quotations about cooking
It must be hard to cook if you anthropomorphisize your vegetables.
BILL WATTERSON
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
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
Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn't cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn't cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it's Rachel Samstat, she's bright, she's funny and she can cook!
NORA EPHRON
Heartburn
A good cook has great power to assuage grief by his art.
MOUCHY
attributed, Day's Collacon
I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.
W.C. FIELDS
attributed, Chicken Soup for the Wine Lover's Soul
Do not taste food while you're cooking. You may lose your nerve to serve it.
PHYLLIS DILLER
The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.
PAUL THEROUX
Sir Vidia's Shadow
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
The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.
ALEXANDER POPE
Imitations of Horace
"Never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink," he said. "Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn't drink."
LEV GROSSMAN
The Magicians
No one here will be surprised to hear me say that the Promethean fire which first raised humanity above the animal was the cooking fire.
BRIAN STABLEFORD
The Last Supper
Just remember--it's always a good idea to follow the directions exactly the first time you try a recipe. But from then on, you're on your own.
JAMES BEARD
The Best of Beard: Great Recipes from a Great Cook
It is the art of cooking that makes the distinction of man and the lower animals; and a good cook who has a thorough knowledge of his art, should be entirely devoted to the gratification of taste, and the preservation of health.
M. UDE
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
Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.
MARIO BATALI
Food & Wine interview
Cooking is like poetry, a combination of ingredients, ideas and concepts in no particular order. If your creativity is influenced by what you've read, eaten or seen cooked, then it's a good thing, something to be applauded.
PHILIP DUNDAS
Cooking Without Recipes
The saddest thing in life is to marry a woman who looks like a cook--and isn't.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Because cooks love the social aspect of food, cooking for one is intrinsically interesting. A good meal is like a present, and it can feel goofy, at best, to give yourself a present. On the other hand, there is something life affirming in taking the trouble to feed yourself well, or even decently. 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
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