Cooking Recipe Quotes & Sayings

I remember the excitement of finding a great pancake recipe in 'Gourmet.' It felt as if it were mine. And it was Berkeley, of course - everybody cooked together. Cooking is what one did. — Mona Simpson

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

Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour, or to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewing of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch over steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat loaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her hands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandma's mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life in the way they must absolutely lead it. — Ray Bradbury

Mastering one recipe is better than mastering too many. Learn something and own it, and you'll feel so much better about it. You'll have more confidence if you've made it five times, and that confidence adds so much fun to cooking. — Tom Douglas

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal. — Pat Conroy

Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss. — Julian Barnes

[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

I let myself relax into the pattern of the recipe. — Jael McHenry

My ritual is cooking. I find it therapeutic. It comes naturally to me. I can read a recipe and won't have to look at it again. — Iman

There are so many things that come into writing a recipe, and it's really important if you're writing for home cooks to be cooking like you are at home. — Sally Schneider

For me, directing is sort of like cooking or something. You know that you're making this interesting recipe while you're putting all the ingredients together, you can never oversee what it's gonna taste exactly. So while you're doing that, you're tasting. — Matthijs Van Heijningen Jr.

Most cooks try to learn by making dishes. Doesn't mean you can cook. It means you can make that dish. When you can cook is when you can go to a farmers market, buy a bunch of stuff, then go home and make something without looking at a recipe. Now you're cooking. — Tom Colicchio

You may say, "Oh, no. You can't touch a traditional recipe." But we ask: why can't you? Back in 1350, a vinaigrette was a stew, so we ask, why not? This can be applied to any kind of cooking, and that's the shocking part of it. It kind of bends all the traditions. It's a good thing. — Ferran Adria

Is cooking dangerous?"
Most would answer no. But what is a gas range but a short - range flame thrower? Any number of flammable materials might lie waiting beneath the average kitchen sink. Shelves lined with pots could weaken and fall in an avalanche of iron and steel. A butcher's knife could kill as easily as a dagger.
Yet few people would consider cooking a dangerous profession, and indeed, the actual danger is remote. Anyone who has spent any time in a kitchen is familiar with the inherent risks, such as they are, and knows what can be done safely and what can't. Never throw water on an oil fire, keep the knife pointed away from your carotid artery, don't use rat poison when the recipe calls for
parmesan cheese. — Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair. — Barbara Kingsolver

I love cooking. My Italian mother is a genius cook, and I picked that up from her. I make my own sauce, which takes four hours, from a recipe that's been refined over many years. I won't tell anybody what it is. — Josh Fox

A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe. — Thomas Keller

It is important to view a recipe book as one that you use daily and what we in our family call "a living book" - a book that you use all the time, not just read once and discard on the shelf. It is in a sense a spell book, a book of magical enchantments, to be consulted, used and altered as needed. — The Silver Elves

Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe. — Alton Brown

The world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formula leaves the responsibility for cooking up salvation firmly in human hands. The world is drowning in religion. But it is scared out of its wits by any mention of the grace that takes the world home gratis. — Robert Farrar Capon

I'm brilliant at cooking my stepmother's scrambled egg recipe. The secret is to put eggs, butter, milk, and seasoning together in the saucepan, and to keep stirring with a wooden spoon under a low heat until the preferred consistency is reached. — Ian McKellen

Catherine [of Siena] sent the Pope five oranges which she had candied and covered with gold leaf ... She develops the theme of the difference between the bitter and the sweet pain, and gives the Pope a recipe for making candied oranges. — Sigrid Undset

I love the idea of cooking, but I don't like using recipe books, so I'll put a mish-mash together, and it might be amazing by total accident, or it will be a catastrophe. — Trinny Woodall

Once you know the fundamentals of cooking, then you don't need to follow a recipe - you just know what herbs go well or what meats, or what combination of what goes together, and then you can just branch out from there. But if there's something specific that I want to make, I work on the recipe and tweak it to my own. — Keshia Knight Pulliam

Unfortunately, Martha's recipes, though suitably complex, fall a tad short if you're looking for aphrodisiac cooking, perhaps only because everything about a Martha recipe, from the font it's printed in to the call for sanding sugar, with appended notes on where to find such a thing, simply screams Martha. — Julie Powell

Self-confidence without self-reliance is as useless as a cooking recipe without food. Self-confidence sees the possibilities of the individual; self-reliance realizes them. Self-confidence sees the angel in the unhewn block of marble; self-reliance carves it out for oneself. — William George Jordan

What I like about cooking is that, so long as you follow the recipe exactly, everything always turns out perfect. It's too bad there's no recipe for happiness. Happiness is more like pastry - which is to say that you can take pains to keep cool and not overwork the dough, but if you don't have that certain light touch, your best efforts still fall flat.
The work-around is to buy what you need. I'm talking about pastry, not happiness, although money does make things easier all around. — Josh Lanyon

The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom. — Criss Jami

The secret to good cooking is knowing how to follow the recipe till you feel comfortable, — Natalie Baszile

