it first.

I use recipe books occasionally, mainly for inspiration. I also have several "recipes" in my head of meals that I make regularly. But most of the time, I just look at what I have and chuck things together.

I have never really thought of myself as a good cook, but the family enjoys most of my creations. :) And when I served up spaghetti with tomato sauce from a jar recently (a very rare occurrence in this house!) dd looked like this and asked me why the sauce wasn't as yummy as usual! So I figure I probably do an ok job.

No, LeQueen, cooking is just normal.

It is sad and worrying that people increasingly see cooking as something dreary/strange/extravagant.