Quotes & Sayings About Cookery

I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too good - good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook. — Aldous Huxley

I took a cookery course. On the examination, I had to cook a cheese omelet with peas and an egg custard. With the egg custard, which was supposed to be a dessert, I forget to put the sugar in, so that's more of a quiche, isn't it? — Lesley Nicol

The things you leave school knowing - some dates and long division - so much of it has been of no use to me. Schools should teach the basics of cookery, first aid, how to look after your money and how to speak foreign languages. Useful things. — Jane Asher

What passes for cookery in England is an abomination. — Virginia Woolf

To set the standard for beauty in classical and modem cookery, and attest to the distant future that the French chefs of the 19th century were the most famous in the world. — Marie-Antoine Careme

Would the cook were o' my mind! — William Shakespeare

This is the body's nurse; but since man's wit
Found the art of cookery, to delight his sense,
More bodies are consumed and kill'd with it
Than with the sword, famine, or pestilence. — John Davies Of Hereford

Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements. — Marcel Boulestin

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery. — Fannie Farmer

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. — Joseph Conrad

Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication. — Maya Angelou

The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery. — Marie-Antoine Careme

TV cookery is very like internet porn - the overwhelming majority of its audience will never ever get to act out what's happening on screen. — Skint Foodie

It is not, in fact, cookery books that we need half so much as cooks really trained to a knowledge of their duties. — Eliza Acton

I was always drawn to the blues. Alberta Hunter at the Cookery was a life-changing experience. I only wanted to get enriched as a performer as I got older, to have an audience which got older, too, and would come to see me when I'm 80. — Bonnie Raitt

There are some readers who have never read an essay on taste; and if they take my advice they never will, for they can no more improve their taste by so doing than they could improve their appetite or digestion by studying a cookery-book. — Robert Southey

Management is a far more homely business than its would be scientists suggest, more closely allied to cookery than any other human activity. Like cooking, it rests on a degree of organisation and on adequate resources. But just as no two chefs run their kitchens the same way, so no two managements are the same. — Robert Heller

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda. — Martin Parr

In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima- beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits-- cherries, pears, peaches. At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken. — Thomas Wolfe

Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children's books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book. — Eva Ibbotson

The onion tribe is prophylactic and highly invigorating, and even more necessary to cookery than parsley itself. — George Ellwanger

Crackers, toasted or hard bread may be added a short time before the soup is wanted; but do not put in those libels on civilized cookery, called DUMPLINGS! One might about as well eat, with the hope of digesting, a brick from the ruins of Babylon, as one of the hard, heavy masses of boiled dough which usually pass under this name. — Sarah Josepha Hale

Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect! — Thomas Carlyle

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

We are all works in progress, the authors of our own lives. — Caroline James

Done coma, walking/talking,art, cookery. scouts then wrote two books, asked for help, gave a book to HRH Princess Anne, tried publisher, got another DEGREE, now Google Gillian Mk2, what else can I do? — Gillian Firth

The thing about late-night cookery was that it made sense at the time. It always had some logic behind it. It just wasn't the kind of logic you'd use around midday. — Terry Pratchett

Will Thisbee gave me The Beginner's Cook-Book for Girl Guides. It was just the thing; the writer assumes you know nothing about cookery and writes useful hints - When adding eggs, break the shells first. — Mary Ann Shaffer

In lecturing on cookery, as on housebuilding, I divide the subject into, not four, but five grand elements: first, Bread; second,Butter; third, Meat; fourth, Vegetables; and fifth, Tea
by which I mean, generically, all sorts of warm, comfortable drinks served out in teacups, whether they be called tea, coffee, chocolate, broma, or what not. I affirm that, if these five departments are all perfect, the great ends of domestic cookery are answered, so far as the comfort and well-being of life are concerned. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery. — Henry David Thoreau

