It’s quite shocking how many people are completely unable to cook something from scratch. These days the average American home eats a majority of its meals using prepackaged, highly processed foods that require very little skill to cook. If it doesn’t come out of a box, a can, or a plastic pouch most people are clueless when it comes to cooking.
If you’re serious about preparedness, and you’re in the process of getting started with food storage, learning how to cook from scratch is something you cannot afford to ignore. In order to successfully build a stockpile of emergency food, you’re going to need to learn how to cook, and you’re going to need to learn how to do it with basic ingredients.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most preppers don’t want to hear: a basement full of wheat, rice, beans, and powdered milk is not a food plan. It’s a pile of ingredients. If nobody in your house knows how to turn those ingredients into bread, biscuits, soup, and a hot meal that people actually want to eat, that stockpile is going to be a lot less useful than you think when the grocery store shelves go empty.
Ask yourself one question: If the stores closed tomorrow, could you make a loaf of bread, a pot of beans, and a pan of biscuits using only what’s already in your pantry? If the answer is no, this is the most important skill you can start working on today.
Why You Need to Learn How to Cook From Scratch
There are a number of reasons to learn how to cook homemade meals from scratch:
Have you looked at the list of ingredients on the foods you eat? Do you even know what half of those ingredients are that you’re putting into your body? Cooking from scratch allows you to know exactly what’s on your dinner plate.
Learning to cook with basic ingredients is not only better for your body, but it can significantly cut down on your monthly food bill. A 50-lb bag of flour or rice costs a fraction of the boxed meals it can replace.
If you or someone in your family has food allergies or medical issues, learning how to cook from scratch is essential to their health and wellbeing. You can’t read a label that doesn’t exist in a crisis.
During a long-term survival situation, where essential services and food delivery systems are shut down or cut off, you need to be able to feed yourself using the food supplies that you have in your home.
There’s also a morale factor that gets overlooked. In a long emergency, a hot meal that tastes like home does more for a family than almost anything else you can stockpile. Bland, repetitive food leads to appetite fatigue, where people simply stop eating enough — a real problem documented in disaster situations and long deployments. Knowing how to turn the same basic staples into a dozen different meals is what keeps everyone fed and keeps spirits up.
The Basics of Cooking From Scratch
The great thing about scratch cooking is many of the ingredients used to cook a wide variety of meals are pretty basic, and most of these items can be bought in large quantities – something that’s extremely important when trying to build a stockpile of long-lasting emergency food.
To learn how to do this right you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and experiment; you’re also going to need a good cookbook. While there are a million cookbooks on the market these days, I recommend looking for something that was developed before the 1950’s; something that deals in basic ingredients, without relying on a bunch of pre-processed products.
The Scratch Cook’s Core Pantry
Almost every old-school recipe is built from the same short list of staples. Stock these, learn what each one does, and you can cook just about anything:
| Staple | What It Does in the Kitchen | What You Can Make |
|---|---|---|
| Flour / Wheat | The backbone of baking and thickening | Bread, biscuits, tortillas, pancakes, gravy, noodles, dumplings |
| Rice | Cheap, filling, stores for decades when packed right | Side dishes, casseroles, rice pudding, soups |
| Dried Beans & Lentils | Protein and fiber that store for years | Chili, soups, refried beans, baked beans, bean patties |
| Oats | Breakfast staple and a baking stretcher | Oatmeal, oat bread, cookies, meatloaf filler |
| Cornmeal | Quick breads without yeast | Cornbread, johnnycakes, mush, breading for fish |
| Fats (lard, shortening, oil, butter) | Flavor, tenderness, and calories | Pie crust, biscuits, frying, sautéing |
| Leavening (yeast, baking powder, baking soda) | Makes bread and baked goods rise | Every bread and quick-bread recipe |
| Powdered Milk & Eggs | Shelf-stable dairy and binding | Baking, sauces, custards, pancakes |
| Salt, Sugar, Honey | Flavor and preservation | Everything — plus curing, pickling, and jams |
| Spices & Bouillon | Fights food fatigue | Turns plain beans and rice into real meals |
Don’t buy 200 pounds of wheat if nobody in your house has ever baked a loaf of bread. Start cooking with your storage foods now, rotate them into your weekly meals, and you’ll find out quickly what your family will eat — and what needs to be replaced. Need help with packaging and shelf life? Check out our guide to long-term food storage.
Skills Worth Mastering First
You don’t need to become a chef. You need a handful of foundational skills that unlock hundreds of meals. Here’s where I’d start, in this order:
- Biscuits and quick breads. Flour, fat, leavening, salt, and milk. No yeast, no rising time, and they’re on the table in 20 minutes. Once you can make biscuits, you can make pancakes, cornbread, dumplings, and shortcake.
