Comment by maccard
> For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes
Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.
You learn a recipe to eat. And you learn fundamentals and techniques to cook.
Learning a recipe doesn't give you much in terms of cooking-skills. But with skills, you can create or adapt any recipe to your own demand.