Food Or Cooking 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

Bistro cooking is good, traditional food, earnestly made and honestly displayed. It is earthy, provincial, or bourgeois; as befits that kind of food, it is served in ample portions. — David Liederman

There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can't put up the two months' rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can't save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Cooking is not about being the best or most perfect cook, but rather it is about sharing the table with family and friends. — Skye Gyngell

[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

It's not about exact measurements or ingredients', shrugged Lomax, when Joseph complained. 'Good food is about feeling. Cooking is an art, not a science. You got to have soul to feed people right.' He smiled. 'That's what this is. Soul food. — Alex George

Most small business owners are not particularly sophisticated business people. That's not a criticism; they're passionate about cutting hair or cooking food, and that's why they got in the business, not because they have an MBA. — Andrew Mason

IMBECILE!" the chef shouted. "Next time why don't you just put your whole HAND in the food, hey? Yes, your whole hand, or maybe your FACE! I arrange the food on plates with care, are you understanding what I am telling you? It is part of the art form of cooking, yes? A lovely plate of food is a thing of beauty! And then you, NUMBSKULL, come along and put your fat greasy FINGERS all over my plate, and SHAKE the plate, and move my food all around the plate until it looks like pigs' vomit!"
"Chef Vlad!" I cried out in delight. — Kenneth Oppel

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

Because cooks love the social aspect of food, cooking for one is intrinsically interesting. A good meal is like a present, and it can feel goofy, at best, to give yourself a present. On the other hand, there is something life affirming in taking the trouble to feed yourself well, or even decently. Cooking for yourself allows you to be strange or decadent or both. The chances of liking what you make are high, but if it winds up being disgusting, you can always throw it away and order a pizza; no one else will know. In the end, the experimentation, the impulsiveness, and the invention that such conditions allow for will probably make you a better cook. — Jenni Ferrari-Adler

I'm a big believer in cooking your own meals. It makes it much easier not only to ensure that you eat fresh foods but also to follow the second rule of eating (see previous chapter), which advises incorporating as many colors, tastes, textures, and aromas as possible into one's meal. Beyond those benefits, I feel that cooking celebrates self-respect, and it's especially important on the Warrior Diet. Through cooking, you can control exactly what you put inside your body. It's a creative process, where you use trial and error to determine what you like.You can use different herbs and spices to increase or balance flavors, aromas, and textures.You're not a scavenger on the Warrior Diet. — Ori Hofmekler

That time period is clearly a season of holidays. A holiday season. No matter what faith you belong to or what tradition you follow, everyone is partying. You're shopping, you're cooking, you're getting together with family, you're eating food that's bad for you, you're eating more food that's bad for you, and of course you're eating food that's bad for you. — Jim Gaffigan

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we've more recently become, grazing at gas stations and eating by ourselves whenever and wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us. — Michael Pollan

Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

When everyone's focused on the conventional parts of war - doing infantry imbeds or chasing IEDs - you look at the thing that seems not that interesting to people, like the circumstances of logistics workers cooking the troops' food or cleaning their latrines. — Sarah Stillman

In France today, people no longer eat as much heavy food and fat as they did 15 or 20 years ago. These days, French cooking, through the influence of 'grande cuisine,' has become a bit lighter. And we are beginning to discover the original flavors of our produce. — Joel Robuchon

Anyone who thinks they're too grown up or too sophisticated to eat caramel corn, is not invited to my house for dinner — Ruth Reichl

I like to abide by the seasons and let the natural flavor in food speak for itself. I use quick cooking techniques of high heat with very little fat, such as quick saute or wok stir-frying. — Cat Cora

But I know somebody must be thinking about us because if they weren't we'd just disappear just like those Indians who used to climb the pueblos. Those Indians disappeared with food still cooking in the pot and air waiting to be breathed and they turned into birds or dust or the blue of the sky or the yellow of the sun.
There they were and suddenly they were forgotten for just a second and for just a second nobody thought about them and then they were gone. — Sherman Alexie

