Cookbook Quotes & Sayings

You want happy endings, read cookbooks. — Dean Young

I'd love to own a bakery at some point. My grandmother could help me run it - she is an amazing baker! I'd also love to do a cookbook. — Jordin Sparks

It used to be that people went to their doctor to find out what was wrong. That was the expectation when someone made an appointment with their local family doctor: they wanted to know what they had and how they could feel better. Ear infection: what should I take? Pulled muscle: what should I do? Broken ankle: how can you fix it? Over the years, something happened to this common sense approach. "Algorithms" and "pathways" have proliferated in ways that have reduced each person's unique story to simplistic recipes. More often than not, this cookbook approach ends up telling patients what they don't have - which, while potentially reassuring, does not result in a real diagnosis.1 — Leana Wen

Cooking involves a deadline and hungry people and ingredients that expire in a week. It's stressful. Cooking happens on the stove and on the clock. Baking happens with ingredients that last for months and come to life inside a warm oven. Baking at Zomick's Bakery is slow and leisurely. — Zomick's Bakery

I've seen cookbooks from lots of great chefs that have been disappointing. A book, to me, it has to have a story. Some of these people, they open a restaurant, and one year later, there's a cookbook. There's not much of a story yet. — Wylie Dufresne

Chekyns upon soppes" (basically chicken on cinnamon toast) from the 1545 early Tudor cookbook A Propre Newe Booke of Cokerye: Chekyns upon soppes. Take sorel sauce a good quantitie and put in Sinamon and suger and lette it boyle and poure it upon the soppes then laie on the chekyns. — Dan Jurafsky

According to a Wall Street Journal article some 59 percent of Americans don t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible. — Maureen Corrigan

I enjoy cooking and baking. Alicia Silverstone's vegan cookbook is awesome. — Mary-Louise Parker

The Silver Spoon, the best-selling Italian cookbook of the last 50 years. — Timothy Ferriss

I would definitely be interested in doing a cooking show or something related to cooking, and I think probably most immediately, I would do a cookbook. — Keshia Knight Pulliam

She is my "Soul Dog" and I totally get it now. — Christy Bright

'Outlaw Cook' was a revelation. Folks like Jeff Smith and Marcella Hazan got me interested in cooking, but John Thorne pushed me into the path that I follow to this day. This is the only cookbook I've ever read that understands how men really eat: over the sink, in the dark, greasy to the elbows. — Alton Brown

I have my 'Whole New You' cookbook I'm currently working on. — Tia Mowry

I like to erase lines between categories. Why separate cookbook writing from writing, healthy from good tasting? I want to be open to possibilities. — Crescent Dragonwagon

How can you say anything other than Ratatouille is Pixar's best movie? Your a chef, for Christ's sake," Sue said.
Lou smiled at Sue's accusatory tone. She needed this distraction.
Harley rolled his eyes and said, "You're letting your biases show, Sue. Up uses music better- like a character. The opening fifteen minutes is some of the best filmmaking- ever. And who doesn't love a good squirrel joke?"
"But Ratatouille brings it all back to food." Sue waved a carrot in the air to emphasize her point. "They made you want to eat food cooked by a rat! I'd eat the food; it looked magnificent. That rat cooked what he loved; what tasted good. Like I've been telling Lou, we should cook food from the heart, not just the cookbook. — Amy E. Reichert

A cookbook is a moment in time because, otherwise, you look back at the end of the day, and all the meals have been eaten, and the experience is gone. — Daniel Humm

We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it. — Nathan Myhrvold

He's so happy," Eliot said dryly. "It's like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook. — Lev Grossman

I've always had a fantasy to write a cookbook, because everyone wants to know what a model eats. — Padma Lakshmi

When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.' — Nathan Myhrvold

Somewhere close behind air and water is the need for food. — L.J. Martin

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble. — Ellen Feldman

I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends. — Nora Ephron

A cookbook is only as good as its poorest recipe. — Julia Child

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

So Artichoke was a restaurant borne out of impulse and recklessness. Four years on, it's also a testament to how an enterprise started on such a fucked up approach can actually succeed. — Bjorn Shen

