Quotes & Sayings About Cooking Food

The smells of slow cooking spread around the house and impart a unique warmth matched only by the flavour of the food. — Yotam Ottolenghi

Remember to add the most important ingredient to every recipe you make - your love! — Diana Silva

There is a wonderful simple human reality to Christ's hunger. The man is famished. He's missed meals for three days, He has a lot on his mind, He's on His way back to heaven, but before He goes He is itching for a nice piece of broiled fish and a little bread on the side with the men and women He loves. Do we not like Him the more for His prandial persistance? And think for a moment about the holiness of our own food, and the ways that cooking and sharing a meal can be forms of love and prayer. And realize again that the Eucharist at the heart of stubborn Catholicism is the breakfast that Christ prepares for Catholics, every morning, as we return from fishing in vast dreamy seas? — Brian Doyle

I think my ideal man would speak many languages. He would speak Ibo and Yoruba and English and French and all of the others. He could speak with any person, even the soldiers, and if there was violence in their heart he could change it. He would not have to fight, do you see? Maybe he would not be very handsome, but he would be beautiful when he spoke. He would be very kind, even if you burned his food because you were laughing and talking with your girlfriends instead of watching the cooking. He would just say, 'Ah, never mind'. — Chris Cleave

You can still live with grace and wisdom thanks partly to the many people who write about how to do it and perhaps talk overmuch about riboflavin and economy, and partly to your own innate sense of what you must do with the resources you have, to keep the wolf from snuffing to hungrily through the keyhole. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

Stopping the junk food and Eating well is partially about cooking well and having the skills to do that. — Gordon Ramsay

I enjoy cooking with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food I'm cooking. — Julia Child

When I was interviewing Beth as a potential flatmate, I asked her about her hobbies. She said she enjoyed cooking for others. I asked her when she could move in. — Jennifer Gilby Roberts

[Y]ou can't control everything. Anything, really. Like the food we've been making. We can follow the recipe exactly as your grandmother wrote it, do everything exactly
or almost exactly
as she had, and the dish can come out so-so instead of amazing. Or it can come out amazing when you were expecting very little. — Melissa Senate

Cooking is at once one of the simplest and most gratifying of the arts, but to cook well one must love and respect food. — Craig Claiborne

Start with a clean grill. Keep it clean by brushing with a wire brush after preheating, and again after cooking. Make sure to oil your grates and your food before putting it on the grill to keep it from sticking. — Emeril Lagasse

Without another word, we began to eat. I was hungry, but no appetite would excuse the way we set upon those dishes. We shoveled food into our mouths in a manner ill befitting our fine attire. Bears would have blushed to see us bent over our plates. The pheasant, still steaming from the oven, its dark flesh redolent with the mushroom musk of the forest floor, was gnawed quickly to the bone. It was a touch gamy - no milk-fed goose, this - but it was tender, and the piquant hominy balanced that wild taste as I had hoped it would. The eggs, laced pink at the edges and floating delicately in a carnal sauce, were gulped down in two bites. The yolks were cooked to that rare liminal degree, no longer liquid but not yet solid, like the formative moment of a sun-colored gem. — Eli Brown

Do not taste food while you're cooking. You may lose your nerve to serve it. — Phyllis Diller

At my age the bones are water in the morning until food is given them. — Pearl S. Buck

The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn't set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper. — Ben Aaronovitch

In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook 'la cuisine bourgeoise' - good, traditional French home cooking. — Julia Child

It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor - this stands for that - is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pig skin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined. — Michael Pollan

News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself. — Rose Macaulay

Invest in what's real. Clean as you go. Drink while you cook. Make it fun. It doesn't have to be complicated. It will be what it will be. — Gwyneth Paltrow

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

She did not so much cook as assassinate food. — Storm Jameson

I'm just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression. — Maya Angelou

My mother was born in Burma, but my grandfather on her side was Indian-Spanish. So I have this quite exotic mix, which is reflected in my earliest memories, in our Wiltshire country kitchen, of gran, and aunts, cooking spicy stewy, casseroley curries, a version of Indian food with a Burmese twist. — Jamie Cullum

Preparing food is one of life's great joys, but a lot of times, parents ask their kids if they want to cook with them and then tell them to go peel a bag of potatoes. That's not cooking - that's working! — Guy Fieri

Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet. — Julia Child

My kids always joked that I spent more time cooking the birds' food than I have cooking for them. And it's probably true. — Roz Chast

Lilith returned to her cooking. She didn't let herself think about anything but preparing the food, one ingredient at a time, a pinch of this into a bowl of that, a vial of this into a jug of that, and so it went, while the sweat ran off her in rivulets and her hair and dress clung to her, and the kitchen hummed with the droning of flies. — Georgina Anne Taylor

Food was a labor of love you felt by cooking it and eating it. — George Tillman Jr.