- A basic yeast bread. This is the skill that separates people with a wheat stockpile from people who can actually feed themselves with it. Learn one simple white or wheat sandwich loaf and make it until you don’t need the recipe.
- Dried beans from start to finish. Sorting, soaking, cooking, and seasoning. Canned beans are convenient; dried beans are what you’ll have in a long emergency.
- Soups, stocks, and stews. The ultimate stretch meal. Bones, scraps, a handful of beans or rice, and whatever vegetables you have can feed a family for days.
- Gravy and white sauce. Fat, flour, and liquid. Master this and you can turn almost anything into a meal — biscuits and gravy, creamed chicken, casseroles, and more.
- Tortillas and flatbreads. Perfect for when you don’t have an oven. All you need is a hot skillet.
- Basic baking substitutions. Knowing how to replace eggs, milk, butter, or buttermilk when you run out is a huge advantage when you can’t run to the store.
- Buttermilk: Add 1 tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to 1 cup of milk and let it sit for 5 minutes.
- Egg (for baking): 1 tablespoon ground flaxseed mixed with 3 tablespoons of water, or reconstituted powdered egg.
- Self-rising flour: 1 cup all-purpose flour + 1½ teaspoons baking powder + ¼ teaspoon salt.
- Brown sugar: 1 cup white sugar + 1 tablespoon molasses.
- Milk: Powdered milk mixed with water per the package directions works in nearly every recipe.
The Best Classic Cookbooks for Learning to Cook From Scratch
Tried-and-true books from a time when cooks worked with basic ingredients — not boxes and pouches.
One of the best books available is the Fannie Farmer Cookbook by Fannie Merritt Farmer. The book was first published in 1896 as The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book and is now in its 13th edition (re-released by Marion Cunningham). While the 13th edition does have many of the original recipes, it has been updated in some areas. If you can find an original, snatch it up immediately; otherwise the later editions are a good place to start.
Here are the classic cookbooks I recommend keeping on the shelf. Every one of them teaches cooking the way our grandparents and great-grandparents did it.
Since1896
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (Anniversary Edition)
Fannie Merritt Farmer, revised by Marion Cunningham
This is the book that taught America to cook with level, standardized measurements. Marion Cunningham’s revision keeps the spirit of the original while making it practical for today’s kitchen, with clear instructions on breads, soups, meats, and baking from basic ingredients.
Why preppers love it: It’s a complete kitchen education in one volume — the closest thing to a “one book” cooking library.
Original1896
The Original 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
Fannie Merritt Farmer — unabridged Dover republication
If you can’t track down an original, this is the next best thing: an unabridged reprint of Fannie Farmer’s first edition. It’s pure 19th-century scratch cooking — no mixes, no convenience foods — with sections on bread making, preserving, and stretching simple ingredients.
Why preppers love it: It was written for kitchens without refrigerators or modern appliances, which is exactly the situation you’re preparing for.
Original1931
Joy of Cooking: 1931 Facsimile Edition
Irma S. Rombauer
Irma Rombauer self-published the first Joy of Cooking in 1931, right in the teeth of the Great Depression. This facsimile reproduces that first edition page for page — recipes written for families who had to make every ingredient count.
Why preppers love it: Depression-era cooking is survival cooking. These recipes were designed for tight budgets and short supplies.
Original1950
Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (1950 Facsimile Edition)
Betty Crocker / General Mills
The original 1950 edition was written for cooks who knew very little, which makes it one of the best beginner books ever printed. Step-by-step illustrations walk you through techniques like kneading dough, cutting in shortening, and making pie crust.
Why preppers love it: The pictures. If you’re teaching kids or a spouse who has never cooked, this is the book to hand them.
Original1953
Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book: 1953 Classic Edition
Better Homes and Gardens
The famous red-plaid binder that sat in millions of American kitchens. This reprint of the 1953 edition is packed with straightforward, family-style recipes from before convenience foods took over the grocery aisles.
Why preppers love it: Hearty, practical, feed-the-family meals — and the ring binder lays flat on the counter while you cook.
Since1973
Putting Food By (Fifth Edition)
Ruth Hertzberg, Janet Greene & Beatrice Vaughan
Cooking from scratch and preserving food go hand in hand. This classic has been the go-to home preserving guide since 1973, covering canning, freezing, drying, salting, smoking, and root cellaring — fully updated in the fifth edition.
Why preppers love it: It’s how you turn a garden harvest, a deer, or a cooler full of fish into food that lasts through the winter.
If you want one book that covers cooking and everything else about living off the land, Carla Emery’s The Encyclopedia of Country Living has been a homesteading staple since the late 1960s — gardening, livestock, grain grinding, food preservation, and hundreds of from-scratch recipes.