He begged to know to which of his fair cousins the excellency of its cookery was owing.
Briefly forgetting her manners, Mary grabbed her fork and leapt from her chair onto the table. Lydia, who was seated nearest her, grabbed her ankle before she could dive at Mr. Collins and, presumably, stab him about the head and neck for such an insult. — Seth Grahame-Smith

I'm always up for music shows such as Jools Holland, but news more than anything, particularly Newsnight. And cookery: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein - it's down to him that I cook fish so much - and the great food alchemist Heston Blumenthal. — Charles Hazlewood

As in the fine arts, the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilisation is marked by a gradual succession of triumphs over the rude materialities of nature, so in the art of cookery is the progress gradual from the earliest and simplest modes, to those of the most complicated and refined. — Isabella Beeton

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book. — George Eliot

Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: as 'art for art's sake' it is unthinkable. A man may sing in his bath every morning without the least encouragement, but no cook can cook just for his or her own sake in a like manner. All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for. — Andre Simon

I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in. It's a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat. — Charles Dickens

I learnt basic cookery by watching my mum. — Jane Asher

Okay, a lot of people think that I'm someone known for a love of eggs and egg cookery. Being asked to endorse an egg yolk separator, I mean, I understood where it came from, but it didn't seem necessarily like something that was ultimately worth pursuing. — Wylie Dufresne

A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die. — Mark Twain

It may be safely averred that good cookery is the best and truest economy, turning to full account every wholesome article of food, and converting into palatable meals what the ignorant either render uneatable or throw away in disdain. — Eliza Acton

Al journalism should be investigative, from football to cookery — John Pilger

Sauces in cookery are like the first rudiments of grammar - the foundation of all languages. — Alexis Soyer

Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. — Thomas Jefferson

He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed. — Mal Peet

I would love to do a cookery show and cookery books. I'm not a professional cook, but I can definitely cook. I know the difference between good and bad cooking. I mean, when I was in 'Big Brother' I was the glorified cook of the house, so if I got offered my own show - then why not? — Shilpa Shetty

It might have been brief, but so much of a kiss - a first kiss especially - is the moment before your lips touch, and before your eyes close, when you're filled with the sight of each other, and with the compulsion, the pull, and it's like...it's like...finding a book inside another book. A small treasure of a book hidden inside a big common one - like...spells printed on dragonfly wings, discovered tucked inside a cookery book, right between the recipes for cabbages and corn. That's what a kiss is like, he thought, no matter how brief: It's a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption of the mundane. — Laini Taylor

Poirot closed his eyes. What he perceived mentally was a kaleidoscope, no more, no less. Pieces of cut-up scarves and rucksacks, cookery books, lipsticks, bath salts; names and thumbnail sketches of odd students. Nowhere was there cohesion or form. Unrelated incidents and people whirled round in space. But Poirot knew quite well that somehow and somewhere there must be a pattern ... The question was where to start ... — Agatha Christie

Sichuan pepper is the original Chinese pepper, used long before the more familiar black or white pepper stole in over the tortuous land routes of the old Silk Road. It is not hot to taste, like the chilli, but makes your lips cool and tingly. In Chinese they call it ma, this sensation; the same word is used for pins-and-needles and anaesthesia. The strange, fizzing effect of Sichuan pepper, paired with the heat of chillies, is one of the hallmarks of modern Sichuanese cookery. The — Fuchsia Dunlop

(to father) Aren't you glad that you've never had to buy vegeterian cookery books as the first small step on the road to getting inside someone's knickers?
(father) ... however vegeterian recepies you have read, you still have more fun than we were ever allowed. — Nick Hornby

The dishes of the present day are very light, and they have a particular delicacy and perfume. The secret has been discovered of enabling us to eat more and to eat better, as also to digest more rapidly ... The new cookery is conductive to health, to good temper, and to long life ... Who could enumerate all the dishes of the new cuisine? It is an absolutely new idiom. I have tasted viands prepared in so many ways and fashioned with such art that I could not imagine what they were. — Louis-Sebastien Mercier