Humans are amazing ritual animals, and it must be understood that the Tzutujil, nor any other real intact people, do not 'practice' rituals. Just as a bear must turn over stumps searching for beetles, real humans can only live life spiritually. Birth itself was a ritual: there was not a ritual for birth, or a ritual for death, or a ritual for marriage, for death was a ritual, life a ritual, cooking a ritual, and eating were all rituals with ceremonial guidelines, all of which fed life. Sleeping was a ritual, lovemaking was a ritual, sowing, cultivating, harvesting, storing food were rituals, even sweeping, insulting, fighting were rituals, everything human was a ritual, and to all Tzutujil, ritual was plant-oriented and based on feeding some big Holy ongoing vine-like, tree-like, proceedance that fed us it's fruit. — Martin Prechtel

The person who decides what shall be the food and drink of a family, and the modes of its preparation, is the one who decides, to a greater or less extent, what shall be the health of that family. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

No human society, present or past, has lacked music. Music is therefore one of the very few human universals, which puts it on the same level as food and sex. — Fredric Lieberman

Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed. Eh bien, tant pis. Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile, and learn from her mistakes. — Julia Child

He whose wealth or children distract him from remembering God is lost; but the one who remembers God experiences delights sweeter than the pleasure of food and drink. — Ibn Ata Allah

A creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles. — William Wordsworth

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

Rather than being about what foods to avoid and why, The Essential Good Food Guide is an introduction or a reminder of what good food is and what to do with it. — Margaret M. Wittenberg

As long as one strives to become a gourmet or a connoisseur of wines because it is the "in" thing to do, striving to master an externally imposed challenge, then taste may easily turn sour. But a cultivated palate provides many opportunities for flow if one approaches eating - and cooking - in a spirit of adventure and curiosity, exploring the potentials of food for the sake of the experience rather than as a showcase for one's expertise. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It's no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it's no more or less pea for being pea or pod. Grappa is made from the spent skins and stems and seeds of wine grapes; marmalade from the peels of oranges. The wine behind grappa is great, but there are moments when only grappa will do; the fruit of the orange is delicious, but it cannot be satisfactorily spread.
"The skins of onions, green tops from leeks, stems from herbs must all be swept directly into a pot instead of the garbage. Along with the bones from a chicken, raw or cooked, they are what it takes to make chicken stock, which you need never buy, once you decide to keep its ingredients instead of throwing them away. If you have bones from fish, it's fish stock. If there are bones from pork or lamb, you will have pork or lamb stock. — Tamar Adler

The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if passing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging the flour. In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work as much as attentiveness.) A wooden spout at the bottom of the mill emitted a gentle breeze of warm, tan flour that slowly accumulated in a white cloth bag. I leaned in close for a whiff. Freshly milled whole-grain flour is powerfully fragrant, redolent of hazelnuts and flowers. For the first time I appreciated what I'd read about the etymology of the word "flour" -- that it is the flower, or best part, of the wheat seed. Indeed. White flour has little aroma to speak of; this flour smelled delicious. — Michael Pollan

You probably don't think twice about going into your kitchen and turning a few knobs to prepare a meal for yourself and your family on an electric or gas range. But for nearly 3 billion people in developing countries who depend on solid fuels to cook their food, the simple act of cooking results in 4 million premature deaths every year from exposure to toxic smoke. — Kathy Calvin

Anything good on the trucks?"
"Some beautiful lake salmon, fresh asparagus, and new potatoes."
"New enough their skin is peeling?"
"Yes."
"I know what we're going to do today!" Lou felt the excitement surge. This was why she loved cooking: getting amazing fresh ingredients and making something extraordinary. Luella's traditional French menu didn't leave much room for creativity, so the daily special had become Lou's canvas, where she was limited only by her imagination and whims.
"We'll keep it a simple spring dinner. Roast the potatoes in butter, salt, and pepper. Maybe some thyme or tarragon, too. We'll top the salmon fillets with hollandaise and roast the asparagus. — Amy E. Reichert

I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

But my favorite remained the basic roast chicken. What a deceptively simple dish. I had come to believe that one can judge the quality of a cook by his or her roast chicken. Above all, it should taste like chicken: it should be so good that even a perfectly simple, buttery roast should be a delight. — Julia Child

Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise denaturing them, some are fine as they are. — Steve Albini

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

When you're cooking with food as alive as this
these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh
you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight. — Michael Pollan

Cooks are in some ways very much like actors; they must be fit and strong, since acting and cooking are two of the most exacting professions. They must be blessed - or cursed, whichever way you care to look at it - with what is called the artistic temperament, which means that if they are to act or cook at all well, it cannot be for duds or dummies. — Andre Simon