My mom had Julia Child and 'The Fannie Farmer Cookbook' on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes. — Anthony Bourdain

One of the problems with writing a cookbook is that recipes exist in the moment. — Thomas Keller

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies - loaf givers. — John Ruskin

My most cherished possessions are my grandma's letters and my vintage Martha Washington cookbook. — Sandra Lee

I think if you can take one or two things from a cookbook, it's successful. — Thomas Keller

Nothing belongs to you. It didn't matter that Grandma gave the cookbook to me. All Mama had to do was hold it in her hands and it was hers. — Bryn Greenwood

...among whom the art of living well and getting the most out of life at a moderate expense has been attained to a very high degree. — Maria Gentile

Just before I'd moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: The birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something. — Nora Ephron

One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It's what I did with my cookbook, frankly. — Nathan Myhrvold

To the chefs who pioneered the nouvelle cuisine in France, the ancienne cuisine they were rebelling against looked timeless, primordial, old as the hills. But the cookbook record proves that the haute cuisine codified early in this century by Escoffier barely goes back to Napoleon's time. Before that, French food is not recognizable as French to modern eyes. Europe's menu before 1700 was completely different from its menu after 1800, when national cuisines arose along with modern nations and national cultures. — Raymond Sokolov

Oh, did I tell you I have a cookbook? I have a cookbook deal. — Ted Allen

I am a cookbook fanatic. — Samantha Bee

My cooking spoon,
My magic wand,
Of this dish,
You will be fond. — The Silver Elves

I have loved to cook since I was a child in my mother's kitchen. If I don't have time to cook, I'll just read a cookbook. — Kamala Harris

I let the food speak for itself and the food always wins... — Rachel Lynn Frank

Every once in a while, a cookbook comes along that simply knocks me out. — Ina Garten

Food is an implement of magic, and only the most coldhearted rationalist could squeeze the juices of life out of it and make it bland. In a true sense, a cookbook is the best source of psychological advice and the kitchen the first choice of room for a therapy of the world. — Thomas More

I would like to, at some point, do a cookbook. — Wylie Dufresne

When we were working on 'Julie & Julia,' I went back to the Julia Child cookbook and made some things I haven't made in a while, one being beef bourguignon, which to me is a hilariously 1960s dish that everyone felt they had to serve at a dinner party or they weren't a grown-up. — Nora Ephron

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable. — Henry A. Kissinger

The popular Paderno Spiralizer, Veggetti Spiral Vegetable Cutter and other spiralizers and julienne slicers are perfect for food lovers on any kind of regimen, including Gluten-Free, Paleo or weight-loss diets. This book will not only give you great recipes to utilize your new vegetable cutter, but it will show you how to use these utensils safely and efficiently. — J.S. Amie

[The kitchen] was also messy
delightfully so, thought Jane
and it didn't look as though lots of cooking went on there. There was a laptop computer on the counter with duck stickers on it, the spice cabinet was full of Ben's toy trucks, and Jane couldn't spot a cookbook anywhere. This is the kitchen of a Thinker, she decided, and promised herself that she'd never bother with cooking, either. — Jeanne Birdsall

I'm always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting - I love it. And every now and then I think, 'I should write a cookbook' or, 'I should write for food magazines.' And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again. — Kiran Desai

Megan was able to get me the single most important item in this entire house."
"She got you that new vibrator?"
"Jesus ... "
"Oh, the cookbook, right," he said, remembering.
Megan used to work for the Food Network, and was able to secure me a signed copy of the original Barefoot Contessa cookbook. — Alice Clayton

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing. — Jane Green

the splendid manhood and womanhood of Italy — Maria Gentile

As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing. — Alice B. Toklas

And dear, if you should someday become famous, don't write a cookbook. — Lauren Graham

The argument that making contraceptives available to young people would prevent teen pregnancies is ridiculous. That's like offering a cookbook as a cure to people who are trying to lose weight. — Jerry Falwell

Collectively the media; the meat, oil, and dairy industries; most prominent chefs and cookbook authors; and our own government are not presenting accurate advice about the healthiest way to eat. — Caldwell Esselstyn