If pale beans bubble for you in a red earthenware pot, you can often decline the dinners of sumptuous hosts. — Martial

I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world? — E.A. Bucchianeri

Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. — Alexander Pope

Le Cirque at first was one of those general French restaurants in town, which were cooking more or less the same food. At Le Cirque, I wanted to do something different while respecting the foundation of the restaurant. I did that through the menu. — Daniel Boulud

HOSPITALITY, n. The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging. — Ambrose Bierce

How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of your body the day after you eat it. — Laurie Notaro

I don't cook. I respect food too much. — Eva Mendes

Maybe your mind won't remember what I cooked last week, but your body will. — Erica Bauermeister

When I was first approached for 'Pass the Plate,' I was thrilled because I love to cook. And I love to cook healthy. The reason I started cooking was because I would go to restaurants and have just amazing food but feel so heavy and gross. I would go home and try to cook the same thing, but a healthy version. — Brenda Song

... food is capable of feeding far more than a rumbling stomach. Food is life; our well-being demands it. Food is art and magic; it evokes emotion and colors memory, and in skilled hands, meals become greater than the sum of their ingredients. Food is self-evident; plucked right from the ground or vine or sea, its power to delight is immediate. Food is discovery; finding an untried spice or cuisine is for me like uncovering a new element. Food is evolution; how we interpret it remains ever fluid. Food is humanitarian: sharing it bridges cultures, making friends of strangers pleasantly surprised to learn how much common ground they ultimately share. — Anthony Beal

When we travel for research our strategy is to simply move from kitchen to kitchen. It's truly a wonderful way to travel - food shopping, cooking and eating in one home for lunch and then another for dinner. The process of cooking takes us immediately into the rituals and rhythms of daily life and also places us firmly in the position of learners. We were meet with incredible generosity by all of the families we ate with. — Jon Rubin

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. — George Akerlof

An understanding of what food is and how cooking works does no violence to the art of cuisine, destroys no delightful mystery. Instead, the mystery expands from matters of expertise and taste to encompass the hidden patterns and wonderful coincidences of nature. — Harold McGee

At length, when I considered it, I realized that the best of my actions were small things. Picking flowers and cooking food for my mother when she had been unwell, spending an afternoon with the children, sending money to my sister or kissing Henry's tiny head as he slept in the nursery before I left. I thought of every detail and afterwards I felt better. Hellfire and brimstone have never appealed to me and I admit I become easily confused thinking of right and wrong. But I do understand kindness. — Sara Sheridan

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

In its essence, a meal is a creative act that has its genesis in the mind of someone who cares enough to plan it, gather ingredients and labor over its creation. — Andi Ashworth

I love eating shabu-shabu in Japan - a kind of beef hotpot. But if you're talking about authentic, traditional food, then Italian cooking is one of the best in the world. — Andrea Bocelli

It may be that a taste for Bittor's cooking, for his obsessive, slightly mad investigation into the nature of wood and fire and food, has been prepared by our culture's ongoing attempt to transcend all those things, not just with molecular gastronomy, but with artificial flavors and colors, synthetic food experiences of every kind, even the microwave oven. High and low, this is an age of the jaded palate, ever hungry for the next new taste, the next new sensation, for mediated experiences of every kind. — Michael Pollan

Alice wondered if her mother was aware that she wasn't the only one in town who'd come down with a bad case of Blueberry Fever. — Sarah Weeks

One of the dirty little secrets of my job is that I don't do ANY food or cooking shows. — Hank Stuever

You know what I really love the most in life? Food. Yep, just food. I love the cooking of food, the eating of food, the talking about food, the thinking about food, and the dreaming about food. Food, food, food. That's what I love. Can there be anything more Hobbity than that? I reckon not. — Steve Bivans

Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food. — John Green

This dish ain't just called Karate Meat because it's got an Asian kick to it. It's called Karate Meat because it will beat you up like a pigeon in prison. — Coolio

I am a chef through and through. Everything I do - whether it is cooking for kids in Harlem or cooking in a fine dining establishment - all my days are consumed by food. — Marcus Samuelsson

I can't stand people that do not take food seriously. — Oscar Wilde

You take romance - I'll take Jell-O. — Ella Fitzgerald

Tita knew through her own flesh how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn't been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour. — Laura Esquivel

Keep it simple, keep it tasty. Salt, pepper and garlic. Shallot another day, lemon grass for nextweek. Nutmeg and cinnamon every now and then. — Riana Ambarsari

Michelin Star? I'd rather chew a French rubber tyre. — Fennel Hudson

A home that nourishes life embraces the little moments and appreciates the rhythmic seasons of life, including the time necessary to cook real food from scratch...It doesn't have to take too much time, however, with efficient menu planning and wisely planned trips to the grocery store and farmers' market.
The payoffs are astronomical - better health, good stewardship of our environment, and setting a good example for our children are just a few of the benefits. It also fosters an appreciation of the ebbs and flows of seasons because you'll be using fresh ingredients that are more readily available (and of higher quality) when they are in season. If you feel too busy to cook from scratch, then I argue that you're too busy, period. Reevaluate your priorities and commitments. If you want to live a healthy, long life and to pass the same luxury on to your children, then you MUST take the time to cook real food — Tsh Oxenreider

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

Polly had a gift for baking pies, and she poured her heart and soul into every one she made. — Sarah Weeks

Vegetables cooked for salads should always be on the crisp side, like those trays of zucchini and slender green beans and cauliflowerets in every trattoria in Venice, in the days when the Italians could eat correctly. You used to choose the things you wanted: there were tiny potatoes in their skins, remember, and artichokes boiled in olive oil, as big as your thumb, and much tenderer ... and then the waiter would throw them all into an ugly white bowl and splash a little oil and vinegar over them, and you would have a salad as fresh and tonic to your several senses as La Primavera. It can still be done, although never in the same typhoidic and enraptured air. You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and chill them, and eat them in a bowl. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

I was wary of my sister's cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust ... So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a tiny trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister's notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food. — David Nicholls

I used to sleep in the desert once every week, now it is every two weeks, most of the time alone. It's beautiful. What I enjoy is taking my food and cooking for myself. — Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

You show people playing poker or hacking into a computer; it feels so significant in the script, and then when you see it on the screen, it loses something. But there's something about cooking - food being prepared is incredibly captivating. It became just a fun box of tools to use as a director. — Jon Favreau

I wake up every morning happy for where I am in life. It's not all about the cooking, but the fact that I can contribute by using my influence to help people all over the country. In the last two years, my partners and I have fed more than 10 million hungry people by bringing meat to food banks. — Paula Deen

In London there was no home cooking worthy of the name. When you were in funds you ate out. But only the people whose faces appeared in such publications as Town and Queen could afford to eat in restaurants serving food which would leave them looking and feeling better instead of worse. — Clive James

My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook. — James Boswell

Food and cooking are among the richest subjects in the world. Every day of our lives, they preoccupy, delight, and refresh us. Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things. Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart's astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder. Even more, they sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around — Shauna Niequist

I thought we were going to take a 20-mule team out to the Grand Canyon and get a Bunsen burner and a bow and arrow, and whatever you can catch you cook. And it's gotta be gourmet and it better look good. — The Creators Of Top Chef

Fake food
I mean those patented substances chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out to kill the appetite and deceive the gut
is unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good eating and good cooking. — Julia Child

'It is very small for its age,' said Gnathaena. — Athenaeus

Prepared and fast foods have given us the time and freedom to see cooking as an art form - a form of creative expression. — Jeff Smith

MANNA, n. A food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness. When it was no longer supplied to them they settled down and tilled the soil, fertilizing it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original occupants. — Ambrose Bierce

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere. — W. H. Auden

Kids see cooking as a creative outlet now, like soccer and ballet. It gives me hope that things like fast food, childhood obesity and the horrible state of school lunches can be addressed by kids and their parents. — Graham Elliot

