The reality of America is mass-market stupidity.

A recipe is only an introduction. It is the beginning of your relationship with the dish.

This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury’s milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.

I stood in the doorway of one room, lost in a meditation of the house’s recurring habits. People had made love here, sweated through pregnancy, gave birth, looked after children, became ill, died, the fire always burning in the kitchen. In this room, the next generation had done the same, the fire still burning. And the next generation, for thousand years.

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity.

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.

I remember thinking: if the day becomes more violent, who do you blame? The English, whose behaviour on the square could be said to have been so provocative that they deserved whatever they got? The Italians, whose welcome consisted in inflicting injuries upon their visitors? Or can you place some of the blame on these men with their television equipment and their cameras, whose misrepresentative images served only to reinforce what everyone had come to expect.

You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

In normal life, ‘simplicity’ is synonymous with ‘easy to do,’ but when a chef uses the word, it means ‘takes a lifetime to learn.’

You can’t do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.