Exchanging life with Jesus Christ as taught by Jesus and His designated witnesses is not following a set of laws, rules, codes, principles, disciplines, scripts or cookbook formulas in our own power in an attempt to be like Jesus. Exchanging life with Jesus is not us giving imitation performances with our own acting abilities of what we think Jesus would be or do. Exchanging life with Jesus is Jesus giving repeat performances of His life in anyone who allows Jesus to do so. Jesus then lives out the supernatural performance of His Life in and through their lives. — John David Geib

Yes I can," Curran snarled. "Listen: this is me telling you what you will not do."
I raised the cookbook and tapped him on the nose. Bad cat. — Ilona Andrews

There's just so much love that goes into home cooking, and I think it will really help the American family overall. I'm hoping to maybe get a cookbook out one day because I've got some great family recipes. — Ming-Na Wen

Writers need to be open to trying new things. My first bestseller was a cookbook, and from that experience I learned things about marketing a book that benefitted me greatly. — Dan Alatorre

It wasn't fair, he thought. The world of pro sports was stuck in a time warp, still in the 1950s as far as sexuality went, even as the rest of the country, save for small pockets of deliberately cultivated ignorance, moved on, got over it. What kind of life are we going to have? Brian thought. Then he laughed at the thought of himself as a football wife, hanging out with the other wives and working on a charity cookbook. "What? — Brad Vance

When I wrote my cookbook, 'I Love Crab Cakes,' I asked some of my best chef buddies to contribute recipes. — Tom Douglas

It's funny, the whole cooking thing came out of just a random thought of writing a cookbook with my mom and my sister for fun ... — Trisha Yearwood

The difference between 'Molto Italiano' and 'The Babbo Cookbook' is that the ingredient lists in 'Molto' are about half or even a third the size. In 'Babbo,' they are very long, they are very real. That's exactly how we make them in the restaurant. — Mario Batali

Take what fame or fortune comes your way. My first bestseller was a cookbook, so remember to be open to trying new things. From that experience I learned things about marketing a book that benefitted me greatly and, combined with my sales management experience with Fortune 500 companies, I was able to launch a string of bestsellers. — Dan Alatorre

Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed. — Anthony Lane

The cookbook gives a detailed description of ingredients and procedures but no proofs for its prescriptions or reasons for its recipes; the proof of the pudding is in the eating ... Mathematics cannot be tested in exactly the same manner as a pudding; if all sorts of reasoning are debarred, a course of calculus may easily become an incoherent inventory of indigestible information. — George Polya

As a little girl I always expected that one day adventure would happen to me - someday a tornado would whisk me away to Oz, or I'd fall down a rabbit hole, or David Bowie would kidnap me and take me to his labyrinth where he'd sing me songs and feed me magic peaches. (I still sorta wish David Bowie would kidnap me, but that's beside the point.) As I get older, I realize you have to make adventure happen for yourself. I hope this cookbook helps you, dear reader, to make some tasty adventures for yourself - and maybe throw some really awesome LARP parties. — Cassandra Reeder

If you are baking a pie for your friends, and you read an article entitled 'How to Build a Chair' instead of a cookbook, you pie will probably end up tasting like wood and nails instead of like crust and fruity filling. — Lemony Snicket

Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that. — Michael Symon

I intend that my last work shall be a cookbook composed of memories and desires.
Alexander Dumas, 1869, as quoted in Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days by James and Kay Salter — Alexandre Dumas

When I purchased my first vegetable spiralizer, I was excited to try making zucchini noodles, also known as "zoodles." My first dish - zucchini spaghetti with fresh tomatoes, basil and garlic - was fun, creative, and delicious! I quickly found that zoodles were popular with my friends and family. Everyone seemed pleasantly surprised by the experience and enthusiastically asked for more! — J.S. Amie

I'd like to learn how to cook. I've hauled around this big, old, heavy Martha Stewart cookbook in my suitcase to Cape Cod, L.A., Paris. I don't know what possessed me. — Mamie Gummer

The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. — P. J. O'Rourke

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world? — Jonathan Safran Foer

