In the hands of an able cook, fish can become an inexhaustible source of perpetual delight.
Interpretation
The skill of a great cook can transform simple ingredients into something wonderfully enjoyable.
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of a skilled chef, suggesting that even the most ordinary ingredient, like fish, can yield endless joy when prepared with expertise. It highlights how culinary talent can elevate food from mere sustenance to a source of pleasure and satisfaction.
In practice
In a cooking class, to illustrate the beauty of food preparation.
It has been shown as proof positive that carefully prepared chocolate is as healthful a food as it is pleasant; that it is nourishing and easily digested... that it is above all helpful to people who must do a great deal of mental work.
The limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed, and that we have no idea what degree of bodily bliss we are capable of attaining.
Place a substantial meal before a tired man and he will eat with effort and be little better for it at first. Give him a glass of wine or brandy, and immediately he feels better: you see him come to life again before you.
Gourmandism is an act of judgment, by which we prefer things which have a pleasant taste to those which lack this quality.
You first parents of the human race...who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey?
Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life.
One day, the people who work in my kitchen stir-fried chopped Napa cabbage to serve with some meat or fish for their own dinner. I got to thinking: 'What if the cabbage was the most important thing on the plate?'
Kitchens should be designed around what's truly important-fun, food, and life.
It's still possible to savor the remarkable foods that millennia of human ingenuity have teased from milk. A sip of milk itself or a scoop of ice cream can be a Proustian draft of youth's innocence and energy and possibility, while a morsel of fine cheese is a rich meditation on maturity, the fulfillment of possibility, the way of all flesh.
I had a long-lasting love affair with the flavors from Japan and the hustling New York street vendors. And, of course, a life-changing return to Ethiopia has made huge impacts on my life in food.
As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.," an overwhelmingly large percentage of "new," healthy," and "organic" alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. "They got you comin' and goin'" has never been truer.
One of the troubles with food is that people take themselves too seriously. This is why I'm very happy for people to change my recipes, alter them, replace one ingredient for another.
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