This makes me glad my mom started teaching me my way around the kitchen in high school. Thanks to her, maybe I'm a little bit ahead of the curve.

First Cake- 16
First Romantic Meal- 17
Dinner Party- 23
Christmas Dinner- 24

First successful cake, or first cake in general? I definitely baked a cake from scratch as kid, but it tasted terrible. It was suppose to be a sponge cake, but it ended up tasting like an omelet. haha! First successful cake probably happened in college, maybe around age 20 or so.

I still haven't cooked a romantic meal all by myself as my other half likes to do the cooking and tends to take on that task.

Dinner party happened sometime in college, and Christmas Dinner will probably never happen as my family's tradition is to do a cheese and crackers thing.

I just did the math, and I'm pretty sure I've hit 10,000 hours (I'm 31)! I guess I've done a heck of a lot of cooking in my lifetime.

Baked first cake: 7 (from scratch, and it was awesome because I confused Ovaltine with baking cocoa in the recipe- my family still loves it)
Cooked first romantic meal: 19
Hosted first dinner party: 18
Made first Christmas supper for the whole family: 20

First Cake- 7 or 8?
First Romantic Meal- 20
Dinner Party- 21
Christmas Dinner- 21 (I substituted Thanksgiving here, because Christmas dinner isn't really a thing for us)

I find the premise of the survey both outdated because of the gender imbalance, and just... odd. I question the result. I don't think I'll ever "master" cooking, but at 26 I can make a perfect fried egg and have a fairly extensive (albeit vegetarian) repetoire. It's hard to imagine that people really don't get things together until their 50s.

Hmm. Hard to pin down ages, since I've done all of those things at various ages, although not necessarily with any skill or panache.

I feel like I've come into my own in the past two years, in the first two years of my 30s. In that time, I've learned to perfectly roast vegetables and a whole chicken, learned to season things much better (still working on that one), have taken on much trickier cookies and sweets with success, learned to perfectly (to my taste) fry an egg, made a successful roux and gumbo on more than one occasion and adequately adjusted a favorite recipe for a diner's dietary restrictions.

You can't measure mastery just based on age or hours of output.

Someone can start cooking from the age of 10 but not master cooking in general anything by the age of 40 if they don't go beyond their comfort zone. My mother likes to make bread. In terms of mastery, she knows far more about baking bread via breadmaker than I do. I am a far better cook because I cook almost every night and diversify my skills by experimenting and doing research. My mom doesn't cook much (beyond bread) so I think undoubtedly I have spent more hours cooking even though she is much older, but neither of us have reached 10,000 (her because of actual work and me because of age).

first cake @ ~10
first scratch cake @ about 12 or 13
i don't know what constitutes a "romantic meal"..
first dinner party: 19
made my first turkey at 20

*baked first turkey

• Baked first cake: 7-8 I think.
• Cooked first romantic meal: 18
• Hosted first dinner party: 16
• Made first Christmas supper for the whole family: 22 (if Tksgiving counts it would be 17)

I guess having parents who hate the kitchen/work late forced me to learn a little early??? Too bad enjoying cooking now makes me the official "Family Cook"... regardless of who's house I am at.

First cake with no help? Maybe nine or ten. Not really sure what counts as a "romantic meal", either 22 or never. Not really sure what counts as a dinner party hosting, but I cooked the food for lots of parties in the last few years (I am 25). Hm, I made the main dish for Christmas supper and have made the dessert for years, sometimes antipasti and helped a lot, but never did all of it on my own and I don't expect to really ever do it (Christmas is a lot of work, so I don't think that anybody in my family has ever done it on his or her own).

I'm shocked that everyone remembers their first cooking experiences. I didn't start cooking (really) until my Junior year in college. I have no idea when I made my first cake or dinner party or any of that stuff.

I'd also like to know what definition they're attributing to "mastery." I can cook an excellent fried egg and I probably have more than 15 meals I can "cook in a flash." I don't know anyone, including experienced cooks over 70, who don't measure ingredients when baking. Except bread. That just seems like asking for disaster when chemical leaveners are involved. Unless you have the recipe virtually memorized, in which case that's not really something that is based on age, just repetition.

Experience matters much more than age. As does skill. You can be 55 and still not know how to bake a cake from scratch, for instance. After all, practice makes perfect.

First cake--10. I was in 4H.
Didn't learn to cook until I went to live in an intentional community at age 24. Cooking dinner everyday for 27 people, with the raw materials coming straight from the farm & garden was a true baptism of fire. Such recipes as were available to me were in metric weights, which I was unable to convert to American volume measures (to estimate how much food to prepare).
We didn't starve, & not much scares me now.

- First cake from scratch: 7 or 8. By age 14, I was making 6-layer genoise cakes with 2 layers of dacquoise and 3 different flavours of true French buttercream.

- First romantic meal: 17 (I think the timing depends more on your amorous life than your culinary skills...)

- Hosted first dinner party: 14 (it was for my 14th birthday).

