quotations about cooking
Mother doesn't cook, Ignatius said dogmatically, She burns.
JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE
A Confederacy of Dunces
You may say, "Oh, no. You can't touch a traditional recipe." But we ask: why can’t you? Back in 1350, a vinaigrette was a stew, so we ask, why not? This can be applied to any kind of cooking, and that's the shocking part of it. It kind of bends all the traditions. It's a good thing.
FERRAN ADRIA
interview, Toronto Life, Mar. 13, 2014
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
No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.
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
Even a miser does not refuse meat to the cook.
EFIK
attributed, Day's Collacon
There is not a good or a bad cuisine, just the one you like the best.
FERRAN ADRIÀ
book signing, Sep. 29, 2011
Do not taste food while you're cooking. You may lose your nerve to serve it.
PHYLLIS DILLER
The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.
MARIO BATALI
Humanities, 2004
Unless you live alone in a cave or hermitage, cooking and eating are social activities: even hermit monks have one communal meal a month. The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.
LAURIE COLWIN
Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
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
Yet smelt roast meat, beheld a huge fire shine,
And cooks in motion with their clean arms bared.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
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
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
Her cuisine is limited but she has as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Naval Treaty
Her cooking is the missionary position of cooking. That is how everybody starts.
EGON RONAY
The Independent, Nov. 1, 1998
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