Bill Buford Quotes & Sayings

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it. — Bill Buford

Probably the single most important evolutionary trait dogs developed was right there at the outset, illuminated by the campfire. It is in those eyebrows and in the way dogs have of tilting their heads. They are warm packages of emotions. — Bill Buford

Rachael Ray is probably the most watched kitchen personality in the history of American television. — Bill Buford

Cable made the Food Network possible. It was invented in 1993 by Reese Schoenfeld, a co-founder of CNN, who was convinced that its natural audience was women - millions of them. — Bill Buford

The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali's friends had described to me as the 'myth of Mario' was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when I invited him to a birthday dinner. — Bill Buford

The reality of America is mass-market stupidity. — Bill Buford

Gordon Ramsay grew up in a tourist town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, but in a part tourists don't visit - a council estate: a concrete bunker subsidized by the local government, synonymous with deprivation and blight. — Bill Buford

Gramercy Park is a four-acre square given in perpetuity to the residents surrounding it, 170 years ago, by Samuel Ruggles, a real estate developer of immoderate means. — Bill Buford

Lyon is unusual and seems to be exceptionally incompetent at publicising itself. In fact, it doesn't want visitors. It fears discovery. — Bill Buford

I bashed myself. I cut myself. I caught on fire. I fell: I had been myopically focused on peeling garlic, and hadn't noticed a bin of beef at my feet until I walked into it. — Bill Buford

Tuscan sausages are smaller than their American cousins, each one demarcated with a string, a graceful loop drawn tightly into a knot - looping and tightening, looping and tightening, a symmetrically floppy, aesthetically appealing rhythm. — Bill Buford

I ended up wanting to be a cook and hold my own in a restaurant. — Bill Buford

The cacao content is a wrapper's most important datum, and the acceptable benchmark is seventy per cent. The figure is a measure of 'cocoa mass.' — Bill Buford

You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred. — Bill Buford

Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had. — Bill Buford

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can't do. — Bill Buford

A white truffle, which elsewhere might sell for hundreds of dollars, seemed easier to come by than something fresh and green. What could be got from the woods was free and amounted to a diurnal dining diary that everyone kept in their heads. May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini. — Bill Buford

The skyline in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rope' is made up: no, you don't get the Waldorf and the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings and a dozen other magnificent structures in one window. — Bill Buford

Giada De Laurentiis, of 'Everyday Italian,' is not a chef, although she has culinary expertise - she was trained at the Cordon Bleu and worked as a private cook for a wealthy Los Angeles family. — Bill Buford

This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury's milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed. — Bill Buford

It could be Paris. It could be Rio de Janeiro. It could be anywhere but home: someplace, anyplace, disorienting enough to make him notice what he wouldn't otherwise see. (The medicinal benefits of disorientation can never be overestimated.) — Bill Buford

For reasons I didn't understand, I felt I needed to learn how to cook the food of France and knew that I was going to have to get over to the country: to Paris, I'd always assumed. — Bill Buford

The crowd is not us. It never is. — Bill Buford

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season. — Bill Buford

In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn. — Bill Buford

The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it's very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand. — Bill Buford

It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality. (198) — Bill Buford

What is New York? A straightforward answer: seven million people crushed onto an island originally settled by the Dutch. But it's more than that. These are seven million who were, mainly, not even born here. — Bill Buford

Bahia is the Amazon's geographical next-of-kin: the same climate, forest canopy, diverse floor. But there is no wild cacao; the tree was introduced, most likely by a Frenchman, Louis Frederick Warneaux, who, in 1746, sowed seeds near one of Bahia's large rivers. — Bill Buford

I was taught how to tie up the loin with a butcher's looping knot and was so excited by the discovery that I went home and practiced. I told Elisa about my achievement. "I tied up everything," I said. "A leg of lamb, some utensils, a chair. My wife came home, and I tied up her too." Elisa shook her head. "Get a life," she said and returned to her task. — Bill Buford

