The Principles of Cooking Well
How to suck less at food, an introduction to Marco Pierre White
I recently ran a poll where I asked my followers if they know how to cook.
The results:
33% of those who voted don’t know how to cook
34% of men don’t know how to cook
20% of women don’t know how to cook
The results likely reflect the general population. 1,879 votes is statistically significant relative to my account size (~58,000 followers as I’m writing this).
To prove I’m not pulling an Elon Musk when it comes to polling people, given most of his followers live in India — the majority of my followers are American. American millennials and zoomers.
33% of Millennials & Zoomers not knowing how to cook isn’t devastating, but it isn’t good.
It’s Never Been Easier To Suck At Cooking
DoorDash (or ‘Deliveroo’ for my UK followers) is at everyone’s fingertips now. If you want fast food or a meal prepared from a restaurant, an immigrant will bring it to you in under an hour. I believe Curtis Yarvin said restaurants are one of the few things America still does exceptionally well. Even in small cities, it isn’t difficult to find high quality food. Trader Joe’s & Whole Foods have aisles of pre-prepared meals that can be heated up in the microwave now. If you have the money, you can live the rest of your life without ever knowing how to cook.
Why You Should Know How To Cook
You should know how to cook for yourself. And I’m not talking about a potential apocalypse, I’m talking about baseline life satisfaction. Eating something delicious that you made yourself is significantly more rewarding than paying for it at a restaurant. Serving it to people you care about is even more rewarding. It’s a good skill to have whether you’re a man or a woman.
For the record, I’m extremely pro-restaurant. It’s a luxury to be served amongst friends or while on a date. But knowing how to do this for people in your home is something else entirely. Eating is more special when it was prepared by someone you know. You aren’t just shoveling calories down your gullet for energy. It’s also just flat out impressive. When someone knows what they’re doing in the kitchen, you think more highly of them. There’s zero downside to knowing how to cook well.
Whipping Something Up vs. Cooking
Whipping something up isn’t difficult. It’s just following instructions. Every recipe you can think of is online and there’s infinite YouTube videos to learn from. Recipes are actually one of the few things AI is exceptional at, given the LLMs “learned” every recipe on the internet. Those long diatribes you scroll past before finally getting to a recipe? AI read all of it.
Anyone can make a decent meal once by following instructions. But what about knowing how to cook, and cook well, on an intuitive level? Seeing a bunch of ingredients and “just knowing what to do” without needing to look up recipes? For anyone who doesn’t know how to cook, this is the level you should strive for. This doesn’t require taking cooking classes or spending hours watching YouTube videos. There’s small things you can do, from knowing how to prepare, to buying a high-quality chef’s knife, that will not only make you better at cooking but will make you want to cook more often.
I’m also going to summarize a few lessons I’ve learned from Marco Pierre White, untrained British philosopher and master chef rooted in simplicity, from his book The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef.
“Allow Mother Nature to be the true artist. Allow her to do the work. You’re just the cook. And when you accept that in life, then life changes.”
-Marco Pierre White
The ideal state is being confident enough in the kitchen to want to learn how to make anything incredible you eat at a restaurant. But this won’t happen over night. It will cost you practice, some money, and your ego.
Family Advantages
I got lucky in this area. My mother is the best cook I know (many such cases, but seriously — she is). I watched her cook as a kid and learned a lot from her. I remember rummaging through her wooden box filled with old recipes that have been passed down from multiple generations as she cooked, which one day I’ll pass onto my kids.
If you have someone in your family who knows how to cook well, ask them for recipes. Don’t be scared to call them in the middle of preparing something and ask them for tips. If they love cooking, they will be happy to help you. Food is an incredible way to bond with family.
Prepare for Preparing
Cooking is chaotic. That is part of why it feels so daunting. If the meal requires a lot of preparation, sometimes it feels too overwhelming and you just say “fuck it” and move on. Mentally prepare yourself to spend 20-30 minutes before you start cooking to have everything laid out in front of you. Measure out the oil, chop the garlic, and throw out what you don’t need. Set aside a clean space for what you need. Place everything in small bowls so they’re ready to use when you need them. If you have everything you need laid out in front of you, this makes the actual cooking portion much easier.
Don’t Skimp on Quality
In America, you get what you pay for. And that applies to everything. This doesn’t mean you need to be swindled into paying absurd prices for something basic, but you should at least be able to tell the difference between shit-tier and high quality.
I never skimp on two things: food and sleep. I choose to have the most comfortable mattress, pillows, and sheets possible because we spend 1/3 of our lives in bed. “I need to live a certain way.” But I also spend a lot on kitchen gear and high quality ingredients because I mostly cook at home. And the more you cook, the more you learn you shouldn’t skimp on quality. Here are a few things you really shouldn’t skimp on.
Chef’s Knife
I cannot overestimate how much a high quality Chef’s knife will change the way you cook. Compared to a regular kitchen knife, a proper Chef’s knife gives you more control. The ergonomics are built for comfort and speed.
I have a few different Chef’s knives. Germany and Japan are the best at making steel for the kitchen. Wüsthof is selling their classic with a pairing knife for 40% off on Amazon right now. It’s incredible. Mac is also a great brand, based in Japan. Trust me, a good Chef’s knife is absolutely worth the money. It isn’t necessary, but a magnetic knife board looks great in kitchens and is a great place to store them.
