"I can't cook"

You'll have said this, and you'll have believed it, and some of the belief comes from watching people cook on television, where cooking is a performance with a knife and eleven ingredients and a sauce that has to be exactly right. Measured against that, most people can't cook. Measured against what dinner needs, most people can.

Jean Adams and colleagues looked at the cooking skills of just over five hundred adults in the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey. Around ninety per cent said they could cook a main dish from basic ingredients without help, and almost two-thirds cooked a main meal at least five times a week. That's the general population, not a cookery class. The skill you think you haven't got is one most people have, and most people got it not from a course but from watching a parent. Fiona Lavelle and colleagues, surveying a thousand adults across the island of Ireland, found that people who learned to cook as children or teenagers had more skills and more confidence in them as adults, and that the mother was the main source. If you didn't get that, you're at a real disadvantage, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But the disadvantage is a start you didn't get, not a ceiling.

What does the plain plate actually need you to do. Boil water. Put a thing in a pan with some oil and move it about until it changes colour. Open a tin. Grate cheese. Put salt on it and taste it. Those are the whole skill set for the six meals in chapter 20, and none of them is the kind of thing anyone learns and then forgets. The confidence is the missing part, and confidence is what goes up fastest. Ada Garcia and colleagues, reviewing community cooking programmes, found that the one result those programmes produce consistently, across ages and settings, is that people come out more confident in their cooking. Changes in what they eat were less consistent. Confidence is the easy bit, and it comes from doing it, not from being taught.

It's like driving to the shops. You don't need to be able to drive well to drive to the shops. You need to be able to drive. The "I can't cook" belief is comparing you to the people on television, and dinner doesn't need them.

So the test isn't whether you can cook. It's whether you can make one plain plate badly tonight. If you can, you can cook, in the only sense that matters on a Tuesday, and the second one will be better than the first.