I like racing but food and pictures are more thrilling. I can't give them up. In racing you can be certain, to the last thousandth of a second, that someone is the best, but with a film or a recipe, there is no way of knowing how all the ingredients will work out in the end. The best can turn out to be awful and the worst can be fantastic. Cooking is like performing and performing like cooking. — Paul Newman

I quite enjoy cooking but I'm not consistent. I can't follow the recipe book. If something goes well, I'll never make it again, which is completely stupid. It's a one-shot kind of deal. — Rebecca Hall

When I do a cooking class now, I tell people that the most important part is to read the recipe many times so you know what you're doing. What I don't tell them, though, is that sometimes I do parties where I'm rushing so much I don't have time to follow my own advice. — Wolfgang Puck

I do a lot of recipe creation. Translation: cooking tempting dishes that must be eaten. — Ruth Glick

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

Give two cooks the same ingredients and the same recipe; it is fascinating to observe how, like handwriting, their results differ. After you cook a dish repeatedly, you begin to understand it. Then you can reinvent it a bit and make it yours. A written recipe can be useful, but sometimes the notes scribbled in the margin are the key to a superlative rendition. Each new version may inspire improvisation based on fresh understanding. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as all that, but such exciting minor epiphanies keep cooking lively. — David Tanis

Everything I touched in the kitchen turned out crappy, no matter how closely I followed the recipe or copied the cooking show. — Drew Barrymore

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

With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations? — Nathan Myhrvold

I love cooking, and I can make real good rajma chawal. It is a time consuming process and only for the consumption of a select few very special people. Also, I can make delicious mutton biryani, but I must confess I have stolen the recipe from my mother. — Nimrat Kaur

Life is like cooking your masterpiece recipe. You have to get the right ingredients,have the right mixture and the right cooking time to reveal the PERFECT and DELICIOUS TASTE of your craft. — Bette Midler

I imagine that when I am creating a song or a project or an album or putting some clothing together or cooking a meal, whatever it is, I don't really have a recipe. The fun part is to throw that big piece of clay in the middle of the table as hard as I can, and whatever shape it takes, that's what shape it takes, and then I start to carve away. — Erykah Badu

Make sure you test your brand story's recipe with whomever you're cooking it for. — Laura Busche

Musical harmony is based on physical principles, while in cooking, ingredients must be weighed out with precision. At the same time, you have to be able to invent because if one follows the same recipe all the time, you never create anything new. — Fabiola Gianotti

Nowadays films and television are what I like to call "Microwave Media". I like mine in the oven, giving the production time to simmer; get the juices flowing, and cooked to perfection. And that takes time. Slow, precious, tempered time. A script is a film's recipe. It's just a piece of paper to the novice cook, but even a recipe needs time to be perfected before it's given to the masses. — Solange Nicole

I love cooking. I like to make lasagna - it's authentic Italian-style. I also do a great chicken recipe for a barbecue. — Sullivan Stapleton

If you're cooking for someone important - whether it's your boss or a date - never try a new recipe and a new ingredient at the same time. — Marcus Samuelsson

ESTHER'S RECIPE FOR BOYFRIEND COOKIES Ingredients: 1 cup butter, softened ¾ cup granulated sugar ¾ cup brown sugar, packed 3 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla ¼ cup whole wheat flour ¼ cup soy flour 3½ cups quick-cooking oatmeal 1½ cups salted peanuts, coarsely chopped 1 cup carob chips Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter and sugars. Add eggs and vanilla, beating until fluffy. Sift flours and add to creamed mixture. Fold in oatmeal, peanuts, and carob chips. Drop by teaspoon 2 inches apart on greased baking sheet and bake 8 to 10 minutes. Yield: 7 to 8 dozen cookies. — Wanda E. Brunstetter

Had she been a more instinctive, "natural" cook, she might have felt less compelled to parse each recipe, to tackle each one as though getting it right were a matter of life and death. — Karen Karbo

In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking. — Bee Wilson

What's up?" Christian asked. "Need some hairstyling tips?"
"Tips you stole from me? No thanks. But I hear you've got a really good bacon meatloaf recipe."
It was worth it then and there to see his complete and total surprise.
"Since when do you cook?" he finally managed to stammer.
"Oh, you know. I'm a Renaissance man. I do it all. Send it if you've got it, and I'll give it a try. I'll let you know if I make any improvements."
His smirk returned. "Are you trying to impress a girl?"
"With cooking?" I pointed at my face. "This is all it takes, Ozera. — Richelle Mead

I love anything to do with cooking, from watching the Food Network to reading recipe books by Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Levi Roots. My favourite types of cuisine are Asian and Caribbean, and I love cooking new recipes for my family. — Jourdan Dunn

If you're preparing a dinner for friends or a holiday dinner, make sure to only prepare recipes you are comfortable with and have cooked before. Cooking for others is not the time to try out a recipe for the first time. You end up spending all your time in the kitchen instead of enjoying your company. — Rachael Ray