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Oh, and before anyone thinks I was a child prodigy in the kitchen, let's just say that a lot of what went on was spurred by necessity rather than a burning passion to learn how to cook.

I went to a Montessori school for kindergarten, and the kids would help with daily lunch preparations. The littler ones performed only basic tasks, of course, but I remember helping out at least a bit as soon as I started at the school at age three. There was also a memorable incident involving a bad knife cut sustained while making stone soup.

After kindergarten, I always helped my parents in the kitchen, and learned how to bake cookies and cakes quite young. But the first time I remember preparing a real meal (i.e. cooked, not a slapped-together sandwich or whatever) completely by myself was one weekend when my parents were out of town and the girl they'd hired to stay with me had no idea how to cook anything. I was hungry, so I decided to see what I could do. I'd seen my dad do homemade red sauce for pasta before, and so I tried replicating what I'd watched him make. I was probably about eight?

Like dbcurrie, no child prodigy claims. I learned my way around a kitchen fairly early on simply because I grew up in a household where one cooked and baked. The red sauce is a good example: it would never have even occurred to me to open a jar of Ragu.

I rmember that I was doing things as young as I can remember in the kitchen, so what about 2-3 yrs old (too long ago to remember). But as I remember when my mother made suger cookies and with the cookie cutters she taught me to stamp out a shape. With my cookies when she made a colored frosting allowed me to decorate my cookies. Then at around Easter with the Easter eggs mom let me scribble crap on my egg and helped me dye the egg. When she made the authentic apple struedel with it all laid out on the dining room table (yes she did it all by scratch) I was allowed to sprinkle cinnamon/suger on the apples. Later came my Easy-Bake-Oven (which was run by a single light bulb back then) making little mini cakes, then it was learing how to make French toast or scrambled eggs and the rest is history.

Unsupervised? Around 10.. I'd come home and make sauteed onions and sliced hot dogs. Gross to me now, but I like that I could appreciate caramelization then.

for reasons too complicated to explain-- my brother and I were pretty much on our own from 7 and 8 onwards. So cooking was survival! My favorite meal was leftover chinese take out rice cooked in alot of butter with ground beef and cheddar cheese. i cooked this standing on phone books from 8 years old on at least 3 times a week!

I was never allowed in my mom's kitchen as a kid. I didn't really realize how much I loved cooking until after I was married.
Now, my mom would always have something freshly baked from scatch waiting for us when we got home from school.Cakes, cookies, muffins, you name it, there was something. Not the best of cooks, but an amazing baker.

I was 18, and just married when I first cooked a meal. Mom would not allow me in the kitchen, and she did not have the patience to teach me how to make anything. I know that I have made her sound like a horrid person, she really isn't. She was just very (over)protective of the cleanliness in our home. We weren't allowed to clean or do laundry either! Was a dream growing up, but soon found out it was a curse. I have to really watch myself with my daughter, because I find myself wanting to do the same thing....

We moved to England when I was in 3rd grade. I went to a local English school and cookery was every week. Loved it. They would give us a list of ingredients to bring for the next cookery class and I would pack them into a tin and take to school. The finished dish was always incorporated into our family dinner. Some of the dishes did not quite make it home, like the peas and carrots gratin...that ""sadly"" fell into the gutter on my walk home (hated carrots at the time.

That started my delight in cooking...I used to beg my mum to help her chop, saute, etc..etc. Came back to the states when I was in high school and was in charge of the family dinners for eight.

I started by helping to do things like shuck peas and corn when I was probably 5 or so, then snipped the ends off green beans with a knife when I was 6 (my parents would probably be thrown in jail today for letting me do so!) But I clearly remembered seeing a pudding commercial on TV when I was probably 6-7 and thinking that would be a great thing to be able to make lots of... I found a couple of boxes of old fashioned (the pudding that needed to be cooked) chocolate pudding in the pantry and pulled out the first of two sauce pans I would ruin that day. Apparently stir constantly and low heat mean nothing to a 6-7 yr. old. my brother was "watching me" (all be it not very closely) until my mother came home. Probably the best thing that came about because of it was that my mother never got mad at me and instead took the time (after she bought two new sauce pans) to show me how to make chocolate pudding. After that I started experimenting with omelettes... god bless my poor parents, they ate every last one and never complained.

