For Those Who Don’t Know How to Cook, Quarantine Presents a Challenge

When she began self-isolating in her apartment in College Station, Texas, in March, Melissa Hodges thought it would be her big opportunity to finally learn to cook. After all, so many of her classmates at Texas A&M University, where she is a senior, were posting Instagram photos of glossy strands of spaghetti carbonara and citrus scones drizzled with a sticky glaze.

Then she tried to heat up a frozen cheese pizza.

“I stuck it in the oven at a random temperature because I didn’t bother to read the instructions,” recalled Ms. Hodges, 22, who didn’t put the pizza on a dish. “About 20 minutes in, it fell through the cracks of my oven.” The result was both doughy and charred. “I sat on the floor and started crying.”

After that disaster — and another involving undercooked pasta that crunched when she bit in — she is resigned to dinners of breakfast cereal and other undemanding foods. “The kitchen just sits there and stares at me,” she said.

Cooking, one of life’s most basic chores, has suddenly become a creative outlet and source of comfort for a whole new audience of the housebound. On social media, it can seem as if everyone is spending more time in the kitchen, whether to bake banana bread or to cultivate a sourdough starter with a cheeky name like Jane Dough. Traffic to cooking websites has exploded. Celebrities are broadcasting their culinary feats. As the website Grub Street recently noted, “In quarantine, it turns out, everything becomes a cooking blog.”

Yet for all the home cooks who are embracing the art as a therapeutic escape or mode of entertainment, there are as many others who are left cold, or confounded, by the sight of a stove.

It’s hardly news that plenty of people don’t cook, or don’t like to. But driven by necessity or inspired by the new popularity of cooking, Ms. Hodges and others like her have tried their hand at it, often with discouraging results: smoke-filled kitchens, blackened pots, whipped-coffee explosions.

Even when they succeed, satisfaction isn’t guaranteed. The pandemic has pitted the passive cooks against the passionate ones, with some feeling increasingly annoyed by the culinary renaissance unfolding around them.

“I feel a little bit tricked,” said Kim Baldwin, who works at Parnassus Books in Nashville. “Like I knew all these normal people who had this latent bread-making skill that had never been talked about.”

Ms. Baldwin, 43, has a kitchen full of unused appliances that she and her husband, John, received as wedding gifts 12 years ago. Neither has ever found cooking relaxing.

Since her work has slowed, she has been flipping through her few cookbooks (also wedding gifts). She made curried lentils with the legumes in her pantry, but later realized they were about eight years old. “They were chewy and weird,” she said.

She tried making barbecue chicken by putting boneless breasts into a slow cooker and pouring an entire bottle of barbecue sauce over them. “It was terrible,” she said, “like chicken barbecue soup.” Her husband has made a lot of instant ramen.

Her only victory has been a lemon pie, in which she had to substitute almost every ingredient in the recipe because she couldn’t find what she needed at the grocery. “I was so surprised that I made it work, and the pie was delicious,” she said. It was “my only joyful kitchen experience so far.”

Still, some fledgling cooks have found pleasure, and even pride, in their debacles.

“The fun part for me has been chronicling my failures” on Twitter, said Kyler Callahan, a computer engineer in Seattle. “A lot of my close friends do cook, so it’s like, ‘Hey, while you are looking at these amazing things, look at this passable piece of food I made.’ ”

Mr. Callahan cooked a chicken breast on his stovetop, but a thermometer kept indicating that the meat was undercooked. So he turned up the heat and promptly burned it.

Even toast posed a challenge. His toaster broke, so he turned to the stove. But because his stove top is pitched at an angle, the bread cooked on only one side, which burned. The center was cold. The butter didn’t melt evenly.

One appliance that hasn’t failed him is the rice cooker he bought a few years ago and has started using regularly over the past two months. “It has been a huge savior for me,” he said.

Lauren O’Connor’s strategy is to “get a bit drunk, cook as much food as I possibly can and chuck it in the freezer,” she said. “Most stuff can be salvaged with a can of tomatoes, some garlic and chili powder. If it doesn’t taste like something I dug out of the garden, I am fine.”