Since 1890, the Tour d'Argent's basic recipe hasn't changed. If you find yourself at the restaurant tomorrow, you will eat duck in the confidence that it was what someone ate a hundred years ago. You will eat it in the expectation that someone else will be served it a hundred years from now. — Bill Buford

The text, written in Latin, was inspired by a fifteenth-century chef known as Maestro Martino and was called De honesta voluptate et valitudine, On honest pleasures and good health. — Bill Buford

When I was at Babbo, I was covered in scars and scabs and burned bits - melted hair, ribbed burns I got reaching across the top of a hot skillet ... I sliced off the tip of my finger. I cleaved my forehead - a deep, ugly wound. Luckily, it regenerated. — Bill Buford

You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm. — Bill Buford

I felt weightless. I felt nothing would happen to me. I felt that anything might happen to me. I was looking straight ahead, running, trying to keep up, and things were occurring along the dark peripheries of my vision: there would be a bright light and then darkness again and the sound, constantly, of something else breaking, and of movement, of objects being thrown and of people falling. — Bill Buford

I remember thinking: if the day becomes more violent, who do you blame? The English, whose behaviour on the square could be said to have been so provocative that they deserved whatever they got? The Italians, whose welcome consisted in inflicting injuries upon their visitors? Or can you place some of the blame on these men with their television equipment and their cameras, whose misrepresentative images served only to reinforce what everyone had come to expect. — Bill Buford

I just believe people should know what they're eating. — Bill Buford

I didn't know why dessert was invented or what function it was meant to perform. Raising livestock and the harvesting of grains are ancient activities, but when did humankind decide it also needed creme brulee? — Bill Buford

A dish was a failure because it hadn't been cooked with love. A dish was a success because the love was so obvious. If you're cooking with love, every plate is a unique event - you never allow yourself to forget that a person is waiting to eat it: your food, made with your hands, arranged with your fingers, tasted with your tongue. — Bill Buford

If kept dry, a chocolate with a high cacao content, I've discovered, rarely spoils. — Bill Buford

The 'classic' pig is inspired by northern Italy. It is made up of meat and fat, rosemary and garlic, salt and lots of black pepper. — Bill Buford

Most chartreuse recipes call for one bird, a fat one, like a pigeon or a partridge, secreted inside the casing, a vegetable mold, which is then turned out onto a plate. — Bill Buford

Kasha is the hardy starch of a Slavic winter - buckwheat, in fact - but when cooked properly, it gets a nutty, deep-brown crust. — Bill Buford

All this intelligent and careful work revealed a man of great forethought. Yet you could see in Mr. Wicks's eyes
as he stood in the shade of the terminal awning, all that tweed and education waving to us, as one by one each bus pulled out for the noisy drive into the city
that he had failed. — Bill Buford

Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the 'Guide Michelin,' is not a monster. — Bill Buford

The first sign that I'd been unknowingly affected by cooking shows occurred on a Sunday morning when I realized I was talking to myself. I'd been making toast. 'First, we cut our bread,' I whispered. 'Do you know why?' I stopped what I was doing and looked up. 'Let me tell you why.' — Bill Buford

People have all this interest in food. But for most people, it's a mystery how to prepare food. I wanted the knowledge cooks know: the in-your-fingers knowledge you get by doing it over and over. — Bill Buford

I didn't want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy had taught me why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer's knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved the conditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don't have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it's true, those who have it tend to be professionals
like chefs. But I didn't want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human. (313) — Bill Buford

Then he exploded. "No!" he said. That familiar injunction. I'd heard it so many times. "No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct." He opened his knife drawer. "It goes here," he said, "until you return."
(That's how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)
And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to. (301) — Bill Buford

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud. — Bill Buford

If you're cooking with love, every plate is a unique event - you never allow yourself to forget that a person is waiting to eat it: — Bill Buford

It was one of the things you put up with: that every Saturday young males trashed your trains, broke the windows of your pubs, destroyed your cars, wreaked havoc on your town centres. I didn't buy it, but it seemed to be so. — Bill Buford