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Where and/or from whom did you learn how to cook?

Tirvine

ancient grey sweatophile
Mom, dad, working in restaurants and dining halls, cooking school, television, and reading cookbooks. Good cookbooks combined with television shows like the ones on PBS can provide an excellent foundation. Websites like this one can also be great resources. Just ask, "How do I make (fill in the blank)?" and you will get answers that will be very helpful. After doing this since the sixties, I'd say to any home cook, no matter if they are a beginner or an accomplished cook, read Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. I am still learning all the time!
 
One of my favorite cookbooks isn’t one that can be found in a store or online. It’s a collection of recipes that my mom put together. Some of them are recipes that my grandma had fixed and written down and some are ones that my mom found and made

Mom has her own personal cook book as well. She gifted me a blank cook book with a few of the family favorite recipes and plenty of room for mine.

Mom didn't care for my grandmother's cooking much. Said she always seemed in a hurry and used too much heat. A lot of meals were burnt.
 
Good cookbooks combined with television shows like the ones on PBS can provide an excellent foundation.
My favorite cooking show on PBS was Justin Wilson’s show
Mom has her own personal cook book as well. She gifted me a blank cook book with a few of the family favorite recipes and plenty of room for mine.
Family recipe books are a great way to pass down memories. I miss my grandma’s cooking. Might have to add some empty page protectors to the one my mom gave me so I can do the same
 

ajkel64

Check Out Chick
Staff member
My mother mostly. Then at school I did Home Economics in years 11 and 12 out here in Australia. I thought then when I leave home I need to be able to cook for myself and possibly others. Then quite a few years ago I started watching River Cottage with Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. I finished up buying most of his cook books.
 
From some guy named Bill S.... I think the recipe went something like this:


Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.


Cast iron cauldron is preferred.
 
My mother was an excellent cook but was not vary adventurous. I was more inspired by her than taught by her. I suppose she taught me how to make crepes. That would have been harder on my own. I think that is true of a lot of people I have "learned" cooking from.

I was into good food and the costs sort of required me to learn how to make things myself. I had a good friend, somewhat older, who introduced me to good wines and encouraged me to buy good equipment and to cook.

I read a lot of cook books and magazines, and watched a lot of cooking shows on TV. I took some some classes at a local cooking school, with a real French chef, and through "Open University." One thing about classes is they provide good recipes. I guess I would say that classes were really useful, for the most part, and gave me confidence to pursue stuff on my own, which I think is where I developed most of my cooking skills.
 
I learned the basics from my mom. And I am good at finding multiple recipes from the internet and mashing them together to make something from what I have on hand.
 
A combination of Mom (home cooking meat and potatoes, enchiladas), Fire station ( i became the "apprentice" to my battalion chief in the kitchen learning to cook for 10-15 guys everyday day, they still beg for my homemade cinnamon rolls) then Food Network while I was in a cast and on crutches for 10 weeks, I would watch Bobby Flay or Giada then have the wife bring home the ingredients and I would recreate the dishes.Now I have enough skills in the kitchen to freelance and make up my own dishes as well.
 

Doc4

Stumpy in cold weather
Staff member
Some of you old-timers may remember the English satyrical puppet show called "Spitting Image" ... which credited it's puppet caricatures of celebrities, politicians, &c to "Luck and Flaw".

... I think they taught me to cook, as well.
 
I never did! I went from mom's house to the Navy to marrying a woman that could cook. We have an arrangement that has worked for a long time. I keep everything in the house fixed and the cars running and she feeds me: what a cool arrangement.
 
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