Ms. O’Connor, 32, a paleoclimatologist in Tucson, Ariz., is subsisting on defrosted batches of beans and rice, paired with toast topped with Vegemite, a food spread she grew up on in Australia.

She’s not the only one using the time at home to connect with her culinary roots. Richard David recently attempted to recreate his family’s Guyanese chicken curry in his apartment in South Ozone Park, Queens.

The dish was taking a while, so he drank a little wine and fell asleep on the couch with the pot still on the stove. He woke to a smoky apartment and a pitch-black curry.

There was a silver lining: “I also realized my smoke detectors don’t work,” Mr. David, 34, said.

Certain dishes have emerged as especially popular during quarantine — like the whipped dalgona coffee that has taken social media by storm.

Jennifer Tallman thought the drink might be a way to dip a toe into cooking. She tried making it with an immersion blender at home in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. “The mixture went everywhere,” she said. “My kitchen ceiling, floor and my shirt.”

She also tried to stage a romantic date night, cooking garlic shrimp pasta for her husband, John. “We had some wine, we were listening to Frank Sinatra,” she said. “I was trying to do it like we see in the movies.”

The pasta came out chewy and not garlicky enough. “There wasn’t an ounce of joy that came from it,” she concluded.

Now, every night, she roasts vegetables and fries some eggs, and for the rest of the evening, her husband snacks on Little Debbie Nutty Buddy bars and Turtle Brownies to fill up. Sometimes the vegetables are raw or burned when they emerge from the oven. She eats them anyway; as an executive assistant and fitness instructor, she has little time to spend in the kitchen.

A lack of enthusiasm for cooking can become even harder to bear when there are children involved.

“I don’t want to feed my son chicken tenders and frozen pizzas,” said Miranda Richardson, an administrator for the police department in Laurel, Md. But what she makes may not pass muster with him. “Kids tell the truth when they don’t like food.”

She pointed out that she is actually a good cook — she recently made a vanilla cake, since so many others are baking — but still dislikes it. “Being in that kitchen just does not make me happy,” she said.

In Bethesda, Md., Kathryn Spindel is living with her adult daughter, Pippa, 22, who moved back home in March. If it weren’t for her husband’s cooking, Ms. Spindel, 54, said there might be a repeat of the dinner of cut apples and cheese she once served her daughter when he was out of town.

Meaningful progress has come for some of the new cooks. Sudarshan Muralidhar, 25, a software engineer in Seattle, said he has learned that the pasta is supposed to go into the water only after it boils, and that you can’t use the same kind of oil for every dish.

Numan Ahmed, 26, a merchandiser in Montreal, finally bought a mixing bowl, after the dough for his homemade hamburger buns spilled outside the saucepan he was using as a proofer. (He had broken the plastic handle off the pan to make it oven-safe.)

In March, Eric Phillips jokingly tweeted about alphabetizing his spice collection of five seasonings (including salt), and received more than 4,000 responses, most of them derisive. (“How do you live like this?” “Do you even know what cumin is?”).

Now, he is using social media to learn to cook, watching videos and asking questions about what to do with ingredients. He has perfected fried eggs, he said, but his ambitious attempt to make grilled octopus in his West Village apartment without a recipe “turned out extremely tough and rubbery.”

Mr. Phillips, 39, who works for a crisis management firm, said he doesn’t resent the people who have found comfort in cooking. He just doesn’t always understand them.

Others feel more strongly. “I can’t look at more sourdough,” said Nicole Najafi, a writer isolating with her boyfriend at his parents’ house in South Dartmouth, Mass. “At this point, if you made bread, you don’t need to post it. We have seen the bread. We are good.”

Over the past two months, Ms. Najafi, 32, has learned to grill and make pasta carbonara, but she is “absolutely” sure that once she and her boyfriend move back to their apartment in Downtown Brooklyn, cooking will no longer be a habit.

She might bake more banana bread, she said, as it was “nice to have it hot out of the oven.”

But will she enjoy the process? Not likely.

“I am scarred from cooking after this experience,” she said. “There is nothing like forcing you to do something to make you really not like it.”