quotations about cooking
There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.
MARIO BATALI
Humanities, 2004
People wouldn't think of making avant-garde cuisine at home. When people play basketball at home, they can't play like Michael Jordan.
FERRAN ADRIA
The Daily Beast, Jan. 29, 2014
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.
PAUL THEROUX
Sir Vidia's Shadow
Sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.
TERRY PRATCHETT
The Fifth Elephant
Standing back and staring blankly at the glass, he realized he had no idea what it meant to preheat. Obviously he heated it prior to something, but to what?
AIS
Evenfall
One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends. People who like to cook like to talk about food. Plain old cooks (as opposed to the geniuses in fancy restaurants) tend to be friendly. After all, without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.
LAURIE COLWIN
Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
If anything goes wrong at the table, the cook is forever dishonored; he survives not the disgrace; let him welcome death.
VATEL
attributed, Day's Collacon
Cooking for others had often been my way of offering care. So why, when I was alone, did I find myself trying to subsist on cereal and water?
JENNI FERRARI-ADLER
Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant
Yet smelt roast meat, beheld a huge fire shine,
And cooks in motion with their clean arms bared.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.
ALEXANDER POPE
Imitations of Horace
Do not taste food while you're cooking. You may lose your nerve to serve it.
PHYLLIS DILLER
The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a “home” might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a recreation.
EMILY POST
Etiquette
The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.
ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN
Physiologie du Gout
The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to then create from them a new order.
MICHAEL POLLAN
The Omnivore's Dilemma
Cooking for yourself allows you to be strange or decadent or both. The chances of liking what you make are high, but if it winds up being disgusting, you can always throw it away and order a pizza; no one else will know. In the end, the experimentation, the impulsiveness, and the invention that such conditions allow for will probably make you a better cook.
JENNI FERRARI-ADLER
Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant
Her cooking is the missionary position of cooking. That is how everybody starts.
EGON RONAY
The Independent, Nov. 1, 1998
Her cuisine is limited but she has as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Naval Treaty
Give two cooks the same ingredients and the same recipe; it is fascinating to observe how, like handwriting, their results differ.
DAVID TANIS
Heart of the Artichoke and Other Kitchen Journeys
Once, several years ago, some friends and I enrolled in a cooking class taught by an Armenian matriarch and her aged servant. Since they spoke no English and we no Armenian, communication was not easy. She taught by demonstration; we watched (and diligently tried to quantify her recipes) as she prepared an array of marvelous eggplant and lamb dishes. But our recipes were imperfect; and, try as hard as we could, we could not duplicate her dishes. "What was it," I wondered, "that gave her cooking that special touch?" The answer eluded me until one day, when I was keeping a particularly keen watch on the kitchen proceedings, I saw our teacher, with great dignity and deliberation, prepare a dish. She handed it to her servant who wordlessly carried it into the kitchen to the oven and, without breaking stride, threw in handful after handful of assorted spices and condiments. I am convinced that those surreptitious "throw-ins" made all the difference.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Existential Psychotherapy
The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.
E. B. WHITE
One Man's Meat