Knowing How To Use A Knife
If this is all very new to you, you might be convinced you’re going to slice your finger off. And you might if you aren’t smart about it. This is where YouTube comes in. Anything that needs to be chopped has a YouTube video that will give you a hack to chop it more efficiently, from onions to garlic to bell peppers. Practice chopping them until you’re confident in it. If you’re completely new to using a knife, be extremely careful. Buy gloves at first if you need to.
This might feel stupid to do, but you should buy 3-4 onions and just use them to learn how to slice and chop them properly. Most people have no idea how to chop an onion properly. Once you learn how, it’s significantly easier. Same goes for garlic. Two ingredients that are often the reason for why some dishes have flavor.
“Gastronomy begins with technique. If you haven’t got technique, you will never master gastronomy.” -Marco Pierre White
Respect Food
High quality ingredients cannot be overstated. If you live in America, chances are you don’t know what a tomato tastes like. Tomatoes in Southern Europe are grown in soil that hasn’t been completely plummeted of their nutrients like in America. They have so much flavor you realize most tomatoes in America are just water with red guts and seeds. Hence why they have NO place on a burger. But I digress.
If you’re buying organic ingredients, they’re going to taste better. That’s just how it is. The more powerful your ingredients, the better your meal is going to taste. You don’t need to add a ton of spices to give something flavor, contrary to let’s say, some ethnic and cultural differences in America you may have heard about.
Over time, you will begin to understand which ingredients work well with others, and how balance works. If you’re unsure about why a recipe works the way it does, and I’m not kidding — ask AI. It knows how flavor works despite not being able to taste.
“You should buy the best ingredients and cook them perfectly, but to do this you have to question what you are doing and why you’re doing it.” -Marco Pierre White
Do Not Be Afraid of Heat
Something Marco Pierre White stresses is not being afraid of heat. Understanding how heat works. “Attacking the stove.” Understanding what requires being cooked on high heat versus low heat is absolutely critical. Understanding heat means understanding time. Eventually, you will develop a gut sense for when something needs to be turned, or if the heat needs to be higher or lowered. Buying a food thermometer goes a long way, especially for meat, but I recommend waiting a bit before doing this. If you burn something, you burn something. This is how you learn. Don’t be afraid to learn the hard way.
Cookbooks and YouTube
I read Marco Pierre White’s book because I have a lot of respect for him. But it isn’t necessarily a cookbook, it’s more of a biography. I’ve watched hours of his YouTube videos because I find him fascinating.
If cooking well is something you’re truly interested in, I recommend reading the following to understand more advanced principles.
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan
Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nostrat (her documentary by the same name on Netflix is great)
You Are Going To Fuck Up
In the kitchen there’s a wide spectrum of fucking up. If you’re not using a critical ingredient because you forgot to buy it and are gonna try it anyway, the dish is shot. It was over before it began. If you bought low quality ingredients, it’s not going to be as good as it could be. However, sometimes it’s great, but not perfect. This is going to happen, especially in the beginning. Just like with dating, being aware of where you fucked up and not doing it again in the future is how you get better. Yes, cooking well is a lot like dating.
No one is going to master a dish on their first try. I don’t feel truly confident in a dish unless I’ve cooked it 3-4 times. By the 4th time, I’ve got it under control. I know where I went wrong in the past and what shouldn’t be ignored. This is going to happen. You need to accept that your ego is going to be bruised along the way before you truly know what you’re doing in the kitchen.
“Perfection is a lot of little things done well.” -Marco Pierre White
Great post on a seriously important topic. I feel like cooking well is a bridge guys have to cross to be true, functioning adults. Never seen a girl, or guy friends for that matter, not like a dude that knows how to prepare food.
For an account to follow entirely devoted to cooking, I recommend ppl follow Myles Snider @mylescooks here and on Twitter. I’ve been able to take tons of his advice and run with it. If you’re here some of your mutuals probably already follow him
Thank you, once again, for writing such a needed and intelligent piece, and for also including so many practical tips. I hope this isn’t annoying, as I tend to leave long comments when something really makes me think. But here it goes…
You wrote: “I got lucky in this area. My mother is the best cook I know… I watched her cook as a kid and learned a lot from her.” I believe that makes a very big difference later in life, witnessing someone you love pour care into the meals they prepare. It creates skill, but also reverence. A respect for food AND for ritual.
I grew up in Romania in the 80s, when it was still communist. There were no shortcuts back then. You ate what you cooked. Most people grew their own food. My grandmother had a large farm and didn’t need to buy anything. She worked the land until her late 80s.
I still remember helping her collect beans one summer. We walked through a field where bean stalks wound their way through tall corn. My legs were scratched, and I had cuts all over my hands from the sharp leaf blades. The sun was HOT and I was sunburnt. We dried the pods for days in the sun, then beat them with wooden bats to release the beans. My hands were blistered and sore, and in the end, we had just two buckets!!! I remember thinking that beans should cost THOUSANDS.
But that night, when we boiled, then mashed them with fresh garlic and salt and spread it on homemade bread… it was the best thing I had ever tasted.
I share this only to emphasize even further the point you made, which is that we have lost our relationship with food. Most of us no longer know what real food looks like from seed to harvest. Everything is so readily available now, so effortless, that we forget the beauty of the process. And perhaps even more importantly, we no longer eat together in the same way. We eat distracted, on the go. We don’t make meals a shared ritual like it used to be.
And yet, as you said, meals don’t need to be complicated. When quality reigns, simplicity shines. This phrase I once heard, and I believe it applies to everything, and specially food: “Simplicity is a luxury only quality can afford.”