Life (and knife) skills: The 15 essential cooking skills everyone should master from boiling an egg to making pasta

I love jointing a chicken. I like standing there at the bench, cutting between the leg and the body, separating the thigh and the drumstick, and following the angle of the breastbone to remove the chicken breast. I like laying out the pieces and staring at my handiwork. It’s a deeply pleasing act because I know what I’m doing. I’m good at it.

Some people can fix a car engine, knit a jumper or write computer code. I cannot do any of those things, but I can joint a chicken.

This basic kitchen skill is a bigger deal than it appears because it gives me autonomy.

It means I can buy a whole chicken – organic, from a good home – instead of being reliant on random pieces from a butcher.

It means I can save money by using the whole bird: the carcass for stock, the cooking juices for gravy, the roasted wings for eating when nobody’s looking.

In the same way, anyone who knows how to fillet a fish can buy the freshest, brightest-eyed snapper at the market, save themselves some money and end up with dinner and a tub of fish stock in the freezer.

So what other skills should we have by the time we’re grown-ups? I reckon we should be able to:

• Make our own pasta
• Bake a cake
• Boil, poach, scramble and fry an egg just how we like it
• Know how to braise, stew, roast and barbecue
• Build the perfect burger
• Preserve our own pickles
• Open an oyster
• Make our own jams and marmalades
• Sharpen a knife without killing ourselves or others in the immediate vicinity

Then there’s the PhD of essential kitchen skills: teaching our children the skills we know so that they know them, too.

That said, there are some tasks that other people will always be more skilled at performing: see fixing a car engine, knitting a jumper, writing computer code. See also, brewing beer, dry-ageing steak and making fancy chocolates.

In which case, I suggest you either marry them, adopt them or pay them for their service – whichever is more convenient. Respecting a greater skill set than your own, and acting upon it, is a skill in itself.