Votingfood / other
Cooking from Scratch
People on teaching themselves to cook from scratch, disasters included.
People on teaching themselves to cook from scratch, disasters included.
Approval Rate
Voters
Passing threshold 60%
Problem to Solve
Most cooking content online assumes you already know the basics, or gives you a recipe without showing what learning is actually like. If you’re starting from nothing, the questions that matter most often go unanswered: what to learn first, what’s normal to mess up, and how long it takes before a kitchen stops feeling scary.
Unique Value
This book collects first-person accounts from people who taught themselves to cook, from knowing almost nothing to feeding themselves and other people. Each chapter is one person in their own kitchen: the dishes that taught them, and the ones that ended up in the bin. No food-influencer gloss. No “anyone can do this in fifteen minutes.”
What You'll Gain
An honest picture of learning to cook: where to start, what’s normal to get wrong, what finally made things click, and what people now cook without thinking. Not a recipe book, just real accounts to learn alongside.
Most cooking content online is polished: perfect plates, “15-minute” recipes that take an hour, and the feeling that everyone else already knows what they’re doing. The honest version is harder to find: learning to cook when you couldn’t, the failures, and the dish that finally made things click. We think a few of those accounts, collected side by side, would make a book worth keeping. If you taught yourself to cook, however slowly, we’d like your chapter.
Most cookbooks hand you recipes and assume you can already cook. This book is different: a group of people who couldn’t, telling how they learned, burnt dinners and all.
This is an open anthology. We set up the book; contributors write the chapters. Each chapter is one person on how they taught themselves to cook. There’s no fixed format. If you want a starting point, you might cover where you began, what you got wrong, the dish that finally made things click, what nobody told you, and what you cook now. But that’s a suggestion, not a requirement. The slots fill as contributors join.
You taught yourself to cook, more or less from scratch, and you’re willing to write about how it went, disasters included. You don’t need to be a chef or a writer. You just need to have learned, and be willing to tell the story honestly.
If turning it into a chapter isn’t your thing, a writer on the team can help shape it.
You decide which accounts make it in, how they’re ordered, and whether the book stays honest and free of food-influencer gloss.
You know home cooking well enough to tell an honest account from a performance.
You work with a home cook to draw out what happened and turn it into a clear, honest chapter. The words stay theirs; you help shape them.
You’re comfortable interviewing, and good at turning a messy learning story into something people can read.
This book was started by ThePeopleBook, a platform for collaborative nonfiction. We organize the book and bring contributors together; the writing is theirs. We’re not chefs or food writers. That experience belongs to the people who taught themselves to cook. We’re starting this book to collect honest first-hand accounts of learning to cook from scratch, written by the people who did it. The book is currently looking for a lead. As the team forms, that role, along with full authority over the book, will pass to a suitable contributor. If you’re interested, write to [email protected].