CUSTOMER: I don't know why she wants it, but my wife asked for a copy of The Dinosaur Cookbook.
BOOKSELLER: The Dinah Shore Cookbook? — Jen Campbell

I love cookbooks for completely different reasons. I love 'The Harry's Bar Cookbook' and Marco-Pierre White's 'White Heat' for their feel. For pure learning, Gray Kunz wrote a great cookbook, 'The Elements of Taste', published in 2001. The first time I read Charlie Trotter's, the Chicago chef's first cookbook, I was blown away. — Marcus Samuelsson

Several years ago, I was creating a Christmas present for the family, a self-published cookbook featuring recipes my grandmother had collected and created over decades. While interviewing her for the biographical section, she began to talk about her courtship with my late grandfather. — Kristina McMorris

I'm working on a second cookbook and am working on my love story, 'Black Heels to Tractor Wheels.' — Ree Drummond

My first bestseller was a cookbook. That will make any novelist humble. — Dan Alatorre

A combination of the qualities of the scholar, the master cook, the painter, the gastronomer, the sportsman and the pantologist, assisted by the skill of the bookmaker and etcher, will be required to compose the cookbook par excellence. — George Ellwanger

I had this idea that I would write a companion cookbook to 'Barbara the Slut.' The recipes would be like, 'Put the Lucky Charms in the bowl.' — Lauren Holmes

It's the most essential thing of all just because it's not a matter of how you do it at all, but of whether you do it. Like being born, or cooking: how you do it is less important than whether you do it. You can find thousands of books on prayer that give you methods of praying, hundreds of "hows"; but they do you no good at all unless you actually pray. Otherwise it's like reading a cookbook instead of cooking. You can't eat a cookbook! — Peter Kreeft

Eternity is a ham and two people" (also given as "Eternity is two people and a ham") is an old quip from the days when a ham was huge - far more than two people could finish. Irma Rombauer mentions this line in her famous cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. — Dorothy Parker

I will not allow a Delia Smith cookbook in my house! It's all so precise with Delia, and it makes cooking seem so inaccessible. — Theresa May

There are some things that don't change much. I find the smell of a dish, or the way a certain spice is crushed, or just a quick look at the way something has been put on a plate, can pull me back to another place and time. I love those memories that seem so far away, yet you can hold them and carry them with you, even forget them, and then, with a single taste or hint or a smell, be chaperoned back to a beautiful moment. — Tessa Kiros

The writer's creed: If life hands you lemons--write The Lemon Cookbook! — Sharon Geltner

Things to know from books to read — Kip Koehler

Innovation simply isn't as unpredictable as many people think. There isn't a cookbook yet, but we're getting there. — Clayton Christensen

A cookbook is not like being an author. It's writing down recipes; it's not writing. — Grant Achatz

The Pigtronix Envelope Phaser pedal is a definite 'must have' for your Funk recipe cookbook ... it adds definite Funkaliciousness to your WOO stew. — Bernie Worrell

Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history. — Russell Baker

My passion for writing cookbooks really came from my love of collecting cookbooks. — Wolfgang Puck

All soul food is southern food, but not all southern food is soul food. — Cassandra Harrell

When I was working on the Olympic cookbook it was amazing to discover how different athletes need different types of diets. Everybody thinks that an athlete has to eat lots of carbohydrates, however some athletes don't need that. Some sports such as sprinting are explosive so you need a diet that will give you the energy for that moment. — William Katt

For me, whether it's in a book or on T.V., a recipe has to be simple. I have a short attention span, so to open a cookbook and see a recipe that goes on for three to four pages, well, I've lost interest. — Al Roker

If I had one piece of advice for people - if they are cooking from the Alinea cookbook, the Betty Crocker cookbook or the back of the box - read through the entire recipe first before reaching for any ingredients, and then read again and execute the directions. — Grant Achatz

My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second. — Jane Yolen

Once you understand the foundations of cooking - whatever kind you like, whether it's French or Italian or Japanese - you really don't need a cookbook anymore. — Thomas Keller

I hope this book will inspire the kitchen con-artist in you, increase fruit and veggie consumption in your family, and motivate you to become an Accidental Cook. Pass it on! — Merrin McGregor