Colwin Way Quotes & Sayings

Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food. — Laurie Colwin

No one who cooks cooks alone. — Laurie Colwin

The sharing of food is the basis of social life. — Laurie Colwin

That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional. — Laurie Colwin

To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup. — Laurie Colwin

The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper at a large table with a large number of people. — Laurie Colwin

As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical. — Laurie Colwin

I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed. — Laurie Colwin

Not everyone can write a book or paint a picture or write a symphony, but almost anyone can fall in love. There is something almost miraculous in that. — Laurie Colwin

We listened to late-night jazz on the radio and went to jazz clubs, thick with smoke, and drank warm beer. In the daytime I lay on my own bed and read books. I kept a stack by my bed and read them off one by one till they dwindled like a pile of pancakes. — Laurie Colwin

My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone's house and hang out, poking into their cupboards if they will let me. — Laurie Colwin

I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato. — Laurie Colwin

She said that my good qualities were my bad qualities
this I have come to realize is true of everyone. On the one hand, I was game, eager and perfectly ready to see what was in front of me. On the other hand, I had no sense of direction or destiny. — Laurie Colwin

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

When it comes to cakes and puddings, savouries, bread and tea cakes, the English cannot be surpassed. — Laurie Colwin

When life is hard and the day has been long, the ideal dinner is not four perfect courses, each in a lovely pool of sauce whose ambrosial flavors are like nothing ever before tasted, but rather something comforting and savory, easy on the digestion - something that makes one feel, if even for only a minute, that one is safe. — Laurie Colwin

It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age - that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over. — Laurie Colwin

These days any planned thing looked good to me. What heaven to have your work cut out for you, to be part of the Big Picture
a picture you did not have to paint yourself. — Laurie Colwin

Cookbooks hit you where you live. You want comfort; you want security; you want food; you want to not be hungry and not only do you want those basic things fixed, you want it done in a really nice, gentle way that makes you feel loved. That's a big desire, and cookbooks say to the person reading them, 'If you will read me, you will be able to do this for yourself and for others. You will make everybody feel better.' — Laurie Colwin

When I was younger, I read all the great food memoirs, by M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin and Julia Child and Nicolas Freeling and Ruth Reichl, and felt flooded with a sense of comfort and safety. — Kate Christensen

Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work. — Laurie Colwin

The best way to feel at ease in the kitchen is to learn at someone's knee. — Laurie Colwin

There is nothing like roast chicken. It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances. Elegant or homey, a dish for a dinner party or a family supper, it will not let you down. — Laurie Colwin

There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can. — Laurie Colwin

To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world. — Laurie Colwin

The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: Even the simplest food is a gift. — Laurie Colwin

On Saturday mornings I would walk to the Flavor Cup or Puerto Rico Importing coffee store to get my coffee. Often it was freshly roasted and the beans were still warm. Coffee was my nectar and my ambrosia: I was very careful about it. I decanted my beans into glass ... and I ground them in little batches in my grinder. — Laurie Colwin

You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies,'Jane Louise said. 'Instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society. — Laurie Colwin

Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said: I have a child in school at the moment. — Laurie Colwin

The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people. — Laurie Colwin

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types-people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing-are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse. — Laurie Colwin

Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good. — Laurie Colwin

I am not a fancy cook or an ambitious cook. I am a plain old cook. — Laurie Colwin

It is my opinion that Norman Rockwell and his ilk have done more to make already anxious people feel guilty than anyone else. — Laurie Colwin

At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden. — Laurie Colwin

Yes, there was a trick to it. You inherited your life, or you invented it. You figured out what you wanted life to be and then somehow or other you made it that way. Then, miracle of miracles, you liked it! — Laurie Colwin

We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us. — Laurie Colwin

How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.
I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was. — Laurie Colwin

When he went to college he wrote me letters which I answered within four days. Each letter took at least five drafts before I thought it suitable to send to Cambridge. — Laurie Colwin

It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life. — Laurie Colwin

Sam loved me in a way that was as close as love could come to his mother's indifference. It was playful, bouncy, it accepted the situation between us without annotations, and without realizing it, he stuck me like a buffer between himself and his parents. He had a wife, and that warded them off. How could he be wild if he was settled? How could he be in trouble if he was married? He might have known these things, but coming from that emotionally monosyllabic household, how could he have had a vocabulary for them? — Laurie Colwin

People who like to cook like to talk about food ... without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago. — Laurie Colwin

I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in. — Laurie Colwin

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books. — Laurie Colwin