Is cooking an inherent ability?

I know how to cook. I can throw something together on the fly or follow a recipe. I never paid attention when my mom was cooking, I never took a food prep course or anything, it's just something I know how to do. I don't know how or why I know, I just do.

My girlfriend, however, cannot cook at all. She has no concept of what ingredients can go together or in what amounts, or how long to cook this or that. Sometimes she can follow a recipe, but most of the time it ends up in disaster.

If someone doesn't have that natural inclination to know how to make food that tastes good, can they be taught?

 

Cooking is a skill, like any other. Some people pick up different skills easier than others.

 

I'd say you deff need some sort of natural skill going in. Your skills can certainly be fine tuned through teachings, but i'd say you stand a very poor rate of success with a 0 know how going into it.

 

At some point, we all had zero know-how. Even the best chef's in the world. The difference is learning ability and time. My mother always cooked meals. We never had take-out or went to restaurants as a child except for special occasions (Christmas Eve, for example). So, I spent alot of time in the kitchen as a child. My mother could keep an eye on me and I learned alot about cooking. You could say I've been learning for 30 years. The people who seem clueless may not be less inclined, they just never helped mom as a child and have only 1 or 2 years of learning.

 

I think it's more like painting, where your natural talent comes into play a lot. I suppose you could break talent down into meaning your ability to learn something quicker and better than the typical person, but there's a word for that already (talent) so I'll use it.

Someone can go to art school and learn how to paint regardless of their lack of talent. They will never be as good as someone who has natural talent, often someone who was self taught with natural talent will do better even.

It's the same with cooking IMO. You can learn to follow a recipe flawlessly after you've learned the relevant cooking terms and methods regardless of talent, but only someone with talent will be good at creating new dishes or adding the right seasonings/ingredients to improve the taste of an existing recipe.