This comes to my mind because I am often asked why our dishes taste good. I normally bring dinner leftover to the office for my lunch and I usually share the food with my colleagues. Now, this question of who cooks in the house. I actually learned cooking from my husband who tried to teach me. But since he is the mentor so why not let him cook. Well, when we started living in an apartment, I bought a small electric stove. It was funny because in the kitchen, my husband and I looked at each other, it was just like a scene in a movie. Neither one of us knows how to cook, huh. But my husband is vain when it comes to asking about cooking so he tried to learn by teaching himself how to cook.
When I was growing up, we lived in an old house that didn't have a cookstove. At one time, it had had an old wood cookstove in the kitchen, but it had been taken out, and there was a refrigerator in the place where the stove had once been. The kitchen was tiny, and there was no other place to have a stove, and the house had no wiring for a 220 appliance in any case. My mom had an electric frying pan and an electic cookpot that was similar to a crockpot, except it had a temperature control just like the frying pan had, and you could exactly control the cooking temperature. My dad had false teeth, and he could not eat a lot of things, so everything we ate had to be simple to fix, and come from one or both of those electric cookers. In the summer, we had fried chicken or hamburger meat, with boiled potatoes and green salad, or maybe just a hamburger sandwich and potato salad. In the winter, we had stew. Every day, we added a can of vegetables to the stew, and ate more of it until it was gone, and then we started another pot of stew. I was always glad when summer came again. Whoever was there first was responsible for making dinner, and since mom and dad both worked long hours, the cook was often me , once I got old enough to do that. When I got married, that was all that I knew how to cook. Fortunately, my husband liked fried chicken.
I never really learned to cook. I could fry eggs and salt pork. But generally if I had to fix my own meals, I wouldn't cook, I eat syrup and stir peanut butter in it and whatever bread was available usually a few cold biscuits on the cabinet. If no bread I'd fork it on a cracker because we usually had peanut butter and crackers. My job was to do the dishes and straighten up the kitchen. i still don't cook.
I learned to cook oats and cinnamon toast when I was a young boy. I never learned to cook anything else until I was out on my own.I think I became a pretty good cook because I like to eat good food and I like to experiment.
My parents died when I was in my teens, so I had to get used to doing lots of things for myself. Cooking was pretty much a case of learning from experience. I've reached the sort of age now where I'm quite good at it.
My mother was a wonderful cook, but she did not have the patience to teach me. I took home economics in high school and that is where I learned to basics of cooking. One year for my birthday my mom bought me a copy of The Joy of Cooking. I loved that cookbook because it had sections that talked about all different cuts of meat and all different kinds of cooking tools and methods of cooking meats. I would take that book to bed with me at night and read those informative sections over and over again. Then, in each section of recipes, it would go over the items that were featured in those recipes. It was so helpful and taught me so much. Over the years, I have worn out 3 or 4 copies of The Joy of Cooking and have given a copy to each of my children, even my son.
I can't really say that I've learned to cook properly, but I definitely learned to "cook". My mother didn't like how lazy I was by the time I turned 20, so she gave me cooking lessons. It turns out I'm not fit to be a chef... I was (and still am!) a disaster in the kitchen. If my lovely wife wouldn't cook for me, I'd probably either starve to death, or live off of junk food.