My mother never stopped cooking. She never stopped nourishing me. On Sundays, her face would disappear into steam from simmering carrots, celery, and onions, as she prepped our soup for the week. Her food processor held a prominent spot on the kitchen counter, mixing homemade sauces. The kitchen always smelled of tahini. She showed me, leading by example, that real food is the right food. It is the only food. — Kristen Beddard

Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If God had created celery, it would only have two stalks, because that's the most that almost any recipe ever calls for. — Skint Foodie

I have come to the conclusion that just as the Japanese live to work, Asians live to eat. — Anastacia Oaikhena

I taped my first series for PBS in 1982 at WJCT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida. The show, called 'Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pepin,' was about saving time and money in the kitchen - and it was a celebration of simple and unpretentious food. — Jacques Pepin

Why don't they just make mouse-flavored cat food? — Steven Wright

The more experience you have, the more interesting cooking is because you know what can happen to the food. In the beginning you can look at a chicken and it doesn't mean much, but once you have done some cooking you can see in that chicken a parade of things you will be able to create. — Julia Child

The Food Network and the Cooking Channel have so many viewers. And, because there's no violence, some of that audience is children. So, I think we have a responsibility to educate parents how to produce healthy meals for their families. — Robert Irvine

This is every cook's opinion -
no savory dish without an onion,
but lest your kissing should be spoiled
your onions must be fully boiled. — Jonathan Swift

While the egg yolks cooled, he directed the beaters at the egg whites, setting the mixer on high speed that sent small bubbles giggling to the side of the bowl, where a few became many until they were a white froth rising up and then lying down again in patters and ridges, leaving an intricate design like the ribs of a leaf in the wake of the beaters — Erica Bauermeister

I'm a terrific Mexican cook, and I just love Mexican food. And I love cooking Mexican food. — Eva Longoria

Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy. — Michael Pollan

I don't like cleaning or dusting or cooking or doing dishes, or any of those things," I explained to her. "And I don't usually do it. I find it boring, you see."
"Everyone has to do those things," she said.
"Rich people don't," I pointed out.
Juniper laughed, as she often did at things I said in those early days, but at once became quite serious.
"They miss a lot of fun," she said. "But quite apart from that
keeping yourself clean, preparing the food you are going to eat, clearing it away afterward
that's what life's about, Wise Child. When people forget that, or lose touch with it, then they lose touch with other important things as well."
"Men don't do those things."
"Exactly. Also, as you clean the house up, it gives you time to tidy yourself up inside
you'll see. — Monica Furlong

I think that there's some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don't have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television-we've turned cooking into a spectator sport ... My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table. — Michael Pollan

Well, it's one of the things that will. Words are good, and words help us become the leading species on earth to the point where we are now ready to wipe ourselves off the earth. But I think that all the arts are needed, and sports too, and cooking, food, and all these different ways of communication. Smiles, looking into eyes directly, all these different means of communication are needed to save this world. But certainly a great melody — Pete Seeger

Nourishment is not just "nutrition." Nourishment is the nutrients in the food, the taste, the aroma, the ambiance of the room, the conversation at the table, the love and inspiration in the cooking, and the joy of the entire eating experience. — Marc David

I believe it's a cook's moral obligation to add more butter given the chance. — Michael Ruhlman

She hadn't known that the ability to make pancakes from scratch made a man brutally hot. Now she did. — Suenammi Richards

Most of my food memories are of my Nan cooking Sunday dinners - roasts of meat with lots of vegetables. I suppose I cook what's comforting and dishes that make me feel good. — April Bloomfield

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

If we don't watch out, the pleasure o be gained from the discriminating enjoyment of food will be lost. It may not be long before the art of fine cooking is viewed as the invention of a handful of snobs ... A whole aspect of living well, of civilization itself, is threatened with extinction. — Benoite Groult

Smiles from reason flow, To brute deny'd, and are of love the food. — John Milton

I wish that food trucks could exist here in Chicago like they do in Brooklyn and in New York, where you're actually cooking off the truck. — Grant Achatz

One of the greatest pleasures of my life has been that I have never stopped learning about Good Cooking and Good Food — Edna Lewis

I need to smell its smells, to hear its sounds, to see food in a pot that simmers, bubbles, sizzles. I enjoy the physical involvement of stirring, turning, poking, mashing, scraping. — Marcella Hazan