Getty Images; iStock; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

“Fear of cooking is a real thing,” says chef Todd Mohr from his home in North Carolina. “It’s called mageirocophobia.” He immediately starts to spell the word as if it’s something he’s often asked to do. Mohr may be the only chef-teacher in the world whose classes (at webcookingclasses.com) are designed to help phobic cooks. “The people I’ve seen in my cooking school and the thousands of people who take my classes online tell me basically the same four or five things.”

First off, says Mohr, “They fear undercooking things and making people sick.” Because “it’s a lot worse to serve a chicken breast that’s pink in the middle than it is to serve a rubbery one, people just keep cookin’ it and cookin’ it. Then of course the food is lousy.”

To solve the problem, Mohr tells students, “Buy a thermometer. No really,” he stresses. “This old wives’ tale: if the steak or chicken is as soft as your cheek, it’s rare. If it’s a little firmer like your lip, it’s cooked medium. If the item is as firm as your chin, it’s well done.” But everyone’s cheek, for instance, isn’t the same. “Does this mean that the steak I’m cooking is still rare on my cheek, but well done on yours? Well, you can quantify your cooking with a $5 digital thermometer. I have a steak number. It’s 128° F. I don’t have to gash it, poke it, do anything. I put a thermometer in it. When it reads 128°, I take it off. I say this about a hundred times in class.”

Another manifestation of cooking phobia is “fear of it not being perfect,” says Mohr. He describes a dinner he was once invited to at the home of a “Martha Stewart-type” woman. “You could see she didn’t really enjoy it.” At one point, Mohr told the host’s husband, “ ‘Boy, this is really wonderful.’ He turned to me and said, ‘You know she made it three times and threw out the first two.’ I thought, oh my, that does sound like a pathology worthy of a long Greek word.”
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