quotations about cooking
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
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.
PAUL THEROUX
Sir Vidia's Shadow
The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.
ALEXANDER POPE
Imitations of Horace
When people think science and cooking, they have no idea that it's not correctly expressed. We're actually applying the scientific method. People think chemistry and physics are science, but the scientific method is something else.... It's the science that the world of cooking generates: science of butter; science of the croissant.
FERRAN ADRIA
interview, Toronto Life, Mar. 13, 2014
There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
MARY FRANCES KENNEDY FISHER
Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher
The saddest thing in life is to marry a woman who looks like a cook--and isn't.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
There is not a good or a bad cuisine, just the one you like the best.
FERRAN ADRIÀ
book signing, Sep. 29, 2011
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
I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner.
JAROD KINTZ
Who Moved My Choose?
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 you are not working in a fast food restaurant or bakehouse, the same dish will never turn out in exactly the same way twice.
PHILIP DUNDAS
Cooking Without Recipes
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
Do not taste food while you're cooking. You may lose your nerve to serve it.
PHYLLIS DILLER
The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
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
Sascha had decided she liked cooking. Unfortunately, cooking didn't like her back.
NALINI SINGH
Branded by Fire
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
Many a newlywed cooks just the way her husband had better like it.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
It must be hard to cook if you anthropomorphisize your vegetables.
BILL WATTERSON
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
'Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
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