I was three. I actually still remember it. I bullied my dad in making london broil, in the broiler, with me in some old 1970s oven (it was 1986). We set the kitchen on fire! We got the fire, and eventually my cooking, under control. Took me 23 years of training to get to Serious Eats!

Guess I was a bit late to the game....

Aside from chocolate chip cookies and brownies when I was a kid, I didn't really do any cooking until I met my husband when I was 27.

I've been cooking for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are sitting on the kitchen counter helping my mom make anything and everything. By the time I was in high school, I was fully capable of making a relatively advanced meal completely on my own. And although my mom is a fabulous cook who loves doing it herself, I'm pretty sure there were times where she was really thankful I could do a lot of it for her.

My grandmother used to make this absolutely divine macaroni and cheese, and I used to watch her make it. I was maybe 4 or 5 years old when I decided to try to duplicate it since I had seen the ingredients she used. The problem was that at that age, my mom wouldn't let me use the oven. Only the microwave, which I guess she deemed "safer." I also had no concept of proportions and decided I was going to make it really cheesy. ...It was really bad. To this day, I'm much better at eating than cooking.

When I first started helping out - 6 or 7. When I first started actually cooking things from start to finish on my own - 11.

Oh my gosh! The multicolored measuring spoons - did they perchance come with the Klutz Cooking for Kids cookbook? My mother still has the spoons (they are awesome and very durable) but I have custody of the book. I still like to use it as a starting point for some things - plus I hand-wrote in some of my favorite recipe alterations. My handwriting has improved only slightly from age 6. Uh oh. (so- I'd say I started helping in the kitchen around age 4, and cooking more on my own but simply around age 6).

This reminds me of my neice helping my mom make homemade Korean noodles.
She had rolled out her own little piece of dough, rolled it, cut it into noodles. Then my mom made the soup and added the noodles. But when Mimi wasn't looking my mom threw out the noodles that Mimi made, tossing them in the trash because they were too thick and gummy.
As we were all enjoying the noodle soup, my sister said, "Mimi why don't you tell us how to make the noodle soup."
Mimi said, "You roll out the dough, then you fold it, then you cut it, then Granny puts it in the trash."

I remember the first cake I baked. I was 14 and we lived in Syracuse. I found a recipe booklet that came with Nescafe instant coffee. I made the cake that was featured on the cover; a 2-layer coffee flavored cake with mocha icing. I must say it came out beautiful. I've been hooked on baking every since. (I'm now a grandmother living in Brooklyn).

I couldn't have been older than 2 or 3, when my mother began letting me help her @ the kitchen. This was during the early '50s, and we didn't have a television yet. (GASP!!) I was only tasked w/ very simple things -stirring, sifting and the like - but it kept me occupied where she could keep an eye on me. Whenever we went to my grandmother's apartment for Sunday dinner, my cousin's family would go as well - they lived in the apartment next to hers. So we'd all be there, myself and two cousins, all of us rugrats. Well, it would be a typical Italian meal, w/ three million courses. Every time, Nana would whip up a large batch of homemade macaroni or ravioli. Either way, the three of us would be involved, forming the pieces of macaroni - individually by hand, of course - or sealing the ravioli.

Now, for making ravioli, my mother had really neat a wood thingie that let you seal an entire side at once. It was about 6" long, and maybe 2" wide. One side - the back - was smooth, but the other side had a series of grooves that ran along the entire length. After sprinkling the "working" side w/ a bit of flour, you pressed the thing into the completed piece of ravioli to create the seal.

But Nana didn't have one of those handy little things. So my cousins Angela and Lynne and I got stuck using the "alternate" method: pressing the tines of a fork into the completed ravioli to make the seal. But we had to be careful, because it was very easy to puncture the ravioli pouch. It was also very easy to push down too hard, and create a ribboned edge @ a piece of ravioli.