If you’re short on funds, I’ve uploaded a great set of recipes from World War I that will give you a good idea of what you can do with some very basic ingredients. The War Time Cooking Recipes can be seen here. It’s a good look into how people cooked during a time when rationing caused them to make do with whatever they had on their shelves. Once you start experimenting you can tweak these recipes with your own ingredients.
Cooking When the Power Goes Out
Learning to cook from scratch is only half the equation. In a real emergency, there’s a good chance you won’t have an electric stove, a microwave, or a working oven. Practice cooking your scratch recipes with at least one off-grid method before you need it:
- Cast iron and a Dutch oven. A cast-iron skillet and a lidded Dutch oven can bake bread, simmer beans, and fry fish over a campfire or bed of coals. They’re nearly indestructible and will outlast you.
- Propane camp stove. Easy, familiar, and a great backup — just make sure you store enough fuel and only use it outdoors or in a well-ventilated area.
- Wood stove. If you heat with wood, your stove top can double as a cooktop for soups, stews, and coffee.
- Solar oven. Slow, but it uses zero fuel and works great for beans, rice, and casseroles on sunny days.
- Rocket stove. Burns small sticks and twigs efficiently — a great option when fuel is limited.
Never use charcoal grills, camp stoves, or generators indoors or in a garage — carbon monoxide can kill without warning. And when it comes to home canning, always follow current USDA-tested guidelines for processing times and methods; old recipes are great for cooking, but canning safety standards have changed for good reason.
Tips for When You’re Learning How to Cook From Scratch
1. Don’t use internet recipes.
While there are a lot of really good recipes out there, many of them are untested or experimental recipes. When you’re first starting out, you want to avoid these types of recipes in favor of tried and true recipes that you can count on. Once you start learning the basics, you can then start to experiment. Besides the Fannie Farmer Cookbook that I mentioned above, two other great resources are the classic Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook or any of The Pioneer Woman’s Cookbooks.
There’s another reason to rely on printed books: when the grid is down, so is the internet. A cookbook on the shelf works with no power, no signal, and no battery.
2. Follow the recipes.
One of the joys of cooking is experimentation, but when you’re just getting started you want to follow the recipes and make sure you measure everything. After you’ve been cooking for a while, you’ll start to get a good idea of what ingredients do what, and where you can make changes. The next thing you know, you’ll be eyeballing everything and making changes to recipes on the fly.
Every time you make a recipe, jot down what worked, what didn’t, and how your family liked it. Over time you’ll build your own family cookbook of proven meals built around the foods you actually store — and it’s something you can pass down.
3. Use the freezer.
The freezer is your friend and really cuts down on how much time it takes to prepare a fresh homemade meal. Once you have some good field tested recipes, ones that you know your family likes, you can then start doubling or tripling the recipe and storing the extra portions in the freezer. This makes it easy to give up those so-called easy preprocessed meals, in favor of healthier homemade meals that are just as quick and easy to heat up.
Soups, chili, bread dough, biscuits, pie crusts, cooked beans, and casseroles all freeze well. Label everything with the date and use the oldest first.
4. Take it slow.
You don’t have to learn how to do everything at once. Take it slow and learn how to do a couple of things really well before moving on. If you try to do everything at once, you’ll probably end up with a bunch of food that nobody wants to eat. Take the time to learn the basics, and take the time to perfect what you’ve learned.
5. Get the whole family involved.
If you’re the only person in the house who can cook, your family’s food security depends on you staying healthy and present. Teach your spouse and kids the basics. Kids who learn to make biscuits and a pot of soup grow into adults who can take care of themselves.
Scratch cooking pairs naturally with putting your own food on the table. If you hunt or fish, learning to clean, butcher, and cook wild game and fish turns a successful day in the field into weeks of meals. Brush up on basic hunting skills and survival fishing, then put those classic cookbooks to work.
6. Just start cooking.
Despite all the warnings, the only real way to get started is to just jump in there and have some fun. There are going to be some setbacks, some total bombed meals, and even some meals that are so bad no one will want to eat them; but in the end, you are going to be more prepared, save a lot of money, be much healthier, and have a skill that’s going to last a lifetime.
A Simple 30-Day Scratch Cooking Challenge
Want a place to start? Try this for one month:
| Week | Focus | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Quick breads | Make biscuits, pancakes, and cornbread from scratch — no mixes. |
| Week 2 | Beans & grains | Cook dried beans and rice two different ways each. Make one big pot of chili or soup. |
| Week 3 | Yeast bread | Bake the same basic loaf at least three times until it comes out right. |
| Week 4 | Off-grid cooking | Cook one full meal using only your backup method — camp stove, Dutch oven, or fire. |
Food storage without cooking skills is just a pile of ingredients. Pick up a good old-school cookbook, stock the basics, and start cooking from scratch today — while mistakes are cheap and the grocery store is still open. Then keep building your stockpile with our guide to 60+ long-term emergency foods you can buy at the grocery store.