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

Luella had been Lou's favorite grandma. Some grandmas took their grandchildren to parks, or bought them books and dolls, or shared their special stories. Her grandma shared her recipes. She taught Lou how to check when a roast turkey was done, chop veggies without cutting off a finger, and bake a coconut cake grown men swooned over. A fog of comforting smells had perpetually blanketed her kitchen- an expression of her love so strong you could taste it. Lou caught the culinary bug during those early days and loved that she was named after her grandma, even if Lou believed she'd never make food quite as delicious. — Amy E. Reichert

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

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

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 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

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

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

... 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

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

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else's. — Michael Pollan

Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work. — Chuck Palahniuk

Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice - or, in other words, make mayonnaise - you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better. — Nathan Myhrvold

[I] learned ... that friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone. That nothing-not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state-will make the past disappear. Only time and patience heal things. I learned that cutting up your arms in an attempt to make the pain move from inside to outside, from soul to skin, is futile. That death is a cop-out. I tried all of these things. — Marya Hornbacher

Too much trouble,' 'Too expensive,' or 'Who will know the difference' are death knells for good food ... Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes. — Julia Child

I feel we don't really need scriptures. The entire life is an open book, a scripture. Read it. Learn while digging a pit or chopping some wood or cooking some food. If you can't learn from your daily activities, how are you going to understand the scriptures? (233) — Swami Satchidananda

Precisely when hominins learned to manipulate fire is unclear. But recent research suggests that fire, in the form of cooking, helps account for the leap into the genus Homo, who became physiologically dependent on cooked food. By boosting calories, and by detoxifying and softening food, controlled fire allowed us to exchange big guts for big brains. Experiments confirm that we cannot thrive or reproduce on raw foods alone: they simply cannot deliver the calories and they require more chewing, digestive juices, and intestinal machinery. With cooking that digestive process begins earlier. If the observations hold, they say that humans and fire have not simply co-existed but co-evolved. We are not only the keystone species for fire: fire is a keystone process for our existence. — Anonymous

When a couple came to class together, it meant something else entirely - food as a solution, a diversion, or, occasionally, a playground. — Erica Bauermeister

Every living thing deserves to be respected, taken care of and loved. Religious differences are but a mere way of one's own choices. We breathe the same air, share the some food; cooking, it can be different. But fish is fish whether grilled, fried, or dropped in curry. — Sulaiman Dawood

For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food. — Anthony Bourdain

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

A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food. — Michael Pollan

I started cooking seven years ago for real, and I started with pasta, and lasagna and roast chicken. Very normal American dishes. When I turned on Food Network, or any sort of cooking channel, that's what people were making. So that's where your education comes from. — Aarti Sequeira

What I love about 'The Chew' is that we have these celebrities come on, and you get to see them in a different light, cooking or enjoying food, when we usually don't see them in that setting. So it's a lot of fun for their fans to see them be normal people and having that commonality of food. — Carla Hall

Never taste or consume food that looks or smells contaminated or even slightly questionable. If the food item or drink has foam on top, if the item continuously bubbles from within, or a bad small emanates from it during cooking or preparing you should discard it right away. — Susan Burnetter

Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don't burst my bubble. I didn't want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (p. 247) — Barbara Kingsolver

First and foremost I am a chef, whether behind the stove at one of my Northern California restaurants or for the past 15 years in front of the camera on my Food Network cooking shows. Creating new dishes and flavor combinations that bring cooks and our restaurant guests pleasure is my job and I love it. — Tyler Florence

Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual. — Julie Powell

Whatever I'm doing, I'm in that moment and I'm doing it. The rest of the world's lost. If I'm cooking some food or making soup, I want it to be lovely. If not, what's the point of doing it? — Sade Adu

In '71 or '72 I returned to New Orleans and stayed there. I started cooking Louisiana food. Of all the things I had cooked, it was the best-and it was my heritage. — Paul Prudhomme

Cooking, to me, it's kind of therapeutic. It's completely different from music as well. I'm not amazing at it, but I can cook myself a good meal. And I'm not just saying this, but anytime I'm on the bus or at home, I'm watching Food Network or cooking on TV just 'cause it's interesting to me. — Phillip Phillips