Everything is relative but there is a standard which must not be deviated from, especially with reference to the basic culinary preparations. A. Escoffier The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery — Michael Ruhlman

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting. — Robin G. Collingwood

I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading. — Barbara Pym

Even French pilferage has not relegated Italian culinary genius to the darker corners of gastronomy. Marie de' Medici brought Italian cookery to France, where Gallic duplicity quickly undermined the integrity of good ingredients with unctuous sauces. The French will always confuse egregious decorative effects with creative integrity. They have a genius for appearances. Trompe l'oeil will do for a Frenchman, but not for an Italian. — Roland Delicio

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything. — Aldous Huxley

My interest in food really began with a month's cookery course in Frome, Somerset, after my A-levels. I left the course not an incredible cook, alas, but a real enthusiast. Food and cooking is at the core of entertaining, and my passion grew and grew. — Pippa Middleton

Sauces comprise the honor and glory of French cookery. They have contributed to its superiority, or pre-eminence, which is disputed by none. Sauces are the orchestration and accompaniment of a fine meal, and enable a good chef or cook to demonstrate his talent. — Curnonsky

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love. — Donald Barthelme

The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite," observed John Sanderson. "We demolish dinner, they eat it." The general misconception back home was that French food was highly seasoned, but not at all, wrote James Fenimore Cooper. The genius in French cookery was "in blending flavors and in arranging compounds in such a manner as to produce ... the lightest and most agreeable food." The charm of a French dinner, like so much in French life, was the "effect. — David McCullough

A crier of green sauce. — Francois Rabelais

I don't feel my capabilities in cookery are as big as my desire - as with so many aspects of my life. — Anna Chancellor

She was no longer the fair-haired, colourless girl whom I had seen at the church fifteen years before, but a stout, over-dressed lady, one of those ladies with no age, no character, no elegance, no wit, nor any of the attributes that constitute a woman. She was merely a mother, a fat, commonplace mother, the breeder, the human brood-mare, the procreating machine made of flesh, with no interests but her children and her cookery-book. — Guy De Maupassant

I have always read all the latest cookery books and magazines, from all over the world. — Delia Smith

Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out. — Ambrose Bierce

I did an O-level in domestic science when I was at school, but on the day of the practical exam, it was a cookery nightmare. — Lesley Nicol

Cookery, or the art of preparing good and wholesome food, and of preserving all sorts of alimentary substances in a state fit for human sustenance, or rendering that agreeable to the taste which is essential to the support of life, and of pleasing the palate without injury to the system, is, strictly speaking, a branch of chemistry; but, important as it is both to our enjoyments and our health, it is also one of the latest cultivated branches of the science. — Friedrich Accum

Suddenly creativity is the popular goal. Ironically, a quality dissonant with our conventional education process is greatly in demand in adults - and those who survive the system without losing their creative integrity are richly rewarded. The magic word in a book's title almost ensures sales: Creative Stitchery, Creative Cookery, Creative Gardening ... Perhaps we are trying to develop something that was innately ours. — Marilyn Ferguson

The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume, but a good stomach excels them all; to which nothing contributes more than industry and temperance. — Michel De Montaigne

Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) and makes it apparent; genius brings something new. But our time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead. — Soren Kierkegaard

No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses. — Willa Cather

In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers — Mario Vargas-Llosa

...fundamental Italian cookery rule that less is more! — Francine Segan

Good cookery is not an extravagance but an economy, and many a tasty dish is made by our Continental friends out of materials which would be discarded indignantly by the poorest tramp in Whitechapel. — William Booth

So here are some foolproof recipes for those of you who understand the true function of food.
Bean Treat: Gingerly pour four fluid oz of beans or something into a jug. Cry. Eat the beans from the jug and pour the rest from the can down your throat. N.B. These taste better if they belong to somebody else in your house.
Pain au Dunk: Fists of bread, rent from the loaf and dunked into anything runnier than bread. Should eat at least six of these because ... you should. Don't toast the bread. Toast is cookery. — Dylan Moran

