Quotes on Cooking

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

Cooking is one failure after another, and that's how you finally learn.

Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.

Never apologize for your cooking.

Eating is the secret to good cooking.

If compliments were food, I'd have starved to death 28 years ago.

The secret of good cooking is, first, having a love of it… If you’re convinced that cooking is drudgery, you’re never going to be good at it, and you might as well warm up something frozen.

In the hands of an able cook, fish can become an inexhaustible source of perpetual delight.

He makes his cook his merit, and the world visits his dinners and not him.

You first parents of the human race...who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey?

[I] learned ... that friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone. That nothing-not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state-will make the past disappear. Only time and patience heal things. I learned that cutting up your arms in an attempt to make the pain move from inside to outside, from soul to skin, is futile. That death is a cop-out. I tried all of these things.

Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life.

The fact is that it takes more than ingredients and technique to cook a good meal. A good cook puts something of himself into the preparation - he cooks with enjoyment, anticipation, spontaneity, and he is willing to experiment.

Food is about making an interaction with ingredients. If you talk to them, they will always tell you a story.

When you don't have much money, cooking can be incredibly reassuring. You feel like you're doing meaningful work.

A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.

By making this wine known to the public, I have rendered my country as great a service as if I had enabled it to pay back the national debt.

French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.

Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.

Economic theorists, like French chefs in regard to food, have developed stylized models whose ingredients are limited by some unwritten rules. Just as traditional French cooking does not use seaweed or raw fish, so neoclassical models do not make assumptions derived from psychology, anthropology, or sociology. I disagree with any rules that limit the nature of the ingredients in economic models.

We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen.