…is not learning to follow recipes, I now realize. Yes, one can lead to the other. I learned a little about how to cook via my Italian family. By “learning to cook” I mean how to physically prepare foods, how to heat them, how to flavor them i.e. techniques. With that knowledge I could easily prepare new recipes, and then informally learned more techniques in the context of learning more recipes.
But it seems that in the usual parlance that “learning to cook” means learning to prepare recipes, and people start there. It’s not easy or obvious that certain food can be heated in certain ways and flavored in certain ways, and how to mix things in proportion, etc. So without a recipe they are clueless.
Therefore, in my ideal world all cooking classes would start with a piece of food and why you cut it a certain way and why you heat it a certain way and how you flavor it a certain way, and then repeat with other, complimentary foods, combining foods into meals, and so on. And somewhere at an advanced stage cover, btw, how to document all this in the form of a recipe.
It is, incidentally, how I would teach music as well.