Twenty useful tips for a home with a cook, from the families who have kept one for years

Short, practical, and mostly free. Each one is something a household on TheHire has learned by getting it wrong first. The costs quoted are the typical city figures from the rate card.

Food safety

1. Two hours to the fridge. Cooked food, covered, in the fridge within two hours of cooking. Not "when it cools". Rice left out through an afternoon is the commonest cause of food poisoning at home.
2. Rice from last night goes in the bin, not the fridge. If it was not refrigerated within two hours, do not keep it.
3. Two boards, one knife each. Mark one board "non-veg" with a marker. Raw chicken on the salad board is the one thing that ends an arrangement the same day.
4. Soap and a nail brush at the sink, always. A cook washes hands as often as there is soap to do it with.
5. Boil milk and put it back in the fridge. In summer, milk on the counter for an hour is milk that is going off by dinner.
6. A cook with a fever or a stomach upset stays home, paid. It is a day's salary against a week of the whole house being ill.

Money

7. Pay on the date. Put it in the calendar, pay by UPI, do not make the cook ask. This is the tip.
8. Agree the oil budget in litres. "One litre a month for four" is a rule; "less oil" is a mood. Mark the bottle.
9. Settle the grocery float weekly, on the same day. Against bills or a photographed list. A monthly glance at prices is enough to keep everyone honest; a daily interrogation loses a good cook.
10. Plan the Diwali bonus in October. Half a month to a month on ₹10,000 for a two-meal cook, paid before the festival. Cooks remember which house paid without being asked.
11. Raise the salary once a year without being asked. Cooks in every building compare notes in the lift. A step up at twelve months is cheaper than a replacement at thirteen: a trial day at ₹700, a week of adjustment, and the risk of a worse cook.
12. Do not hire a party cook for the daily job. ₹1,800 a day buys someone who feeds twenty-five; your family of four needs a daily cook at ₹6,500 or ₹10,000 a month.

The daily routine

13. Say the time the food must be ready, not the time to arrive. "Lunch boxes at 8:15" tells the cook when to start. "Come at 7" starts an argument about what 7 means.
14. Write a fortnight's menu. Fourteen dinners on a sheet, rotated, one new dish a week. It fixes the same-three-dishes problem and writes the grocery list for you.
15. Keep the dabba and the dal tins full and labelled. A cook who has to open five unlabelled tins to find the urad dal loses ten minutes a visit and cooks what is easiest.
16. Tell the cook by the previous evening if you are eating out. They will use the slot for another home, and they will give you the same notice for a day off.
17. Clean the chimney filters before a new cook starts. A smoky kitchen is one the cook rushes through. It is a few hundred rupees and it changes every visit.

Keeping a good cook

18. Write the one-page sheet on the trial day. Meals, times, household, salary, groceries, washing up, weekly off, leave, illness, bonus, notice. Both of you photograph it. Nearly every later dispute is settled by looking at it.
19. Agree the festival leave block in January. A cook from another state wants two or three weeks at their festival. Agreed early it is a plan; raised in October it is a resignation.
20. Have the five-minute conversation at the end of month one. What is working, what is not, both sides. Most cooks who leave quietly had a grievance nobody asked about.

Four more for households with a patient or a diet

21. Hire a diet cook for a diagnosed condition, not for "eating healthier". ₹12,000 a month buys someone who follows a dietician's chart to the gram. For less oil and salt, an ordinary cook told clearly is enough.
22. Stick the diet rules inside a cupboard door. No sugar, low salt, no raw salad, soft food. A card on the inside of the door is read every day; an instruction given once is forgotten by Thursday.
23. A Jain or fasting household should hire for it. A sattvic cook at ₹9,000 knows the rules; everyone else needs them written.
24. For a patient alone at home, pair the cook with the attendant's timings. The home nursing guides cover attendants and nurses; the cook's slot should land when someone is there to serve and watch the meal.

Three for the kitchen between cooks

25. A tiffin bridges the gap. ₹3,500 a month for lunch, 26 days, no one in the kitchen. Use it for the festival block or the fortnight between cooks.
26. A one-time visit covers the days that matter. ₹900 for guests, a birthday or a patient's first week home.
27. Use the gap to trial the next cook properly. A trial day at ₹700 on a day you have time to watch is worth more than one squeezed into a working morning.

Related guides you might want next

A cook is one of three people who may share your kitchen. The housekeeping guides cover the maid who washes what the cook used; the home nursing guides cover the attendant who serves the patient what the cook made. Where the three overlap, the kitchen, the fridge and the timings, the sheet from tip 18 is where the overlaps get written down.