Now, so far I've talked @ Nana and my mother. But I would be remiss if I did not mention my father. My father left most of the cooking to my mother, but in the evening if he got a yen for something from his childhood, he'd be @ the stove. It was very interesting to watch him, because his cooking style was so different from either my mother's style, or Nana's style. (Nana was his mother, btw.) And he could create unique spins @ different recipes, seemingly effortlessly. What his style had in common w/ Nana's was the fact that he "knew" the recipes so he didn't have them written down, and the fact that he didn't really "measure" things much. Instead, he eyed amounts as he added them to the mix, or he'd put a small amount in the palm of his hand before adding it. (Those were usually salt, pepper and other spices.)

By the time I was 6 or 7, I was allowed to make pudding @ my own - hey, no "instant" stuff back @ the '50s, I had to cook the stuff! By 10 or 11, I could prepare an entire dinner. (And it tasted good, too!) I've been cooking ever since.

I also have to mention that when my children were small, it always drove them nuts watching me cook, because my wife uses recipes and measures things precisely, while I sort of feel my way to knowing when to add what, and how much of it. So I guess I synthesized Nana's and my mother's knowledge w/ my father's use-the-force way of doing things.

I remember cooking my first family dinner at the age of 13: steak and Potatoes Anna. Mom said it was well done but the potatoes were too complicated for the simple steak. A few months (weeks?) later I made hollandaise sauce, and insisted my mom stay at my elbow to avert any disasters-in-the-making. But it was perfect. (But I must have hung out in the kitchen before then, because I was perfectly at home there when I started cooking entire meals. I just don't remember.)

Meanwhile, I was suffering through a totally useless home ec class in middle school: It took TWO CLASS PERIODS to make up a drink mix consisting mainly of powdered milk and cocoa powder. It was intended as part of a meal that included pie – and the teacher offered each little group the choice of "lemon pie" or "potato pie." I'm not a big lemon-meringue pie fan, but it sounded better than a stodgy crust full of mashed potato, which I'd never heard of before.

Well, teacher meant SWEET potato pie, which I loved, and if she'd only said so, I'd have opted for that!

The sewing class was even worse. Three or four weeks to make a nasty little scarf edged with bias tape, held together with criminally snarled thread because I needed help adjusting the tension on the sewing machine and wasn't getting it. Meanwhile, at home I made myself a culotte jumper out of corduroy, which I wore until it wore out or went out of style, I forget which.

I think it was after this horror was over that I had pepper steak for the first time. It came with a savory, peppery white-flour gravy. I decided to make it at home, and didn't realize until after the dish was ready for the table that mine was an "au jus" kind of recipe. I was surprised and disappointed – really looking forward to that gravy – but nobody knew what I'd had in mind, and my dad was proud enough to invite a friend of his to stay for dinner.

One of my earliest memories is going to my aunt's house and making oatmeal raisin cookies while my parents took my sister to see Star Wars.

When I was six or seven, my mom went back to work, so we would come home after school and make snacks or whatever. What I really remember is sitting at the counter in the kitchen while my sister did her best Julia Child impression as we made cookies. I'm kindof amazed she doesn't have a food network show yet, but surprisingly, I'm the one that cooks. She bartends.

This isn't to say that we cooked well. I was all grown up before I discovered that spaghetti sauce didn't have to come out of a jar or tried mac & cheese that wasn't from a blue box.

Oh I forgot,
In third grade all the students brought in their favorite recipes and put together a cookbook. I remember making several things out of it with little or no help from a parent.

Wow. So many memories in these comments. Setting fire to things, the electric popcorn maker, inedible desserts the family said were fabulous, standing on step stools that converted to kitchen stools to reach counters and stoves, peeling tomatoes for canning, literally bathed in the juices, the peeling, chopping, stirring and just all of it!

In our family we have always encouraged childrens' efforts in the kitchen. We take the time to explain basic principles and techniques, let them taste the individual ingredients and allow experiments. My son has become a fabulous cook.

The first thing I ever cooked entirely on my own was chocolate cupcakes that I made for church. I couldn't read the recipe yet, so I ran back and forth to my grandmother for the next ingredient/step. I must have been four or five because I could read when I was six.

When I was about ten my grandmother got an electric crepe maker for Christmas. I decided to make Cherries Jubilee, complete with flames. Never were there so many worried looking faces around. They thought sure that I would set the house on fire, but it turned out great!

When I was twelve I decided that I wanted an allowance. In return for said allowance I took on the responsibility of preparing dinner for the family almost every night.