Julie's cookery is actually improving," Paul wrote Charlie [his twin]. "I didn't quite believe it would, just between us, but it really is. It's simpler, more classical ... I envy her this chance. It would be such fun to be doing it at the same time with her. — Julia Child

I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me. — Simon Schama

I love cookery programmes. — Cilla Black

I have a good collection of cookery books. This is not so much because I like cooking, but because I like eating. — Louise Brown

I love cooking. People seem to enjoy my food, but I absolutely love it. I'm one of those people who will buy a cookery book and take it to bed and read it. — Polly Walker

Cookery is naturally the most ancient of the arts, as of all arts it is the most important. — George Ellwanger

The curious alchemy of cookery, that process of making the transfer of life from one being to another palatable. — Diana Gabaldon

to ask simply whether religion is 'good' or 'bad' is to miss the point. Religion serves as a reason for war and peace, love and hatred, dialogue and narrow-mindedness. Religion can be used for many purposes, just as science can be used to develop life-saving vaccines or to build sophisticated weaponry. We may as well ask whether science is a good or bad thing, or cookery, poetry or politics. The 'goodness' or 'badness' of religion depends on the ways in which it is used, applied and lived out. — Symon Hill

There is only one recipe - to care a great deal for the cookery. — Henry James

I think cookery shows have become so sophisticated, and everyone's so marvellous at it, but there are people like me who aren't into the cooking malarkey, who still don't know how to boil an egg for three minutes. — Anton Du Beke

Women can spin very well, but they cannot write a good book of cookery. — Samuel Johnson

; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks ... — Joseph Conrad

Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner. — Aldous Huxley

He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working rhymes and songs. — Willa Cather

Kissing don't last: cookery do ! — George Meredith

'Celebrate' is meant to be a guide to party planning and, as such, it has to cover the basics. If I were to write a cookery book, for instance, I would be compelled to say that, to make an omelette, you have to break at least one egg. Actually, that's not a bad idea. Or maybe I should write a sequel and call it 'Bottoms Up?' — Pippa Middleton

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires. — Benjamin Franklin

Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen. — Robert A. Burton

If I wasn't an actress, I'd like to cook. I'm pretty obsessed by it. Rome was great in that sense, going to amazing cookery bookshops. No wonder their food is good because the quality and wide range of their produce is so good. It's not fair, really. — Polly Walker

Cookery means ... English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness. — John Ruskin

The art of cookery is the art of poisoning mankind, by rendering the appetite still importunate, when the wants of nature are supplied. — Francois Fenelon

Excuse me there. If you go upon arguments, they are never wanting, when a man has no constancy of mind. My father never changed, and he preached plain moral sermons without arguments, and was a good man - few better. When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book. That's my opinion, and I think anybody's stomach will bear me out. — George Eliot

AMBIGU (A'MBIGU) n.s.[French.]An entertainment, consisting not of regular courses, but of a medley of dishes set on together. When straiten'd in your time, and servants few,You'd richly then compose an ambigu;Where first and second course, and your desert,All in our single table have their part.King'sArt of Cookery. — Samuel Johnson

First dentistry was painless.
Then bicycles were chainless,
Carriages were horseless,
And many laws enforceless.
Next cookery was fireless,
Telegraphy was wireless,
Cigars were nicotineless,
And coffee caffeineless.
Soon oranges were seedless,
The putting green was weedless,
The college boy was hatless,
The proper diet fatless.
New motor roads are dustless,
The latest steel is rustless,
Our tennis courts are sodless,
Our new religion
godless. — Arthur Guiterman

He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato. — Terry Pratchett

Hunger finds no fault with the cookery. — Henry George Bohn