- Cooked first holiday dinner: also 14. I hated my mother's stuffing, and turkey, and... well, really, I became a great cook out of see-preservation, because my mother was such a terrible one. I had to start packing my own lunches by the end of grade 2 because the ones my mother packed were so horrible. And because she slept in on weekends, I was making my own breakfast by grade 1. By age 16, my father's friends and colleagues were asking me if I would cater (and no, I didn't grow up to be a chef).

My husband says that I am the best cook he has ever encountered, and even my mother-in-law (no slouch in the kitchen) is constantly requesting recipes. I unashamedly use food to seduce, comfort, love, and celebrate. If I bring cupcakes to school, I will admit that I feel they weren't a success if I have any left over and if I don't have several requests for recipes (at our last school, parents and kids alike were begging for my recipe and would bid on my cupcakes at the bake sales).

So I'd say that by my early 20's I was a very adept and confident cook.

First Cake- 9
First Romantic Meal- 25
Dinner Party- 30
Christmas Dinner- 24

I honestly feel like age 30 was the cooking milestone - I just got the science of cooking that year - I haven't made a bad meal since

I'm guessing (guessing!) that this study reflects the outmoded belief that women are cooks and men are chefs: that men who study cooking become masters of proficiency through diligent and august study, while women who cook learn piecemeal through the drudgery of necessity.

Baked first cake [from scratch]: 6 or so (I know that only because we moved out of that house when I turned 7). It was a success of sorts: good but weird because I unwittingly used a pound cake recipe to make a (squat, buttery, delicious) layer cake with cocoa frosting.

Cooked first romantic meal: Maybe age 17 or 18? Certainly as a teenager, possibly some evening when my parents had gone to the movies or even out of town overnight.

Hosted first dinner party: again, sometime in my late teens. I loved to have friends over for dinner, but I also occasionally cooked elaborate menus for houseguests, for family visits, and for my parents' dinner guests.

Made first Christmas supper for the whole family: I thiiiink this would have been around 19 or 20. I know that by the time I was 21, I had already mastered turkey and instead roasted game hens for one uncharacteristically small Christmas: just my parents and me, with all my siblings off at in-laws. They were fine but... anticlimactic.

Ha ha, yes, outdated but unfortunately still too often true! My partner indulges his whims in the kitchen, with painstaking recipes like fish soup (making the fumet from scratch, with fish bones and crustacea shells); homemade candied fruits; chocolates, etc, leaving a huge mess in the process. Meanwhile, I'm still the one who needs to put a meal on the table every evening before the kids go to sleep, and make sure there are enough clean pans to do that!

• Baked first cake: not yet
• Cooked first romantic meal: not yet
• Hosted first dinner party: not yet
• Made first Christmas supper for the whole family: 18ish

I can't remember which year I cooked my own Thanksgiving dinner for the family but it was either 18 or 19. I'm 24 and still perfecting Thanksgiving, I've been hosting it ever since. All the others I've yet to do! Eep! In all fairness I'm an introvert who is trying to make an out of state relocation, so the top three are low on my priority list. My mother, though she can cook, hardly took the time to teach me when I was in my teens and ready to learn. So all the things I do know how to cook I've found on websites. I'm still experimenting. I'm still gathering together recipes from my childhood; my mother is the type of person who doesn't use recipes or measurements. I'd be thrilled to be able to prepare 15 recipes from memory.

Thank goodness for Pinterest, I have all the recipes I'm still wanting to try pinned, and I can add notes to the ones I have cooked.

This definitely does make me feel a little better about how behind I am, but I'm still anxious to catch up.

I'm really curious to know how these numbers apply (or don't apply) to men!

My boyfriend (23) and myself (24) can both claim proficiency, I think, but we've both worked in professional kitchens. I can poach or fry you an egg to your preference of soft/med/hard without a timer, and 15 meals in a flash sounds simple. I'm pro at quick breads, muffins, cakes, and cookies, but not so much yeasted stuff....my one big blind spot. Bf's great at bread, so I let him do it.

I think it just comes down to having confidence, being adventurous, and putting in the hours of practice. If it took til 55 for some, that's just a function of their life and the multitudes of other stuff they were undoubtedly up to at the time.

Perhaps this is smug, but I'm 30 and I feel like I've mastered cooking (I definitely have my 10,000 hours in on this one). I VERY rarely get anything but rave reviews on my food, and I have a whole slew of recipes I can throw together successfully every time (way more than 15). I owe my skills to my mother, who started teaching me how to cook at 4, and the Food Network, which taught me some of the fancier stuff Momma didn't know. I also got tossed into the entertaining pretty early because our house was the gathering place for my huge family, and when my mother was diagnosed with cancer (I was in college) I took over the cooking.

First Cake- 10
First Romantic Meal-17
Dinner Party- 18
Christmas Dinner- 20

Weaknesses (all due to lack of practice): bread, pie crust, custard, cooked frosting

Maybe I'll have those down by the time I'm 55. :-)