To feel that sad that basic cooking skills are dying out

[SingleDoubleWhippedClotted]

Me and my brother were taught to cook by my gran and mum. Dad used to cook too but worked away a lot so wasn't around as much.

So many people now seem to be incapable of basic food prep and spend a fortune on food. Cooking seems to be an undervalued life skill, I think its so important to have the skills to be able to prepare simple cheap healthy meals.

I have taught my teen to cook and she could fend for herself if she left home tomorrow. She can cook healthy cheap meals.

I see so many threads on here where people can't boil rice, boil an egg etc

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.

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

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 I use warehouses where I buy dried goods that are months out of date.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.

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.

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

amzn.eu/d/bg6LbSW

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

The mumsnet 'big pot of soup' got a mention

'Massive salad' yet to come

I can't get my head round people saying they can't cook. My mum was an OK cook, she didn't teach me that much though. I really began to learn to cook when I went to uni, starting with basic things like Spag bol made using a jar of sauce.

If you can't cook then you can learn. Saying your mum didn't teach you is just an excuse- not may people learn all their cooking skills as a child- it's a skill that develops the more you do it.

For me, cooking is one of those skills you acquire with age and the older and more experienced you get the better you get.

If you can't cook it's because you don't want to learn. Anyone with a reasonable intelligence can follow a recipe.

Ooh a Ninja as well.

(And this is another thing... the right equipment is so important to being able to cook!)

I am a great cook. I can bake none too shabbily too. I love feeding family/friends great meals. But omg I loathe cooking. We seriously need an Autochef!

If I lived alone I'd never cook another thing! I'd eat cereal & toast and French crusty bread with president butter.

I don't really know anyone who can't cook but I know a few who just really don't want to.

I agree with you in a way. There are loads of recipe books and instagrams and tv cooks but everyone would benefit from learning how to meal plan, cook simple meals and basically manage meals for a house. It should be mandatory at school along with understanding tax, doing simple house diy and learning how to manage a household generally. It would level the playing field I think,

But I don’t think it’s the single answer to poverty or people eating better though. It’s much more complex than that.

I think most people could do at least basic stuff but lots choose not to because there is a much wider range of pre prepared food available than there used to be.
I was a child in the 70s and whilst my mum was very good at what she did, we had a far less varied diet than my children do now. We did have some convenience foods - fish fingers, findus crispy pancakes etc even then but a lot of what my Mum did was cooked from scratch and was time consuming. She always made her own pies from scratch, we had home made sponge puddings, stews that simmered on the stove all day and so on. But she was a SAHM and we were far less busy - no after school activities for me and my siblings - so she had time for it. I could cook more or less everything she did, but I don't really have the time or inclination to be honest. I'd much rather do a stir fry or quick pasta dish, though I do use my slow cooker quite a lot and I do a proper roast dinner most weeks.
I have only met one person in recent years who was genuinely completely clueless about cooking - a University friend of my DD's. Lovely girl,very bright but lacking in "normal" life skills. She had been at boarding school since 11 and had all her meals prepared, laundry done etc , then in the holidays her Mum had basically waited on her hand and foot, I guess because she missed her and wanted holidats to be fun. My DD did have to teach her things like how to make a cup of tea, how to boil pasta and how to use a washing machine. She picked it up quick enough of course but when DD first met her she really couldn't do anything domestic. But I think that's unusual.

My 15 year old son can cook a hell of a lot better than my 76 year old mother.

My dd is at uni, in catered accommodation. She can't really cook yet - tbh she's not really interested. I wasn't at her age either. No doubt she'll learn when she wants/needs to, like I did. Honestly, it's not rocket science. These skills aren't 'lost'. Anyone can follow recipes and learn! I'm a good cook. Nobody taught me.

I think a lot of people can still cook...it's just that they are cooking different things and in different ways. We have access to more variety of foods than our grandparents did and knowledge of different cuisines. I get inspiration for recipes from Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. A young person today is more likely to make a burrito or poke bowl than to stew meat/offal for a pie.

I’m incapable, it’s not because I’m letting the skill go by me or not trying, I am just no conditioned to cook- my cooking instincts are horrible- I will ALWAYS lean the wrong way, take it out to early, leave it in too long, cut things the wrong way, I take direction wrong. I’m on cooking Fb groups, I have cook books etc but most things are either meh or very very wrong!!! It’s not because the world has gone wrong, I have 4 kids and cook most days but it’s awful and when dh wfh he’ll bail me out.

That’s really not the case. Many say chop, either finely or coarsely.

I can't cook and I'm sad about it too. I love eating healthy, tasty meals but I just can't plan and cook. I wish I had the skills. I can make rice and pasta, the two things my mum would let me do as a child!

I think it's undervalued as it's stereotyped as a female skill and the world is sexist.

I wasn't taught to cook though I think I saw enough to get the idea. When we were first married my parents came over one Sunday and I did a roast chicken and the works, apparently my mother never stopped saying how amazed she had been that I could do that! I tended to work on the idea If you can read, you can cook.

@SocksAndTheCity

The scheme is about upskilling people so that they have the ability to cook and is aimed at parents.I agree that it is hard to get out of the poverty trap.

"Aibu to tell you how I believe I'm better than other people?"

So why are you here starting a thread about people being shit at cooking if you are working with people to help them?

Not very nice is it?

Cooking IS taught at school!

I find often people who say they can't cook are over thinking things. So "slice finely"...just slice it. No one is going to come round with a ruler and tell you off if it's a millimetre out. The taste won't change.

There are quite a lot of elderly widowed men living on toast and jam because they never learnt to cook. It's not a new thing.
Also I am not sure of Britain's cooking traditions.
During the industrial revolution and after many working class people who had no cooking facilities would have lived on bread from the baker and what they could buy off the street, rural people would have done better eating what they could grow but it would have been mixed whatever we have stew most of the time.